Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vogele bam here. Have you ever wondered how cities
Speaker 1: deal with the bodies of the unclaimed dead, including the homeless, unidentified,
Speaker 1: and unknown. Don't feel weird for being a little bit morbid.
Speaker 1: Cities have always had a protocol for making sure everyone,
Speaker 1: even the nameless and faceless, has an eternal resting place.
Speaker 1: In Biblical times and before refrigeration or embalming, the dead
Speaker 1: had to be buried as quickly as possible. All bodies
Speaker 1: went into the same burial ground. We spoke with cemetery
Speaker 1: writer Lauren Rhodes. She said, if you were part of
Speaker 1: the community, you were buried together. If you were a
Speaker 1: stranger or traveling through or whatever, you got the outskirts
Speaker 1: of the burial ground. That practice continued into medieval Europe.
Speaker 1: American cemeteries started taking shape in the sixteen twenties in
Speaker 1: New Amsterdam, the Dutch settlement that eventually became New York City.
Speaker 1: Burial grounds at churches there designated separate land for strangers.
Speaker 1: Rhodes says these New Amsterdam cemeteries are the first accounts
Speaker 1: she was found in the United States of potter's fields
Speaker 1: burial places for people who remained unclaimed, usually because they
Speaker 1: were unidentified or didn't have enough money for a cemetery plot.
Speaker 1: She said they were drawing a distinction between the people
Speaker 1: that belonged and the people that didn't belong. In a
Speaker 1: potter's field, the city paid for the burial of the dead.
Speaker 1: The term originates from the Gospel of Matthew, part of
Speaker 1: the New Testament, when the high priests of Jerusalem paid
Speaker 1: for a burial place for strangers and the poor. Rhodes said,
Speaker 1: when the city buries you, they bury you at the
Speaker 1: least possible expense, And so the grave isn't all that deep,
Speaker 1: the coffin's not very nice. If there's a marker, it's
Speaker 1: the cheapest possible marker. So anybody who could afford it
Speaker 1: would choose to be buried in a cemetery rather than
Speaker 1: the potter's field. Every city had a potter's field, but
Speaker 1: many details and laws rely on the given place. In
Speaker 1: some cities, the wait until a person was buried could
Speaker 1: depend on something as mundane as the cabinet maker's schedule.
Speaker 1: Creation wasn't popular, so everyone was buried. The cabinet makers
Speaker 1: also worked as coffin makers, so burial been as soon
Speaker 1: as they could finish a coffin. In other places, cities
Speaker 1: skipped the coffin and instead wrapped bodies in a sheet,
Speaker 1: though that changed around the mid nineteenth century. Most cities
Speaker 1: switched from burying their dead in Potter's fields to cremating
Speaker 1: bodies by the mid twentieth century. Today, almost every city
Speaker 1: in the US cremates unclaimed people, and Potter's field burials
Speaker 1: have fallen out of use. As Rhodes said, it's a
Speaker 1: whole lot cheaper to put an urn on a shelf
Speaker 1: than it is to bury a body. However, New York
Speaker 1: City is rare to this day. The city fairies unclaimed
Speaker 1: bodies in pine coffins to Heart Island, an uninhabited island
Speaker 1: with a Potter's Field of more than one million people.
Speaker 1: Cities have deals with local funeral homes to handle unclaimed
Speaker 1: bodies after cremation. Every city has different rules for how
Speaker 1: it handles remains. Los Angeles County, for example, stores them
Speaker 1: for three years and buries them in a mass grave
Speaker 1: if they go unclaimed. Finding people in Potter's fields can
Speaker 1: get tricky. Cities don't usually pay for markers, so Potter's
Speaker 1: Fields are mostly filled with unmarked graves. If you think
Speaker 1: you know someone who might be buried by the city,
Speaker 1: Roads advises you go to the city and request the
Speaker 1: death certificate, which should say where the body ended up
Speaker 1: if the city handled it. Some of those records are online.
Speaker 1: Of course, you first have to know where a person died,
Speaker 1: and if a person dies without identification, that can easily
Speaker 1: create a situation where a city ends up with a
Speaker 1: Jane or John Doe. Rhodes said, it's really easy to
Speaker 1: slip through the cracks if you're elderly, and if you
Speaker 1: have a heart attack on the street or something like that,
Speaker 1: or if somebody robs your body and you've never been
Speaker 1: arrested or fingerprinted, it's really hard for them to know
Speaker 1: who you are unless somebody can recognize you. At the
Speaker 1: Potter's Field in New York City, the Heart Island Project
Speaker 1: strives to create a map and listing of the sixty
Speaker 1: seven thousand and four people who have been buried there since.
Speaker 1: Not Unlike other cemeteries across the country, Potter's fields also
Speaker 1: speak to the shaky ground that cemeteries are built on. Literally,
Speaker 1: many Potter's Fields have been moved or have had other
Speaker 1: structures built on top of them in the name of progress.
Speaker 1: Even cemeteries full of markers have met this fate. In
Speaker 1: New Orleans, two of the Mercedes ben Superdomes parking garage
Speaker 1: sit atop an old Protestant cemetery. The remains removed and relocated.
Speaker 1: Graves and remains were also moved in Fremont, California, in
Speaker 1: the San Francisco Bay Area for a new housing tract.
Speaker 1: Rhodes said, we think of cemeteries as permanent and monumental,
Speaker 1: and they're not. They're really fragile, and all it takes
Speaker 1: as an earthquaker, hurricane, and the monuments are all damaged
Speaker 1: and they're really expensive to repair. It's easier to take
Speaker 1: them down than to fix them, and that history is
Speaker 1: just lost. Today's episode was written by A. Dina Solomon
Speaker 1: and produced by Tristan McNeil. Rhod's latest book, By the Way,
Speaker 1: is one and Cemeteries to See Before You Die. Check
Speaker 1: it out, and for more on this and lots of
Speaker 1: others slightly morbid but entirely interesting topics, visit our home
Speaker 1: planet how Stuff Works dot Com.