23 min read | Categories: Blog, History |

“A grave is not hard for cities to forget, especially if they largely forgot the people when they were alive.” —Allison Meier, Grave

Across Washington, D.C., several shopping malls, apartment buildings, and even a metro station were once the locations of burial grounds. Remains were exhumed and relocated to mass graves in other cemeteries. Some remains were almost certainly inadvertently left behind, buried beneath new developments. Much like many things in life (and death), a permanent, marked grave is a privilege not afforded to everyone, Human societies value protecting the vulnerable, yet in death many remain anonymous, collected in a mass grave somewhere where even group identities are lost. Sometimes these places are erased from the map itself. Yet these people and their stories have meaning, even when they are forgotten. And if you look in the right places, their stories, and lessons, are there for us to learn from. Later, when possible, they erase that place from the map. However, if forget about the suffering of those who walked before us, we’ll lose the lessons humanity learned.

Historical map of the city of Washington, District of Columbia: view of the city and location of the houses in the year 1802, the beginning of Washington. Courtesy of DC Library.

When Congressional Cemetery opened in 1807, the surrounding area was undesirable due to its marshy composition close to the river. Such an unattractive area was thought ideal first to store gunpowder and later for housing Washington, D.C.’s indigent, sick, and criminal populations. A southeastern spot along the river bank on Government Reservation No. 13 was chosen for an Army and Navy Magazine Outpost. Within a few blocks of Congressional Cemetery, there were once at least three other cemeteries: Ebenezer Cemetery, Beckett Cemetery, and the Potter’s Field at Washington Asylum. While the human remains from Ebenezer and Beckett were disinterred and placed in other cemeteries, it is unclear what happened to many of the remains once buried at the Asylum.

1861 map, Reconnaissance of “Anacostia” above Wash. Navy Yd. From Library of Congress.

In 1846, Washington Asylum was established on Reservation 13. According to Webster’s Dictionary, the “somewhat old-fashioned” definition of an asylum is “an institution providing care and protection to needy individuals (such as the infirm or destitute) and especially the mentally ill.” Initially, the asylum included a hospital, a poorhouse, and a workhouse. The terms almshouse and poorhouse were used interchangeably and refer to an institution where paupers were maintained with public funds or by a charitable organization. Meanwhile, petty offenders were sent to work off their debts and offenses at workhouses. There, their labor was used both on site and offsite by the government. Later a smallpox hospital was added in 1853 and the District’s jail was moved there in 1872. With the expansion of the Navy Yard in 1886, the land once used by the Army and Navy could now be used by the Asylum. One of the magazines on site was converted into a Female Workhouse and another was used to house 26 elderly Black men. The Old Fire Engine House was used as a “Dead-House” to store bodies prior to burial.

1887 map of Washington, DC. Courtesy of DC Library.

In the late 1800s, only a few states had “anatomy acts or bone bills,” laws that allowed medical schools to access unclaimed bodies— often those of people who died in workhouses, hospitals or other institutions whose loved ones couldn’t afford to bury them elsewhere. However, the District of Columbia had no such law, so medical schools relied on Resurrection Men, or Body Snatchers, to procure the cadavers. Body Snatchers made money by illegally sneaking into cemeteries at night, stealing bodies from fresh graves, and selling them to anatomy professors at medical colleges. Potter’s Fields were popular targets for Resurrectionists because the pine coffins commonly used were easier to break open, graves were often dug shallower and mourners were less likely to visit and discover a grave disturbed.

It was common for employees of the medical colleges or even the Asylum to make a little extra money assisting body snatchers. When a local body snatcher, Dr. George Christian, was arrested in 1873, his confiscated diary detailed business arrangements with doctors at the Asylum. This included Dr. Schlimer, a physician at the Almshouse, as well as a janitor named Cato. Both regularly went out “resurrecting” with him at various D.C. cemeteries and routinely disinterred bodies from the potter’s field. Samuel Banks, a janitor at the medical college of Georgetown University, was arrested in January 1894 while robbing graves in the Potter’s Field. Banks and two other men were spotted by the jail’s night guard carrying heavy bags out of the Potter’s Field and loading them into a waiting wagon. His companions absconded with three bodies.

Georgetown Medical College — The Sunday Herald, February 22, 1891.

This irreverent sentiment towards these places of rest was omnipresent. According to the Morning Advertiser in 1893, the medical colleges and resurrectionists referred to the Potter’s Field as “Scientific Ground.” In the same article, the author states that “there were 506 dead buried in the Potter’s Field last year. During the last twenty-five years an average of 400 dead has been buried there per year. There should to-day be 10,000 tombs in Potter’s Field. There are fewer than 400 there…There are probably not a dozen adult bodies in the Potter’s Field to-day.” According to a 1949 article in the Evening Star, when excavations began at Reservation 13, very little could be found of those buried there. Presumably due to body snatching.

“We stood at last amongst the graves of the Almshouse dead—those who have escaped the dissecting knife. Scattered about with little stones and mounds here and there, under the occasional sullen green of cedars, a dead-cart and a spade sticking up as symbols, and the neglected river, deserted as the Styx, plashing against the low banks, we felt the sobering melancholy of the spot and made the prayer of ‘Give me neither poverty nor riches I’”

— George Townsend after an 1871 visit

Potter’s Field

The term “potter’s field” is of Biblical origin and refers to a field purchased after the suicide of Judas Iscariot with the silver coins paid to him for his identification of Jesus. The field previously used by potters to collect red clay to make ceramics was then used for the burial of strangers, criminals, and the poor.

Graves were mostly unmarked but arranged in rows so they could be located easily if family or friends came looking for someone. In Bury Me Deep: Burial Places Past and Present In and Nearby Washington, D.C., Paul E. Slubby, Sr. describes “bodies sometimes la[id] four deep with little earth on top, and caskets and human bones were often exposed. Graves, many marked by a stone at the head, were arranged in long rows. Some remains were buried in barrels. Caskets often were so near the surface that rain sometimes washed away the earth around them ….” The Morning Advertiser opined about the Asylum’s Potter’s field, reporting:

“Its location is a beautiful one. The Field itself is bleak and dreary, with its unkept mounds, monumentless, and at this time of year overrun with withered vegetation. It lies to the east and between the United States Jail and the pesthouse of the District. It is on a knoll that overlooks the east branch of the Anacostia River, and the view is a picture. Even now, with the Anacostia a frozen plain and the trees on its bank capped with snow, the picture must stir an artist’s soul. The scene is too beautiful for such hideous desecration.”

—Morning Advertiser, 1893

According to the Washington Post in 1895, “A herd of some fifteen or more cows have full and free access to food and tramp over the graves, leaving foot-prints and other marks.” A similar scene was described in August 1890 when a family came to have a body disinterred so they could see if it was their missing loved one: “At one end of the cemetery a cow was nipping grass from the green graves, while at the other end an old hog was doing its best to get through the fence. On the marshes, only a few hundred feet away, several sportsmen were in skiffs killing reed birds and enjoying the sport, while a stricken family was awaiting the result of the work to be performed…”

More animals made the potter’s field home. The author of the 1895 article in the Washington Post also states: “I noticed a large number of graves which lacked from one to two feet of being fill with earth. I inquired at the cause of the deep depression and was informed that said graves were filled during the winter months when the ground was frozen and covered with snow. When the warm spring weather came the soil settled, leaving them in their present condition…Into these half filled graves huge rats from the hospital, and snakes from the branch, where they are numerous, crawls up and find a way to get down to the coffins.”

The Smallpox Burial Ground

At least two of the five burial sites on Asylum grounds were used for smallpox victims. Initially, smallpox graves from the 1830s were removed from the old Washington Infirmary grounds in the heart of the city and reinterred east of 19th street, between D & E streets, SE. It appears this site was also used during a smallpox epidemic in 1852. A designated smallpox hospital was added to the grounds in 1853. A site around 20th & B street, SE, was used for interments during the 1872-73 smallpox epidemic. A 1904 article in the Washington Times describes a burying ground for those who died of contagious diseases as “down along the river bank where the ground is low and swampy. There is no record kept of these lonely graves and there is no way of securing the privilege of exhuming bodies. The very spot where they are buried is being slowly filled in by the dirt and trash that accumulates there and the principal object desired is that the place become covered up and lost to sight.”

Body Snatching

In the late 1800s, only a few states had “anatomy acts or bone bills,” laws that allowed medical schools to access unclaimed bodies— often those of people who died in workhouses, hospitals or other institutions whose loved ones couldn’t afford to bury them elsewhere. However, the District of Columbia had no such law, so medical schools relied on Resurrection Men, or Body Snatchers, to procure the cadavers. Body Snatchers made money by illegally sneaking into cemeteries at night, stealing bodies from fresh graves, and selling them to anatomy professors at medical colleges. Potter’s Fields were popular targets for Resurrectionists because the pine coffins commonly used were easier to break open, graves were often dug shallower and mourners were less likely to visit and discover a grave disturbed.

It was common for employees of the medical colleges or even the Asylum to make a little extra money assisting body snatchers. When a local body snatcher, Dr. George Christian, was arrested in 1873, his confiscated diary detailed business arrangements with doctors at the Asylum. This included Dr. Schlimer, a physician at the Almshouse, as well as a janitor named Cato. Both regularly went out “resurrecting” with him at various D.C. cemeteries and routinely disinterred bodies from the potter’s field. Samuel Banks, a janitor at the medical college of Georgetown University, was arrested in January 1894 while robbing graves in the Potter’s Field. Banks and two other men were spotted by the jail’s night guard carrying heavy bags out of the Potter’s Field and loading them into a waiting wagon. His companions absconded with three bodies.

This irreverent sentiment towards these places of rest was omnipresent. According to the Morning Advertiser in 1893, the medical colleges and resurrectionists referred to the Potter’s Field as “Scientific Ground.” In the same article, the author states that “there were 506 dead buried in the Potter’s Field last year. During the last twenty-five years an average of 400 dead has been buried there per year. There should to-day be 10,000 tombs in Potter’s Field. There are fewer than 400 there…There are probably not a dozen adult bodies in the Potter’s Field to-day.” According to a 1949 article in the Evening Star, when excavations began at Reservation 13, very little could be found of those buried there, presumably due to body snatching.

Lowering a Pauper Into His Final Resting Place in Washington’s Potter’s Field With Aid of Convict LaborersWashington Times, September 25, 1904.

After Congress passed an Anatomy Act in 1902, the number of burials in the Potter’s Field decreased. When a death occurred in a public institution such as an almshouse or prison, the Anatomical Board of the District of Columbia was notified. As stated by Slubby in Bury Me Deep, “If the deceased has requested that after their demise they be buried or cremated, or within a twenty-four hour period a relative of the deceased either claimed the body or requested in writing that the burial be made at public expense, then the Board was not authorized to receive the body in question.” Otherwise, the board evenly distributed unclaimed bodies between the District’s medical schools as well as a few other approved institutions. This meant that between 1902 and 1913, the potter’s field was primarily used for those who requested their bodies not be given to science and were buried at public expense or for those unidentified. If someone couldn’t afford to bury a loved one, they would contact the office of the permit clerk of the health department who would send the dead wagon. “Human nature is such that no one who can possibly help it ever applies to someone else to bury his dead. It is a duty that is regarded as sacred,” described the Evening Star in 1912. Burials finally ended at Reservation 13 in 1913 and moved to a potter’s field in Blue Plains. The location of the Anatomical Board Cemetery remains unknown.

“Potter’s field presents a striking contrast to the old Congressional cemetery that borders it. In the latter there are handsome tombstones and monuments. Stately old trees fling their shadows over the resting place of an honored dead. The graves carefully tended; close-cropped, velvety grass grows above them, and flowers and shrubs border the pathways between. Throughout the entire cemetery there is a suggestion of peace and restfulness.

“But the pauper cemetery is far different. it lies amid scenes of suffering and sickness and the punishment of crime. At the foot of the hill on which it is located are the muddy waters of the Eastern branch, and still nearer are the tracks of the main line of a railroad.”

–The Washington Times, 1904

Congressional Cemetery’s interred residents are privileged to have their names and graves recorded. Their stories are preserved, retold, maintaining their sacred purpose. But what about all the communities and people not memorialized in Congressional Cemetery? A name on a gravestone is story waiting to be discovered. When there is no grave marker or a cemetery disappears, those stories are lost. They are grouped together, their individuality and unique experiences robbed in death. It has been said that you can tell a lot about a society by the way it treats its dead. And while American society has not always provided equality to citizens in life or death, people today can give some dignity back to the dead by endeavoring to keep the memory of their experiences alive.

Works Cited

Baker, Frank. Washington Medical Annals: A History of Body Snatching. 1916.

Capital Hill East, Chapter II, January 2014, EHT Traceries.

Evening Star. “Around the District Jail.” March 21, 1903.

Evening Star. “In Potter’s Field, Sleep the City’s Unknown and Pauper Dead.” December 1, 1912.

Evening Star. “The Fate of C.C. Andrews.” August 23, 1890.

Evening Star. “The Resurrection Business.” December 15, 1873.

Evening Star. “Washington Asylum.” June 28, 1884.

Morning Advertiser. “Ghouls at their Work!” January 16, 1893. From US National Library of Medicine.

Sluby, Paul, Sr. Bury Me Deep: Burial Places Past and Present in and nearby Washington, D.C. Temple Hills, MD: Sluby, 2009.

Townsend, George Alfred. Washington Outside and Inside a Picture and a Narrative. Chicago: James Belts and Company, 1871. 

Washington Post. “Dig Their Own Graves.” November 21, 1890.

Washington Post. “Grave Robbing is Common.” January 22, 1894.

Washington Post. “In the Potter’s Field.” July 7, 1895.

Washington Times. “Washington’s Potter’s Field and Its Stories of Pathos.” September 25, 1904.

Funerary Art & Symbolism
23 min read | Categories: Blog, History |

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