As part of the development for the new Merchant Building, archeologists have begun excavating what could be hundreds of graves beneath the North Market parking lot—formerly the site of the North Graveyard. This series, Come Get Your Dead, will explore the long, weird afterlife of the North Graveyard—once the final resting place for some of Columbus’ earliest citizens—and follow the team of scientists currently attempting to exhume and rebury those who were left behind.
The Vault
The day before, Friday, had been unseasonably warm and muddy, but overnight everything froze again and the Franklin County Courthouse at the corner of High and Mound was properly frigid for the first day of February. In the morning, David Kellenbarger, janitor and night watchman for the courthouse, left his sleeping quarters in the county treasurer’s office and went about his usual task of building fires to ward off some of the bitter winter cold before the other county employees arrived at their offices.
It was just after 6 a.m., Saturday, February 1, 1879.
When Kellenbarger entered the office of County Recorder Nathan Cole, he sensed that something was wrong. The room was unusually warm, and when he checked the enormous vault where all county records were kept, he found the vault door as well as its combination lock were hot to the touch. Kellenbarger quickly found Beal Poste, a clerk in the recorder’s office, and together the two of them peered into the vault.
Kellenbarger saw the bright light of flames dancing on the linoleum floor inside.
At 7:30 a.m., Kellenbarger and Poste issued the fire alarm. Someone—it was never entirely clear who—opened the vault door and released a dense cloud of smoke into the office. Firemen quickly flooded into the courthouse wearing “smoke protectors”—smoke-filtering hoods just recently invented for fire brigades. Unfortunately, the technology was so new at that time that the firemen didn’t know how to properly wear them, and had to retreat before being suffocated by the smoke.
By the time the fire was subdued, it had destroyed all the original plats of Columbus, as well as those of the outlying villages. What’s more, the presence of coal oil poured on the records as an accelerant pointed to a disturbing conclusion, according to the Columbus Daily Dispatch — “a bold and systematic attempt was made to wipe out every vestige of land records in the Recorder’s office of Franklin County.”
The Columbus City Graveyards
If it wasn’t for Donald Schlegel, we would know very little about what the North Graveyard actually looked like.
Schlegel, a retired electrical engineer and prolific historian of the Catholic Diocese of Columbus, was reluctant to be interviewed for this series.
“I really don’t know what I could contribute,” said Schlegel in an email. “Haven’t thought much about the old graveyard in some 35 years.”
Despite his humility, Schlegel and his 1985 book, The Columbus City Graveyards, have been fundamental to all modern archeological research into the North Graveyard.
“That Schlegel stuff…” said Ryan Weller, the archeologist who led excavations around North Market in 2001. “Without it we would be operating a little bit in the dark, to be honest.”
Justin Zink, an archeologist for the environmental consulting firm Lawhon & Associates, described Schlegel’s work as integral to his excavations at the former North Graveyard site ahead of construction of the Merchant Building. Krista Horrocks of the State Historic Preservation Office agreed.
“[Schlegel] went through a lot of newspaper articles, did a lot of research through old city council records,” said Horrocks. “From a 1985 standpoint he did a great job because he didn’t have the advantage of the internet like we do now to do a lot of research.”
At the beginning of his book, Schlegel writes of a desire “to prevent the feeling of frustration experienced by researchers when they learn that an old graveyard and its records no longer exist.” Perhaps one of the more frustrating of the missing records was the original North Graveyard plat.
By the time Schlegel started writing, all the original maps of the graveyard were long gone—burned up in a mysterious fire.
The Suspicions of Mr. Wisker
One day, John E. Murphy would be the superintendent of the Columbus Police, overseeing the raucous Grand Army of the Republic reunion in 1888. He subsequently proposed a system of monitoring criminals who move across state lines—sort of a precursor to modern FBI databases—ultimately ending his law enforcement career as a high-ranking official in the U.S. Secret Service. But in 1879, Murphy was still a deputy in the Franklin County Sheriff’s office, responsible for investigating the fire at the courthouse.
After the fire was extinguished, Murphy examined the outer walls of the courthouse, where he found a series of footprints to a door leading to the vault from the outside. Murphy set fire to a piece of newspaper and dropped it through the passageway, illuminating the interior of the vault and revealing the pieces of a broken stone jug. After pieces of the jug were retrieved, they were washed and smelled clearly of coal oil.
The weather was in Murphy’s favor. The perpetrator had left clear footprints in the warm, muddy ground, and when the temperature dropped overnight, the footprints froze solid. Murphy was able to measure them with a length of string, giving him the first clue in the hunt for the courthouse arsonist.
Meanwhile, Patrolman Philip Wisker couldn’t stop thinking about Albert Brown.
Albert lived on Wisker’s beat and they’d known each other for about eight years. They shared a cordial, jovial relationship, despite the fact that Albert had a drunken, ne’er-do-well streak about him. He lived largely on the good graces of his older brothers, William Preston and James Finley—known professionally as the Brown Brothers.
While Albert was a bit of a black sheep, the Brown Brothers were well-respected gentlemen about town, operating a title abstraction business on Third Street. They and their employees spent many hours in the Franklin County Recorder’s vault studying the plats and land titles of Columbus. While some abstractors simply kept the indexes of the records they would reference later, the Brown Brothers were known to painstakingly create exact copies and keep those copies safely stored in a fireproof building.
And that brought Wisker back to a conversation he remembered having with Albert around the time the recorder’s vault was being built. The Brown Brothers had spent a great deal of money on those records, Albert told him—a barrel of money, he said, and they were bound to get it out in some shape. Coal oil could be put on the books, Albert had said, and that would make them burn rapidly.
Those records were, indeed, burned with the assistance of coal oil. Now the Brown Brothers had the only copies in town. The day after the fire, Wisker brought his suspicions to Deputy Murphy.
Map Of The Dead
If Schlegel wanted to include a map of the North Graveyard in his book, he would have to draw one from scratch.
From contemporary city maps, the rough outline of the North Graveyard’s historic boundaries is clear—the cemetery stretched west from High Street to Park Street, with Spruce at the north boundary and railroad tracks (now Convention Center Drive) to the south. But the details of the graveyard’s interior—how the burial plots were laid out, where the walkways were between plots, how much distance there was (and still is) between graves—are more or less a mystery.
Schlegel did have some hard data to work with. In the midst of its condemnation in the 1870s, the North Graveyard was embroiled in different legal disputes, and the surviving court records from those cases offered some dimensions for the cemetery. A survey was conducted in 1871 of the southernmost portion of the graveyard before the Springfield Railroad Company built a new line to Union Depot. This gave Schlegel measurements between the monuments, as well as the general location of the internal roadways through the graveyard.
Schlegel also had the dimensions for the replacement lots at Green Lawn Cemetary where the North Graveyard occupants were supposed to be transferred. Each lot was supposed to be equal to the area of the lots at the North Graveyard, and each lot measured fifteen feet by twenty feet. But although Schlegel knew roughly the size of each lot at the North Graveyard, he had no idea where they were.
In what Lawhon & Associates calls a “fine display of detective work,” Schlegel studied Union Cemetery in Old North Columbus—“the only existing, large cemetery in the county which was contemporaneous with the North Graveyard.” By studying the way burial lots are laid out at Union, Schlegel could build a likely, though hypothetical, map of where the graves might still be under the North Market parking lot.
“What Schlegel did was take, here’s the Doherty Tract, here’s the old tract, here’s the new addition, here’s this add-on, here’s what this section means, here’s when this happened,” said Weller. “I mean without that, we’d have to pull that all together. And maybe not be able to find some of that information as well…His history is a great base to work from, and it’s empirical. You don’t have to worry about whether you’re dealing with theory…it’s just maps and facts. It’s got measurements. In archeology, having measurements and mapping and that kind of accuracy is awesome to have.”
In 2001, Weller and his team of archeologists so thoroughly relied on Schlegel’s work during their excavations that the entire North Graveyard chapter of Schlegel’s book is reproduced in Weller’s final report.
“Attempts to obtain additional and different information regarding this cemetery were relatively unsuccessful,” wrote Weller in his report. “Schlegel’s book is considered to be the most complete and comprehensive documentation of the cemetery’s activities.”
In February 2023, archeologists from Lawhon & Associates started excavating the North Market parking lot where historically, the land was not as disturbed by construction and development as the rest of what was once the North Graveyard. That means that the parking lot may contain hundreds of intact graves. Once again, Schlegel’s graveyard map is proving invaluable to the long saga of North Graveyard research—and it’s already proving to be shockingly accurate.
“Which Way Shall I Go?”
Patrolman Wisker was not the only one who could recall a suspicious interaction with Albert.
In October 1878—just a few months before the fire—a man named George Searles was serving time in the Franklin County jail on a perjury charge. Searles was a lifelong criminal, first arrested at the age of 13, in and out of so many jails he couldn’t remember them all. Fifteen days before his release, Searles was put on kitchen duty at the courthouse.
It was there that Searles met a medium sized man with light brown hair and a mustache running down below each corner of his mouth. The man introduced himself to Searles as Albert Brown, and he had a proposition.
“He asked whether I had ever committed a burglary,” Searles would later testify. “I said no, and asked why. He said he had a job that there was considerable money in. It was to remove or destroy these records.”
Searles assumed this was a put-up job—the officers who’d put him in jail were probably trying to keep him there by enticing him into a criminal conspiracy. But Albert kept on talking. They wouldn’t be alone in the burglary, Albert told him—they would have help from a man named Frank Moseley.
Moseley, it turned out later, was a clerk for the Brown Brothers corporation.
County Recorder Cole remembered Albert as a man who always seemed to be hanging about the courthouse and who stopped at the recorder’s office nearly every day. He never seemed to have any business at the office, Cole said later, but every day Albert would come in and talk and then leave. John Snyder, who’d built the vault in the Recorder’s office, also remembered Albert hanging around the courthouse—particularly during construction of the vault.
On the Wednesday after the fire, Murphy and Wisker arrested a remarkably nonchalant Albert. “Which way shall I go?” he asked the officers before being led to jail. Once there, he bluntly said he didn’t even care what crime he was being charged with. Deputy Murphy retrieved the string he had used to measure the frozen footprints outside the courthouse and matched it against Albert’s shoes. Meanwhile, word was sent to the Brown Brothers that their wayward brother was in jail, and soon they would muster a skilled team of lawyers for his defense.
Later that night, Wisker and Murphy paid a visit to Victoria Berrian, a woman who had been living with Albert. As soon as they told Berrian that Albert had been arrested, she said, “What, for the fire at the court house?” Murphy was astonished, for neither he nor Wisker had mentioned anything about why Albert was in jail. Why had she asked if it was because of the courthouse fire?
People often ask questions without being able to say why they asked them, said Berrian. “I was just wondering what for.”
Reflections
In 2001, the city was taken almost by surprise when utility workers began uncovering human remains at the edge of the North Market parking lot. Ryan Weller still recalls the darkly humorous episode when he received the first frantic phone call about arm bones falling into the utility trench. Despite the long history of bones appearing during all manner of excavation in that area, the official story was that the remains had all been moved to Green Lawn Cemetery more than a century earlier.
“I don’t think anybody expected them to still be intact, even though they knew that they would encounter them when they put in the parking lot,” said Weller. “That kind of information wasn’t really known unless you went and talked to, I think the guy…that used to run the deli, an older guy. He knew, but I didn’t know to talk to him.”
The city was more prepared this time around. In May 2022, Lawhon & Associates produced a 60-page work plan detailing what they expected to find when excavating the former North Graveyard, how they would conduct their work, and referencing the previous findings of both Weller, and of course, Schlegel. The work plan also included the findings of Dr. Kevin Nolan from the Applied Anthropological Laboratories at Ball State University.
On October 25, 2021, Nolan surveyed one portion of the North Market parking lot with ground penetrating radar (GPR). In his December, 2021 report to Lawhon & Associates, Nolan warned that GPR “does not ‘see’ the kinds of things people are interested in. The instrument only sees changes in polarity over time. People interpret ambiguous reflections in human terms.”
Nevertheless, Nolan’s GPR results showed a number of intriguing reflections in the soil beneath the parking lot. These reflections did not line up with the outlines of former buildings at the site—but they lined up almost perfectly with Schlegel’s graveyard map.
“The Schlegel plot map provides the only historically known land use that matches the orientation and structure of the potential grave shaft features and blocks interpreted here,” wrote Nolan in his report. “The grave shafts and cemetery areas were derived without reference to the Schlegel map, constituting a truly independent line of evidence. The close agreement between the map georeferenced by Lawhon and the separate interpretations derived from the GPR data make for a strong, mutually reinforcing case that the reflections seen in the radar data are indeed related to intact grave shafts. All the buildings and other disturbances have different orientations and structures. The only pattern of land use that can explain the observed reflections is the distribution of cemetery plots.”
Decades after Schlegel resurrected the North Graveyard map from the ashes, the data seemed to prove the graveyard detective was right.
The Gold Ring
The circumstantial evidence was certainly incriminating, but except for Deputy Murphy’s string, there was no hard evidence tying Albert to the courthouse fire. At the end of a weeklong trial before Mayor John Heitmann, the case was discharged and Albert was acquitted of setting fire to the recorder’s vault.
According to the Ohio State Journal, Mayor Heitmann said, Tthe testimony showed beyond the reason of a doubt that the fire at the Recorder’s office was caused by an incendiary, but that the evidence produced did not justify the binding of the defendant over to a higher court as the person who did the incendiary work.”
The decision was received with applause, reported the Journal, and Albert was congratulated by his friends—and no doubt by his older brothers.
No connection was ever established between the Brown Brothers corporation and the burning of the courthouse records, but that didn’t stop anyone from speculating. In his closing arguments, county prosecutor and future governor George K. Nash pointed out that Albert had a clear motive—if the arson had been successful, the records held by the Brown Brothers would have greatly increased in value.
“[Nash] wanted it distinctly understood that there was no evidence whatever tending to show that if the defendant did start the fire that he was instigated to do it by his brothers,” reported the Dispatch. “But, having brothers in the abstract business, with the only complete record extant, defendant may have worked up the idea in his mind that he could do his brothers a great service.”
There’s no reason to think that the arsonist—whoever it was—had any particular intention of destroying the original plat for the North Graveyard (though, coincidentally, in 1873 the Brown Brothers did express an interest in purchasing a portion of the condemned graveyard, and in 1875 they were involved in the litigation concerning ownership of the graveyard’s Kerr Tract). The graveyard records were probably just collateral damage, but the result was the same.
After the trial and discharge of Albert, Columbus was on edge. Citizen meetings were convened and rewards were offered for the apprehension of anyone suspected of arson. It was suggested that the “Graveyard Fund”—the money accrued by the city from selling off property in the North Graveyard—might be useful to such an effort. It should be made a reward fund, said the businessman T. Ewing Miller, and a new graveyard should be started with those who are captured and convicted.
Living in the Information Age, it might be difficult to understand just how seriously the community took this crime. But in 19th Century Columbus, the burning of the recorder’s vault was a brazen attack on the city itself. Many of the burned records could not be readily replaced or recreated. It would have been easy to assume that the lost records would be lost forever—including the plat of the North Graveyard.
In the forward to The Columbus City Graveyards, Donald tells his readers a story. When the last graves were being exhumed from the North Graveyard in 1881, a boy standing near the excavation trenches spotted a gold ring in the dirt. Before the workmen could stop him, the boy snuck the gold ring into his pocket and ran away with his prize.
“Those who delve into the past are, like the boy, searching for a treasure, an experience or lesson to make their own life easier or more meaningful, but without the suffering which may have accompanied the original experience,” writes Schlegel. “May each find his or her own ‘gold ring.’”
Schlegel, however, accomplished the opposite of the boy at the North Graveyard. Stealing a gold ring from an opened grave—like burning a vault full of public records—is an act of theft. Through his detective work, Schlegel gave Columbus back something that was stolen more than a century ago—a map that is still guiding those who might bring lasting peace to the dead.
