Markers to honor the dead past at Lincoln Park

Many Chicagoans know that Lincoln Park was once a cemetery. Most, probably, don't know that it still is.

Pamela Bannos, a senior lecturer at Northwestern University, has explored the transition of the Chicago City Cemetery into today's Lincoln Park and her findings are published, on the Internet, as the "Hidden Truths" project. In today's Chicago Tribune Robert Mitchum reports about the project and, in particular, how today Bannos "will place six historical markers at significant sites around the park, like the Couch Tomb, a huge mausoleum too expensive for the city to relocate, and Potter's Field, the burial ground for the city's poor that now lies beneath the baseball fields along LaSalle Drive."

The Couch Tomb is not the only gravesite that wasn't moved. Whether because of incomplete record keeping or because of the loss of records in that unfortunate incident with Mrs. O'Leary's cow (or Pegleg Sullivan, depending on who you talk to these days), it appears that many bodies were not relocated. One page on Ms. Bannos' site documents where bodies have turned up unexpectedly. (Run your mouse over the yellow dots on the linked map to see details.) The Tribune article says that Bannos' work shows that the remains of as many as 12,000 Chicagoans may still lie beneath today's park.

It is not known how many of them still vote.
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Map & photo combination obtained from the Hidden Truths website.