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.
Dead Sleepers
The old sexton’s name was James McDonald, and he had held the job for 20 years straight.
McDonald was the fourth and final man appointed by the city as the official keeper of the North Graveyard, which in its heyday stretched from High Street at its eastern edge to Park Street at the west, bordered to the north by Spruce Street and railroad tracks to the south. This was McDonald’s domain until the middle of the 1860s, when the powers that be finally declared the old cemetery over capacity and refused to allow any further burials there.
Then, a decade after the last body was put in the ground, McDonald was called back into service for a very different task.
It was April 1872, and the Springfield Railroad Company had recently purchased the southernmost portion of the North Graveyard for the purpose of building a new rail line clear across the cemetery to the Union Depot on the other side of High Street. But before the railroad could go through, the graves had to be opened and the bones had to be moved.
McDonald’s job was to supervise the excavation alongside city engineers, politicians and laborers, walking the portions of the yard where the tombstones had long since disappeared, pointing out slight depressions in the ground where hidden graves might be, giving the officials all the correct information as to who was buried where—all he could remember, at least. He did what he could to give names to the nameless dead, all those he’d “shoveled in” back in the day.
They pulled up the bones of an old Ohio Penitentiary guard with a nasty gash in his skull—evidence of the ax used by inmates to murder him back in 1841. They dug up a perfectly preserved woman who’d been in the ground for 38 years—still with a head full of blond hair. They found children-sized gloves with finger bones still inside. Some of the old bodies had clearly been buried without coffins, and in some graves the coffins had decomposed along with the flesh and fluids, leaving only stark, black stains in the brown soil.
By the end of the month, the laborers and the old sexton had opened 391 graves, transferring the long-buried remains to the “dead house” from whence they would eventually be reinterred across the river at Green Lawn Cemetery. Far from being squeamish about this project, the elite of Columbus were supportive of the excavations and exhumations.
Indeed, the Daily Dispatch felt that more needed to be done.
“Now that the work of removing the remains of the dead from a portion of the North Graveyard, condemned for railroad purposes, has been commenced, we know of no reason why the city should not make a clean sweep and transfer all of the occupants of that cemetery to Green Lawn,” wrote the Dispatch on April 24, 1872. “The idea of a graveyard in the city is not pleasant, and while we have respect for the sentiment regarding intrusion upon the silent resting places of ‘those who have gone before,’ the growth of the city requires that the graveyard should be used for the living and not the dead.”
Columbus was changing, and a growing city could hardly afford to leave such a large, open plot of land undeveloped. To leave a graveyard in the middle of an up-and-coming city like Columbus, argued the Daily Dispatch, suggested “apathy and want of enterprise.” And besides, one could hardly say the dead were resting in peace at a place like the North Graveyard.
“It is surrounded with the hum-drum of busy life,” wrote the Dispatch. “The dead sleepers, we think, would find a more peaceful resting-place in Green Lawn.”
But of course, not all of the dead sleepers made it across the river.
“There Might Be a Few More”
In the Spring of 2001, Ryan Weller was in trouble.
Weller is an unorthodox sort of scientist. When I met him for lunch in February 2023, he was wearing a black leather vest and a black cowboy hat over hair that came down to his shoulders. Remarkably tall and deep-voiced, Weller was introduced to archeology at a young age when his grandmother would take him out searching for arrowheads in the fields of Northwest Ohio. By 1993, Weller had a master’s degree from Ohio State and was ready to turn his hobby into a profession.
For nine years, Weller was the proud owner of his own archeological consulting company, with only himself and one other employee. It was hard, unrewarding work, and on top of all that his company had just been embezzled, crippling the business. Weller was hurting, badly. And then something incredible happened.
“It was me and one other guy,” said Weller. “I’m trying to find work, meanwhile his job was to do monitoring for sewer lines in Downtown Columbus. So he’s just watching this backhoe, day after day, for months, five days a week, day after day. Walking after the backhoe as it digs up streets, down in Columbus to put in this sewer line. And I get a call from him one day and he just goes, ‘Get down here quick, two arms just fell in the trench.’ So that’s pretty alarming.”
Weller’s office was only about five minutes away from where the backhoe was digging and soon he was there at the dig site, assessing the situation.
“I look down in the trench and I go, okay, two arms fall in a trench, knowing just general human anatomy, there’s usually a torso between the two,” said Weller.
He ordered his partner to get into a truck with the backhoe driver and go to the spot where the construction crew was dumping the dirt from the trench. It turned out the rest of the skeleton from the trench had been deposited in someone’s yard.
Meanwhile Weller was still at North Market, waiting for the police and representatives from the historical society who were racing to the site to figure out what exactly was going on. Weller looked into the trench and started to make out the remnants of one grave shaft and then another. When the authorities finally arrived, somebody asked him if there might be more burials to be found.
“I looked up at the end of the trench and there was two legs sticking out of the trench,” said Weller. “So I go, ‘I think there might be a few more.’”
That’s when Weller finally realized that the construction crew had in fact entered a cemetery—the North Graveyard.
City of the Dead
In its day, the North Graveyard was vast. For 30 years it was the city’s primary burial ground and it’s possible that almost 8,000 people were interred there—and those are just the official graves. It wasn’t uncommon for families who could not pay the interment fees to bury their loved ones illegally. Nor was it uncommon for cemeteries to maximize profits by burying bodies on top of one another. Who would ever know? Who would ever look? The bones were supposed to lie there forever, after all. That was surely the expectation when the North Graveyard first came into being in 1813.
In 1813, the U.S. was at war with Great Britain and for all intents and purposes there was no city of Columbus—there was only a piece of parchment issued by the General Assembly in Chillicothe saying that there should, eventually, be a capital city on the banks of the Scioto River called Columbus. There was also John Kerr, the enterprising Irish immigrant who was destined to be the mayor of a city that did not yet exist.
Kerr was one of the original proprietors of Columbus who saw the need for a city graveyard and dedicated a small tract of land, barely more than an acre in size, for such a purpose. Kerr was chosen as the man who would be authorized to legally donate the land to Columbus—which was a tall order, given that Columbus didn’t legally exist at the time. Thus when the graveyard was finally established, this initial northwestern-most portion—today occupied by North Market—came to be known as the Kerr Tract. Two more tracts would follow until the North Graveyard comprised almost 11 acres at what was then the northern edge of Columbus.
North Graveyard was never exactly a peaceful place. Gangs of robbers lurked amongst the monuments waiting for defenseless passersby. Tombstones were vandalized and graves were opened illegally. In 1858, the Daily Capital City called on the city council to do something about the fact that, “This ‘city of the dead’ is a place of resort for the lowest classes of men and women which infest this city, who being entirely void of respect for either the quick or the dead, indulge in every species of obscenity and degradation.”
By the 1860s—with the Civil War raging in the South, military units camping out on the Statehouse lawn, and Confederate POWs languishing across the river at Camp Chase—the city wanted nothing more to do with the North Graveyard.
“It has been said that the civilization of a people may be judged by the attention they bestow upon the resting place of their dead,” wrote the Columbus Daily Express in March, 1864. “Viewed from that standpoint the condition of the old North Grave-Yard addresses itself eloquently to the people of Columbus. That spot so often moistened by the tears of bereavement, has…ceased to be appropriate for the purpose to which it was dedicated. And even were it otherwise suitable, its capacity was exhausted years ago. It is now surrounded by the busy haunts of occupation, and the city is constantly folding it more closely in its secular embrace.”
Not only was the North Graveyard crowded, decrepit, and taking up valuable space in a growing city, there was also an attractive alternative waiting across the river. The recently-formed Green Lawn Cemetery Association proposed to those holding lots in the old burying ground to move their deceased ancestors to the new, sprawling cemetery, where they would presumably rest in a more fulsome peace.
“That will indeed involve the necessity of many removals which the association proposes to take upon itself to perform,” acknowledged the Daily Express. “This is the only conceivable objection that can be urged to the proposition. It is very natural that there should be a strong feeling of repugnance to the disturbing the resting place of the dead. But it is morally impossible to long preserve the old ground from desecration; and this disability will increase with every returning year. This consideration has already induced many families to remove their dead to Green Lawn Cemetery, and in a very few years more, there will remain none among us to represent or care for those whose remains are interred at the old grounds.”
The Express even went so far as to issue an ominous—if prescient—warning; “The grounds themselves will become more and more unsightly, and will be liable ultimately to become the subject of individual speculation.”
The North Graveyard, and all those buried therein, faced pressure not just from the exponential growth of Columbus, but also a new sentiment regarding cemeteries that was sweeping the nation. In the middle of the 19th Century, rural burial grounds with peaceful, natural surroundings became fashionable, emphasizing the hope for an afterlife and encouraging the use of cemeteries as something more akin to public parks.
In his influential book The Columbus City Graveyards, Don Schlegel writes that in this period, “The interment of the dead in crowded towns was coming under increasing attack as an offensive and unhealthy practice. The movement had already succeeded in Boston and was being promoted in Cincinnati as early as 1836.”
It was only natural that such a movement would make its way to Columbus—especially when its values dovetailed so comfortably with the needs of a growing city. Not only was the vast cemetery liable to become the subject of “individual speculation,” it was also an eyesore—and to some minds, an embarrassment.
“Since the permanent establishment of Green Lawn Cemetery, the old ‘Columbus grave-yard’ north of the depot has been sadly neglected,” wrote the Ohio State Journal in December 1868. “Bushes and briars grow wild in every quarter. The graves of many persons of wealth and rank are sadly neglected. Many of the pailing enclosures have rotted and are tumbling to the ground. This should not be the case. Situated as the cemetery is, it is visited by many strangers, who know not but that it is the only cemetery in the city. With all such the impression created would be anything but favorable to the reputation of our city.”
As early as 1868, it was important to the people of Columbus that Columbus be nationally regarded. Threatening the city’s prestige was, perhaps, the North Graveyard’s worst offense.
Pure Capitalism
“Not all the graves had a full set of human remains in them,” said Weller. “Some of them were children, some of them were missed. If you thought you knew what you were gonna find, it’s completely unexpected. Even knowing there’s a graveyard there, it’s unexpected.”
For an excavation of this size, Weller needed more help, which came in the form of volunteers and students from Ohio State. With this new complement of archeologists, Weller started excavating the grave shafts under Spruce Street, along the northern edge of North Market. It soon became apparent just how much digging had been done in that little plot of land over the decades. Every time anyone dug down there, said Weller, they hit human remains. It was almost a miracle that he and his team got to the graves when they did.
“I mean, heck, I heard they put a sewer in the year before, and they said, ‘Oh we didn’t see any graves or anything,’” said Weller. “I go, ‘Why, was anybody there?’ And they go, ‘Well no, and we did it all at night.’ And I go, ‘Oh well, jeez, I wonder how that happened.’ I’m not Sherlock Holmes, but I think; it’s hard to see at night, didn’t find anything, and working with a backhoe at breakneck speed because that’s how you get paid? So I suspect they were there then too.”
Over the years, graves had been obliterated, sewer easements had gone into the ground, and there was even a phone line that had been run through a person’s skeleton.
“We encountered a building foundation when we started doing our work…no surprise, we knew there was buildings that went in,” said Weller. “Some of the human remains we found rolled up against the base of the foundation. So the guys building the foundation knew that they were still there, but what happens if they tell their supervisor and boss, ‘There’s graves and we need to stop the development.’ Well, they get fired.”
Weller clarified, “We’re still talking 1800s. I can say that because people from the 1800s are not gonna sue me.”
In Weller’s view, the reason graves were left under the earth to be disturbed by more than a century of development is simple—nobody was doing archeology back then.
“Realize how it was done,” said Weller. “There was supposed to be an ad in the paper, and a public notice, that said, ‘Hey we’re condemning the cemetery. Anybody who has family members, come on down and excavate.'”
Krista Horrocks, an archeologist with the State Historic Preservation Office, also mentioned these newspaper advertisements, which she called “Come Get Your Dead” articles. But by alerting the public with only these ads in the paper, and relying on family and friends to assist with the disinterments, the city failed to take into account disenfranchised communities, minority communities, immigrant communities and people who had already moved on from Columbus after losing a loved one and burying them at the North Graveyard.
“You had a developer in the 1870s who wanted to build things and he makes more money the faster things get up there,” said Weller. “Pure capitalism. He excavated hundreds of burials in two weeks. I mean…the reality is human laziness. You didn’t have to do anything and nobody’s gonna check. There was no check and balances on what was left, so the people there were blatantly forgotten…scandalously forgotten, if you really wanna look at it that way. Because they didn’t ask for that.”
The disinterments in the 1800s and all the development that occurred in the first half of the 20th century happened long before the National Historic Preservation Act which requires developers to coordinate with government agencies if a development might impact historical or cultural sites—including cemeteries.
Because of this law, cities like Columbus must hire archeologists like Weller to make sure utility projects don’t harm our nation’s history—and development companies like Rockbridge, which plans to construct the Merchant Building on the former site of the North Market parking lot, must hire environmental consulting firms like Lawhon & Associates.
But prior to federal laws regulating how development could and could not disturb cultural sites, it was basically a free-for-all. That was very much the case at the former site of the North Graveyard. Streets were expanded and sewers were dug and buildings went up and all the while it was an open secret that the bones were still down there, trying to rest in peace.
The Strangers
After clearing the southern portion of the graveyard for the railroad in 1872, there was no going back.
Nine years later, in 1881, the work to clear the rest of the North Graveyard began in earnest. The process was industrial and certainly not up to the standards practiced by modern archeologists. Laborers dug trenches two feet wide and five feet deep and shoveled whatever remains and bone fragments they uncovered into shoe boxes. By the end of December, 1881, Columbus was officially done with the cemetery.
But the cemetery was not done with Columbus.
According to Weller, every time anyone did any digging on that spot, they hit human remains. Ever since 1881, when the last bones were supposed to have been exhumed and transported to Green Lawn, the relentless history of Columbus development has borne out that wisdom.
By 1885, rumors were flying around Columbus that laborers excavating around the new North Market were finding bodies, not very deep under the ground. The rumors were apparently common and plausible enough that the city council adopted a resolution instructing the city engineer to investigate the situation and move any remaining bones across the river to Green Lawn.
Seven years later a work crew was excavating earth in preparation for the High Street viaduct that would bypass the train tracks running to Union Station, when they uncovered the edges of three coffins. They might have been shocked by such a find, but luckily an old Columbusite stood nearby, and happily informed them that they were digging along the eastern line of the old North Graveyard.
“Two of the coffins are entirely decayed, but the dark lines made by the decayed wood plainly mark the outlines,” reported the Dispatch. “The third coffin is fairly well preserved on the bottom and sides, but the lid has decomposed and the box was filled with earth. A search developed a few small bones, indicating the feet of the deceased were towards the east. It is probable that some of the larger bones will be found if it is decided to excavate the remainder of the coffin.”
Thirteen years after that incident, John Curry of the Bell Telephone company supervised a crew of laborers as they dug a hole for a new telephone pole on Spruce Street, not far from the area Weller and his crew would excavate one day. As Curry looked on, one of the furious shovels yanked a human skull out of the ground with a necktie fluttering along behind it. So long had the skull rested under the ground that it cracked upon contact with fresh air. The skull still had a remarkable set of teeth, complete with brilliant gold fillings.
Nine years later, in March of 1914, Columbus was about to celebrate the opening of a remodeled North Market, and the Dispatch took the opportunity to remind Columbusites of the fact that the market was built atop land that was once, “marked by numerous headstones, marking the resting places of some of Columbus’ oldest inhabitants.”
“When it was proposed to remove the bodies there in order to make way for the market, there arose at first a stormy protest. It was held by relatives of many of the dead that the thought of removal was sacreligious,” wrote the Dispatch. “Finally however, the so-called friends of progress prevailed and the process of removing the bodies began.”
Decades after the final exhumation, it was obvious that not all of the bodies had been removed after the so-called friends of progress prevailed. The question is why. Why were bodies not removed from the North Graveyard when they were supposed to be?
Ben Hayes, a columnist for the Columbus Citizen-Journal voiced a suspicion that probably a few older Columbusites had already considered. In 1975, Hayes recorded an anecdote about a longtime North Market merchant who once discovered a human skull on his stand, excavated by city workers digging a drainage trench nearby.
“The skull could have been that of one of the ‘strangers,’” wrote Hayes. “In orders given the North Sexton by the graveyard committee of the Columbus City Council, ‘strangers’ were to be buried, they said, in the north end of the acreage.”
Hayes was referring to those who would have been buried in what at one time was called a pauper’s grave or a “potter’s field.” Either their families could not afford anything more elaborate than an individual grave without a marker, or they had no known family at all and were buried at the city’s expense. This, of course, would have been the least desirable portion of the graveyard. And strangers were not the only people buried there.
According to Schlegel’s book, in 1841 the Columbus City Council ordered that, “the Colored People be buried under the Direction of the North Sexton, and in the same manner that Strangers are buried.” Black people were not allowed to purchase family lots and had to be buried in single graves alongside paupers and unidentified decedents in the marshy northern section of the graveyard—the land of the strangers.
Hard-Working People
Who were they?
Who were these anonymous people whose bones have laid under our streets for so long? The excavations in 2001 offered precious few clues. There was a clay pipe buried in one grave…or was that lost by one of the laborers exhuming bones in the 1870’s? There was buckshot buried with the skeleton of an adolescent…but that didn’t necessarily mean somebody shot a child. According to Weller, the bones told him that the people buried—and left behind—at the old North Graveyard lived hard, laborious lives.
“We had one individual, just one that I could tell that was probably six foot four, six foot five, that’s how big I am. But he had me by a hundred pounds, I mean this was a big guy,” said Weller. “Weird thing was he had one extra vertebra. I don’t know how that happens. I counted repeatedly—everybody did—he had an extra vertebra. Those kinda things stick in your head. His size and his robust stature stood out. And then you realize, six foot four and, let’s say, 320 pounds, back then he was a colossus. He was a goliath amongst people. They surely would have recognized him walking down the street.”
Weller dug up another skeleton with two extra bones—pieces of the collar bone that never fully fused and instead formed extra articulations in the arm sockets. That sort of thing could only happen from some kind of hard, strenuous work like rowing boats for a living.
“He really must have worked his butt off through his teenage years, to have that not fuse,” said Weller. “You really get a good picture that people were hard-working people and they worked for a living and probably expended a lot more calories then than we do today, for sure.”
There were hard-working adults, but there were also very young children. Child graves would have been easy to leave behind—they’re small enough to have been missed by the laborers who removed bodies from the North Graveyard to Green Lawn in the 1870s and ’80s. Infant mortality was also much higher in the 19th century. In 1881, 867 bodies were exhumed at the North Graveyard, and over half of those were children.
Pieces & Parts
The bones were always supposed to go to Green Lawn.
In 2001, the cemetery that was once considered a more peaceful, appropriate alternative to the North Graveyard still waited with broad green fields to receive the bones that were supposed to be moved there more than a century earlier.
“I wasn’t present for the reinterment,” said Weller. “We had…between 45 and 55 different individuals represented by the bones. Not complete skeletons. I think they put them in two or three graves, because there was just pieces and parts, but they were individually packaged to last forever.”
A few teeth were pulled out of some of the excavated jawbones and retained by the Ohio Historical Connection, just in case DNA analysis could be conducted in the future. But other than that, the anonymous bones had finally made it across the river, in the company of their friends and relatives. Various religious rites were administered and the dead sleepers were, once and for all, laid to rest.
As the dead were buried, Weller’s company found new life. The newly named Weller & Associates—altered from the previous “Applied Archaeological Services” after the embezzlement incident—was back on track. Weller was getting clients again, and people started to have confidence in his work.
“I would say it saved my company,” said Weller. “We weren’t just a cute company, as some people thought. I think it proved that I knew what I was doing—our company knew what it was doing. It showed that we had the ability to organize, and when you have that many people involved, there’s a lot of organization, a lot of control and especially at a site like that, a lot of delegation.”
Long-term contracts came next, which secured Weller’s ability to retire early, “While I can still move around and go climb pyramids and stuff.”
And now, 22 years later, Weller waits patiently as, once again, the remaining graves under the North Market parking lot are opened, this time by Justin Zink and the archeologists at Lawhon & Associates.
“Justin and Lawhon’s work that’s going on at the cemetery will be very enlightening,” said Weller. “I look forward to seeing it.”
