A 'potter's field' grave in Michigan, America

[Stanwix England]

I saw this article a few days ago and thought it was interesting from a genealogical point of view, and the power of research to bring the past back to life.

http://www.wzzm13.com/mb/news/local/michigan/forgotten-mass-grave-in-the-up-finally-gets-recognition/407814655

A hundred years ago, life in Upper Peninsula towns like Sault Ste. Marie was tough. People died young, people died suddenly, and they often died in horrendous ways. Many worked themselves to death, or drank themselves to death, or were killed on the job in unsafe conditions. And if they didn’t have a family, or if their family didn’t have any money, they wound up buried in a potter’s field, the quaint old term for a mass grave.

The potter’s field in the Soo’s Riverside Cemetery never had any gravestones or monuments to mark it. And after the city stopped using it years ago as a place to bury the unknown and the indigent, the grave was smothered by grasses and forgotten.
“Nobody in town knows the potter’s field is here,” said Caroline Grabowski, a Soo resident, author and historian who discovered the grave site a few years ago and made it her mission to bring it to the public’s attention. “Nobody knows who’s buried there.”

But she does. She pored over documents at the county courthouse, old newspapers at the library and burial records at the cemetery, trying to piece together the lives of these unknown dead, who were buried here between 1890 and 1935. She was compelled to find out who they were.

“They were the very destitute, the poorest of the poor,” she said. “These truly were the forgotten. There was nobody for them.”

Here lies Joseph Caruth, a 45-year-old cook in a lumber camp who got drunk one cold October night in 1902 and wandered into the woods, where he passed out and froze to death.
Here lies Anton Anderson, a 35-year-old loner who drank tainted water and died of typhoid, alone and miserable, in the city hospital, in November 1904.

And here lies James Christiansen, an unemployed laborer from Denmark who felt such despair on the 19th day of the sixth month of his 64th year that he hung himself in full public view at the head gate of the canal during the depths of the Great Depression.

These three lie buried with 281 others in the potter’s field; the skid row of the afterlife; the final resting place for the city’s alcoholics, its criminals, its suicides and its poor.
“There’s nothing but very, very sad stories there,” Grabowski said. “Not one you would say, ‘Well it was a good life, a peaceful end.’ Not in potter’s field. It was a hard life and a sad end.”

The term “potter’s field” comes from the Bible, the name given to land unsuitable for growing crops and used only by potters to dig clay and for burying strangers.

Most cities have had a potter’s field, usually relegated to a remote corner of a cemetery, where the poor and unknown were usually buried in cheap wood boxes, one atop the other, lined up in tight rows. It became the final resting spot for the indigent, the widows and the homeless who spent their last days alone and went unclaimed in death. Many came from the poorhouse or the poor farm, places where those receiving public assistance were sent to live and work to earn their keep; places they sometimes never left except in death.


During her research of local cemeteries she kept seeing oblique mentions of the potter’s field, and she grew intrigued.
“I kept coming across this little notation — 'pf' — I didn’t know what that was,” she said. “It just took me by surprise.”
When she learned what it stood for, she was haunted by curiosity. How could hundreds of people be thrown into a mass grave and forgotten?

Through painstaking research she uncovered surprisingly detailed information about some of the deceased, enough to string together biographies that conjured them back into existence.
“Oh, the things they put in public records,” she said. “I’m looking at marriage records for the church and the priest would put all this information like ‘He’s a wife beater.’ They just put it all down, no political correctness.”

Some of the potter’s field dead left behind fascinating stories.
Like Martin Olson, a 35-year-old who was having a drink with two buddies in a saloon on Dec. 17, 1903, when the place caught fire. The owner managed to get his wife and child out, plus the couple who lived upstairs, and even his horse from the stable in the back. But, he told police and the newspaper, he just forgot about the drinkers, who were too drunk to find their way out themselves. The newspaper quoted firemen saying the men looked drunk even when found burned to a crisp.
“You got the news in those days,” Grabowski said of the newspapers’ colorful articles. “At least you knew the truth of what was going on.”




For more details follow the link for the rest of the article

[sami]

Very interesting read - Thanks for posting that.

sami