I was leafing through the late Earl Rebman's outline of history along the Conestoga River from 1710-1973 recently when a black-and-white photo of a line of trees caught my eye.

I know those trees, I thought. They're at the corner of South Broad and Dauphin streets, at the rear of the campus of Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology, less than a half-mile from my home.

I always wondered why there were two lines of mature trees in the middle of the otherwise vacant lot. Now I know.

It's a forgotten corner of the once-vast potter's field in which the county's poor, old, forgotten, insane, infirm, widowed and executed were buried. Most came from the county poor house and hospital nearby, which began operating in 1799.

Rebman, former owner of the well-known holiday variety stores and a lifelong conservationist, was moved by the ragged, abandoned corner, where more than 300 graves dug between 1902 and 1947 were marked only with numbers.

"In certain graves are buried Mother and child together," he wrote. "Certain graves contain three persons buried on top of each other. There are no monuments to those buried here, yet at one time in their life they may have been wealthy.

"There are no flowers or flags on graves of some buried here and yet some fought for their country...just forgotten souls known to God alone.

"In one of the graves buried together forever — a man and his devoted companion, his dog."

One of the original potter's fields was in front of the original almshouse and hospital, one of the county's oldest buildings that still stands off of East King Street beside Conestoga View.

The graves are likely still there, under the lawn, says historian Jack Loose of the Lancaster County Historical Society.

Another potter's field is now the tree-lined main entrance to Thaddeus Stevens. The college was built in 1905.

"Stevens Tech wouldn't be able to build on top of it now but you used to be able to do almost anything," says Jim McMullin, an 80-year-old Manheim Township resident and president of Grave Concern, a nonprofit group that promotes preservation of historic burial places around Lancaster County.

Many downtown churches once had cemeteries beside them, including unmarked mass graves set aside for the unclaimed and forgotten. As churches added parking or parish houses, most of the graves were moved to other cemeteries.

McMullin once researched who was buried in the potter's fields. He found people killed by trains and drowning victims, body parts, derelicts, newborns, a number of Civil War veterans and the two murderers executed by hanging for a grisly double murder in Manheim in 1859.

No one came forward for any of these people and they were placed in the ground without expense or a pause to remember.

McMullin also walked the corner of Broad and Dauphin. He remembers grave 58, the final resting place for Olga Smith, died 1919. Another grave had a stone, marking the spot of "Just Plain Bill."

The potter's field occupants have encountered greater indignities than just being forgotten.

A neighbor of mine tells of a relative who, while a medical student in Philadelphia 80 years ago or so, was responsible for preparing his own human specimens.

The future doctor used bodies dug up from potter's field and boiled the bones in a large three-legged iron pot still in the family's possession.

I visited the potter's field remnant behind Stevens College last week. Most of the 4-inch-square numbered concrete markers at the base of the Norway maple trees are gone. Some appear to have been swallowed by tree roots. One, grave marker, number 55, appears to have recently been sliced in two by a lawn mower.

While a group of kids with bikes eyed me quizzically, I located about eight markers. I wondered who the people below had been.

"We are aware of it," Betty Tompos, Stevens College's vice president of finance and administration, told me when I asked about the piece of potter's field still intact.

"We do not touch that area. We do mow it and if a tree branch falls we remove it. It's sacred ground."

In August, McMullin intends to ask the Grave Concern board about placing a simple bronze marker on the site informing people what is there.

"They were people," he says.


Staff writer Ad Crable can be reached at acrable@LNPnews.com or 481-6029. The Voices column appears Mondays. blog comments powered by Disqus