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.
How Many Caskets?
Randy Rogers, Executive Director of the Green Lawn Cemetery Association, expects the unexpected.
“I tend to go with whatever higher number I hear,” said Rogers. “Then I’ll be ready.”
The estimate he’s been given as of late May is somewhere between 900 and 1,100. So Rogers expects the larger number, preparing to receive the remains of as many as 1,100 people exhumed out of the former North Graveyard site over the last few months. More than a thousand long-dead Columbusites in need of a new final address.
The official number of exhumed bodies will probably not be known with any certainty for more than a year. By mid-May, archeologists for Lawhon & Associates had finished the primary excavations of graves under the North Market parking lot ahead of the Merchant Building’s imminent construction. The remains recovered from those graves are being transported to the University of Cincinnati, where they will be examined by Dr. Cheryl Johnston.
“This analysis will continue for the next few years,” said Justin Zink, the lead archeologist on the project, in an email. “The next sequence in the work plan is the remainder of the sitework and deep excavation. In order to maintain the consistency and integrity of the grave remediations to date, Lawhon will continue to monitor and observe all utility and excavation work as we proceed with the balance of this work for the project.”
The exact number of exhumed individuals is first and foremost a scientific question—but it is also a logistical question for those tasked with reburying the dead.
“The question that I have is logistics, if we’ve got 1,000,” said Franklin County Clerk of Courts Maryellen O’Shaughnessy. “What I’ve asked for is the ability to see the size and scope of what we’re talking about so that I know.”
Coming from a long line of Columbus politicians and funeral directors, O’Shaughnessy is preparing to organize the caskets, vaults and other materials needed to rebury the North Graveyard bones—just as she did in 2001, the last time significant archeological excavations were conducted at the former North Graveyard site.
“Last time, I got everything donated,” said O’Shaughnessy. “I am not charging for my services. I am gratis. Whatever else I can get done I will try to get done on behalf of the historical perspective here. But I need to know what to ask for and I don’t know yet. How many caskets? How many vaults?”
“How many” may be an unanswered question for a while, but those precious few answers that have come out of the soil under the North Market parking lot keep changing the calculus, even for those who, like Rogers, try to expect the unexpected.
“I was always on the high side in terms of my estimate, so not as much of a change for what I was expecting,” said Rogers. “But still it was higher than even I anticipated.”
The Wolf’s Ridge
As the story goes, Columbus once belonged to the wolves.
Before the city was founded, the settlers of Franklinton named the land that would one day host Columbus “the wolf’s ridge” after the packs of predators that roamed unchecked on the eastern side of the Scioto. The settlers did not go there.
Some years ago, the Green Lawn Cemetery Association received a generous donation for a giant wolf in Section R, in the cemetery plot reserved for those exhumed from the North Graveyard after their previous resting place was condemned and redeveloped for the insatiable railroads. Paid for by the county back in the 1880s, Section R was already the final address for those who were exhumed from the streets surrounding North Market in 2001 when the 32,000 pound wolf monument to the unnamed dead finally arrived.
“Those wolves did not have individual names, they were anonymous,” said Rogers in February. “Our ancestors pushed them off of that property and in turn, after they passed and were buried, they also became anonymous and without individual identity and then were moved off of that property to Green Lawn.”
And so back in February, Rogers had a plan for the new remains that would be exhumed by Lawhon & Associates in the spring. Those unknown dead would eventually join their contemporaries—possibly even their friends and family—in Section R, guarded by a lone wolf as nameless as they were.
That was the plan in February, anyway. But sometimes plans have to change.
“[Rogers] has identified a whole different area…because this is too big for [Section R],” said O’Shaughnessy in May. “There’s just not that much space from what I understand.”
“We’re gonna put everyone in a new area for the North Market,” said Rogers. “We identified that area and got it measured off and ready to go.”
In 2001, when Ryan Weller and his team of archeologists excavated remains out of the North Graveyard site, it was a surprise that bones were being exhumed from a city sewer project at all. Everyone assumed that most, if not all, of the North Graveyard remains had been moved to Green Lawn by the 1880s. Anecdotal stories would circulate from time to time about skulls and femurs being discovered during construction projects, but it always had the cadence of an urban legend.
“You get all sorts of stories,” said Zink in January, before the digging started. “You know, Columbus Underground’s had plenty of articles on the North Market cemetery, it always seems to come around Halloween time as well. Always comes with the territory.”
If the reality of the situation—that there were still quite a few people buried under North Market—was the surprise in 2001, the surprise now is the scale and scope of the dead left behind. The North Graveyard site is, “far bigger than anyone originally understood,” according to Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin, who visited the excavation in April.
One thing to keep in mind when considering the size and scope of the North Graveyard is something called the MNI—the minimum number of individuals.
“That literally means how many individual people were found, but that’s not necessarily fully articulated skeletons,” said Krista Horrocks, an archeologist for the Ohio Historical Connection, in February. “We might find what appears to be one burial shaft, but then when you remove all the human remains and you do osteological analysis, you realize that you actually have kind of a jumble or multiple sets of human remains in that one burial.”
So when considering Rogers’ estimate of 900 to 1,100 individuals, one must remember that an “individual” could be represented by as little as a single bone, or as much as an entire skeleton.
“That’s one thing that keeps the numbers sort of up in the air, is they’re still sorting through the pieces to determine who they actually have and what goes with who and how much of each person is represented,” said Rogers.
But the dead—however many there might be in the end—have got to be buried, and so the buriers roll with the punches.
“We are faced with what we’ve got. My thing is to figure the logistics of this out,” said O’Shaughnessy. “Do we do all this at once or do we do it in bits and pieces? In other words, you know, two caskets at a time, and have a service? Three caskets?…I just don’t know how many, I don’t know the size and scope here.”
Gone To Glory
O’Shaughnessy talks the way one might expect from a Midwestern, Irish-American, lifelong politician—straightforward, clipped sentences, no nonsense. Attempts to tie the North Graveyard to the recent discourse about Columbus’ elusive identity elicited only a scoff.
“We’re a capital city,” said O’Shaughnessy. “That’s why we were created. We’re a capital city. That’s our identity. I mean, get over it.”
In 2001, O’Shaughnessy was on city council when she got the call—they’d found human remains during a routine sewer excavation at North Market, and there was “keen interest.”
“Which freaked me out as a funeral director,” said O’Shaughnessy. “Because people have no compunction…If they knew they were grave robbers they probably didn’t even think of it. So we got a cop on the lot to make sure, 24 hours, until the bodies were exhumed.”
It took years for the remains to be fully exhumed, analyzed, and readied for reburial.
“I had to do a little bit of pressing on that,” said O’Shaughnessy. “Because I believed that these people needed to be buried rather than sitting on a shelf at the Ohio Historical Society.”
In 2005, the remains excavated by Ryan Weller and his archeologists were finally reburied at Green Lawn. As funeral director, O’Shaughnessy supervised the burial of two caskets filled with individually packaged remains. Rev. Tim Ahrens of the First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, read a eulogy broad enough, perhaps, to encompass all the possible beliefs of the unknown dead.
O’Shaughnessy still remembers how much funereal material was donated by the community back in 2001, and she remains confident that the community will be similarly engaged this time around. According to O’Shaughnessy, council president Hardin has already volunteered to be a pallbearer for the reburials.
“I’m happy to volunteer in order to appropriately honor these people, even if we don’t know their names and stories,” said Hardin in an email. “I cannot say at this time what exactly that ceremony would look like [right] now.”
O’Shaughnessy acknowledged that much of this rigmarole about funeral plots and caskets and the multiple number of individuals is ultimately not really for the dead—“These people have gone to Glory; a lot of this is for the living.”
“People want to do this. I’m gonna get a bunch of stuff donated. There’s no doubt in my mind I will get stuff donated,” said O’Shaughnessy. “But eventually these people will be put to rest and I think that will alleviate a lot of the sadness and tension that a lot of people are feeling about this gruesome discovery. You know. People are really upset about it. I mean, you’ve read the comments. And we need to do the right thing by these folks and make sure they get where they should have gone, what, 200 years ago? So we’re gonna do that, just like we did before. It’s just the size and scale of this is much bigger than we expected.”
Better Call The Archeologists
“Reverence.”
That was Hardin’s answer when asked what he felt during his April visit to the North Graveyard site.
“We all know the Market and the area as busy places,” said Hardin in an email. “But for a couple of months that small piece of land was separated off to ensure this process could occur undisturbed. I was also grateful that all parties involved were showing our ancestors in Columbus the respect they deserved during this process.”
“Actually, I had somebody complain to me,” said O’Shaughnessy. “He said, ‘How come nobody can watch what’s going on?’ I’m like…we’re trying to be a little private about this. I mean, would you like to have your body exhumed in front of God and the world? Or would you like a little privacy?”
But how much privacy—or respect—can really be afforded to a person when an archeologist opens their grave after 200 years in the ground?
“The fact that they’re being analyzed and picked apart and everything?” said O’Shaughnessy. “Well I guess that happens to our bodies as we age and we end up kind of sick and they’re picking at you until you hit the grave. I think it’s important historically for them to do the analysis, absolutely. And no, I don’t believe that we should have left them there. Yes, this should have been done some time ago, but we’re gonna make sure they end up over at Green Lawn and then they can be properly memorialized.”
According to Hardin, several ideas have been discussed by City Council about ways to commemorate the North Graveyard after the Merchant Building has gone up, but no final decisions have been made. Rogers, meanwhile, has some ideas for the newly designated resting place in Green Lawn Cemetery.
“We do have a tentative design,” said Rogers, though he acknowledged it’s still early in the process to discuss it. He envisions the four corners of the lot marked with cairns of stone, and a larger, central cairn bearing a design representing early Columbus at the time when the North Graveyard was still in operation.
Oddly enough, North Graveyard actually predates Columbus. The city was incorporated in 1816, three years after John Kerr donated the first tract of land to become a public cemetery. For as long as there’s been a Columbus, there have been graves out there. The North Graveyard might be the only thing about Columbus that hasn’t changed since the city’s founding, and it is coming to an end.
Except, “We’re not entirely sure it is the end, are we?” said O’Shaughnessy.
“You know,” said Rogers back in February. “I don’t know that that story ever actually ends, because I think most archaeologists will tell you that no matter how careful you are, you never recover everything. So you know, there will be futures where there’s a repair project or something and, ‘Ope, we better call the archeologists.’”
As of right now, however, Rogers is not in a hurry.
“I think at this point, mostly we just want them to take their time and do as much DNA work and as much pathology as they can possibly do on what they’ve recovered, because that’s such a treasure trove of our community history,” said Rogers. “Let’s get as much of that as we can before we put it back in the ground.”