The Potter's Field

The Sticky Bottle Team tries to take in the environment and its surroundings on rides.  There is much more to see on a bike, things you miss in a car.  We noticed on a recent ride the number of old cemeteries we passed.  We started to think about these ancient graveyards.  Often times these old cemeteries are family plots of one or more related families.  In previous centuries locals in small hamlets selected a plot of land near town for the purpose of burying their dead.  This was an era prior to the large corporate or church-sponsored cemetery we are familiar with today.  

Today the funeral business is a big business.  In years past it was simpler; dedicate a space for friends and loved ones, keep it scared.  This meant digging a hole as best you could, creating some type of burial vault for the casket and trying to keep out the animals.  Established cemeteries could afford better practices and most often closed in the graveyard with walls.  The walls were necessary to keep out digging and rooting animals, specifically pigs.  With better machinery and the increased and improved construction of water-proof burial vaults following the Civil War, the need for “pig walls” diminished.  Such walls in place today can help date the formation of a cemetery.    

Old cemeteries disappear each year.  It is possible to have a cemetery condemned by court order for the purpose of construction and building.  Poor upkeep or the lack of modern burials can be reasons for condemnation.  Such a condemnation occurred in Chicago in 2011.  A 161-year old cemetery was condemned for the construction of a runway extension at O’Hare Airport.  Other cemeteries are easily condemned being that they were at one time, pauper’s cemeteries colloquially known as “Potter’s Fields.”  These facilities were church-created grave sites for the poor, indigent and unknown members of society.    

The record keeping and history of such cemeteries is inadequate and thus easy to condemn.  Creeping suburban sprawl claims thousands of small plot cemeteries each year.  State and Federal laws prohibit the “willful and malicious damage, whether by the owner or by others” to grave sites and so once a site is condemned all remains must be relocated.

In the last few years scientist and archeologists have dedicated studies to the old cemetery.  These old plots provide perfect laboratories for the study of plants and soils as they have been undisturbed for decades and possibly centuries.  A 200-year old cemetery will have 200-year old soils.  Such soils will tell scientists much more than soils from developed neighborhoods, farms and commercial sites.  Cemeteries do not give up their dead but they do have stories to tell.  Visit our website at www.stickybottleteam.teampages.com.