photo by: Rochelle Valverde/Journal-World

One of a handful of gravestones present in the potter's field at Oak Hill Cemetery is pictured on Oct. 8, 2022. The headstone, for Moses Gray, is made out of cement and inset with seashells.

As old city burial records have been reviewed, the list of names has gotten longer.

And though no grand monuments mark the sloping lawn of the potter’s field at Oak Hill Cemetery, one project holds that the hundreds of people buried there are no less worthy of remembrance.

Though publicly accessible records list fewer than 400 people, researchers involved in the Oak Hill Cemetery Potter’s Field Community Remembrance Project have been reviewing the scattered and sometimes incomplete burial records, and now believe as many as 1,000 people could be buried on the site.

Despite this, anyone who comes upon the seemingly bare corner of the cemetery would not know all of the people who lie under their feet. In contrast to the orderly rows of headstones in the rest of the 60-acre cemetery, only a few sporadically placed, modest headstones are present here — one of which had fallen over long ago and was only recently unearthed. A footbridge that once led visitors over a creek to the burial site is gone, and the creek has been filled in with displaced dirt from graves, leaving only sodden ground when it rains.

Those involved with the project envision something more. Not just the identification of the graves and names of those who, due to lack of money or tragic circumstances, came to be buried in the potter’s field, but also an acknowledgement that they lived.

Researchers with the University of Kansas and the Watkins Museum of History have partnered on the remembrance project, which recently won two grants totaling $23,000 from Humanities Kansas and the Douglas County Heritage Conservation Council to support its efforts.

“For more than a century, a lot of them have been totally unknown and nameless out there,” said Kerry Altenbernd, a member of the former group Friends of Oak Hill Cemetery who has been involved with the project.

The potter’s field is located in the northeast corner of the 60-acre Oak Hill Cemetery and was used to bury those who died unclaimed, unidentified or too poor to afford a typical burial. As the Journal-World reported last year, the project began when geophysical surveyors with KU came together with the nonprofit community group Friends of Oak Hill Cemetery, which has since become a standing committee under the umbrella of the Watkins Museum, to try to locate the graves in the potter’s field. Project Director Caleb Latas, an archaeologist focused on historical cemetery preservation, is one of those piecing together information — from city interment records, church and other archives, and a city burial chart — that will be used in combination with the survey data to locate and identify the unmarked graves.

“There’s quite a few puzzles,” Latas said, noting that the burial chart is incomplete and some names were unknown at the time of burial. “But for the most part, we will be able to identify the place where everyone is buried.”

Once the graves are identified, the project will ultimately create a searchable database and five informational signs for the potter’s field that will list those buried there. The signs will include QR codes that link to podcasts with more information about the potter’s field and stories about the individuals buried there. The podcasts will be informed by research and family stories of those buried at the site or about the site more generally, which the project team will collect from the public. The public is also invited to share photographs or other documents and materials related to those buried at the site.

Latas said the goal is to provide information and also memorialize those buried — with the hope of potentially having individual markers or another way for visitors to identify individual plots — and to undertake those efforts with the community.

“We’re working to connect those buried there with the community today,” Latas said.

Latas said the interment records themselves already begin to tell a story, providing names, burial dates and in some cases causes of death. Among them: James Ford, who died in 1876 of consumption; Nellie Fugeral, who died in 1880 of whooping cough; and Rebecca Forsyth, who died in 1878 of old age. In some cases, the city’s burial chart is only marked with an X, or states only “unknown man,” “unknown boy,” or “unknown infant.” Latas is still in the process of consulting city record books and church archives to attempt to fill in the blanks and eliminate duplicates, but he estimates that 950 to 1,000 people could be buried on the site.

photo by: contributed

Interment cards show some of the people buried in the potter’s field at Oak Hill Cemetery.

Latas said amid the approximately 400 records reviewed so far, some trends have emerged. He said the overall number of known children buried in the potter’s field has increased to 301 and the number of African-Americans has increased to 144, with both numbers expected to grow as more records are reviewed. As another recent remembrance project brought to wider attention, the potter’s field is also the burial place of three African-American men who were lynched near downtown Lawrence in 1882.

And though there are only a few headstones, Latas said the records also show that those who couldn’t afford a marker for their loved ones’ graves in some cases took other actions. He said city records indicate some paid so that children could be buried together in the same grave with their parents or siblings, or that in some cases records note that family members or friends were the ones to dig the graves. Latas said some of those details may challenge assumptions people have about indigent burials, showing that it doesn’t mean there wasn’t care taken.

“These aspects of memory and care are happening there,” Latas said. “… This idea of keeping the family together, even in a potter’s field.”

For others involved in the remembrance project, there are other messages as well. Watkins Executive Director Steve Nowak said he hopes the project serves as a model for establishing a more complete understanding of a community’s history.

“The famous people or the wealthy people or the people associated with KU, we know about them,” Nowak said. “But our community was shaped by so many more people.”

Blair Schneider, an associate researcher and science outreach manager for the Kansas Geological Survey, helped collect the survey data from the potter’s field and is involved in the long process of interpreting the data to determine the location of graves. Schneider said she hopes the project provides an example of how science can play a role in the community.

“This is a project for me to be able to show other scientists in my field that they can do projects that directly give back to the community with real meaning,” Schneider said. “I think we forget as scientists how to connect back to the people, and we forget where the significance can really lie based on a community’s needs.”

In the end, the hope is that the inequities that many of those buried in the potter’s field endured in life will not persist in death. Instead of anonymity, their graves will be located, their names will be known and their stories will be shared.

“(To show) they are there,” Altenbernd said. “They are no longer anonymous; they are no longer just a bare patch of ground.”

The project will hold its first of multiple events to gather stories and information about the potter’s field and those buried there on Nov. 19 at the Watkins Museum, 1047 Massachusetts St. Further details about that and future events will be posted on the Watkins Museum website, watkinsmuseum.org.

photo by: Rochelle Valverde/Journal-World

One of a handful of gravestones present in the potter’s field at Oak Hill Cemetery is pictured on Oct. 8, 2022. The stone marks the grave of John W. Dolan, who died in 1883 at the age of 35.