Thirteen years ago, Toby Weiss of BeltSTL and I looked fruitlessly for the location of the reinterment of the St. Louis Potters’ Field, moved to Mount Lebanon Cemetery in 1950. This time, I came up with the ingenious idea of simply calling the cemetery on the phone, now owned by Alexander-White-Millen Funeral Home, and a helpful staff member gave us directions right to it.
The potters’ field, which gets its name from the original being a location where ceramicists had collected clay for their craft, leaving holes later filled by the indigent, was located on the site of today’s Hampton Gardens apartment complex. There were a fair number of articles about the old potters’ field, and it seems like it was relatively unkempt, with around 12,000 burials by the 1920s. There was no giant scandal that closed it, but rather a desire by neighbors and the City to simply remove it and build more housing, thus bringing an end to what had been a landmark for over a hundred years.
Today, a memorial in the grass marks the location of where the bones of the deceased, long forgotten, are now interred.
My great-grandfather is there. We only discovered this about 10 yrs ago. Ironically, I grew up just a mile away on Adie Road. We passed by here everyday, not knowing.
To be clear, potter’s field refers to a burial ground for people that are unidentified or unable to pay for burials. Most major cities had or have them, like Hart Island in New York. The name originally comes from the field purchased by the Pharisees with the money returned to they by Judas in Matthew chapter 27. The area was dug up for clay by potters leaving it unsuitable for farming.
Kinda cool that the Potter’s Field in STL was also a clay mine.