The Duwamish Cemetery was a potter's field, a graveyard where King County's indigent dead were buried. In its 36-year history from 1876 to 1912 it had two locations, but the principal site was on the edge of the county poor farm in the Georgetown community, west of today's East Marginal Way S. It was a forgotten, forlorn place, and burial there carried a stigma that was to be avoided at all costs. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer put it in 1911, the cemetery was considered a place for "the suicides and the failures" ("Saddest of All ..."). It closed in 1912 as part of preparation for development of the area, by then annexed into Seattle, as an industrial site. More than 3,200 bodies were exhumed and cremated in a badly handled operation that led to a grand jury investigation the following year, but nothing came of it. Afterward, the ashes of the dead vanished.
The Potter's Field
The term "potter's field" comes from a Biblical reference found in Matthew 27:7 in the New Testament. It referred to a place where potters dug for clay, leaving trenches and holes that could later be modified to serve as a graveyard. The term came into common use in the seventeenth century as the cemetery of last resort for the destitute or the unknown, where decedents would be quietly laid to rest without ceremony in a cheap pine box. If lucky, they might have simple headboards with name and date of death.
In 1873, King County commissioners authorized the creation of a two-acre public cemetery on the county poor farm located south of Seattle, near what later became the community of Georgetown. The first burials took place in 1876, at a spot north of the location where the county hospital was later built on the northwestern corner of S Michigan Street and Corson Avenue S (then known as Charleston Avenue). By 1900, a second gravesite had been long-established on the southern edge of the poor farm, which was located south of the hospital. In 1904, the graves from the first cemetery were moved to this location in response to complaints from the members of the growing Georgetown community, who felt the original burial ground was unpleasantly close to their new (and, as it turned out, temporary) city.
The lay of the land around the potter's field in 1904 was far different than today. The Duwamish River was a serpentine, quiet river that in one place snaked along the back side of the cemetery, which was located southwest of the intersection of Corson Avenue S and East Marginal Way S. The spot was quiet and remote, perhaps intentionally so. "This latter burying place of unfortunates is itself now a large city of the dead," explained The Seattle Times in a 1904 article, which went on to describe the field:
"A long lane leads to the place. It is a quiet lane, traversed only by the deadwagons of undertakers on their occasional trips from the city ... Through the [entrance] the horses are driven into a waste of wild grass, weeds and flowers. The driver finds his way between the graves hidden beneath the tall growth until the scene of the coming burial is reached.
"A casual visitor would hardly suspect this to be a cemetery. Save for one or two crosses created by friends who have found the body of someone they knew here, there is no visible mark of resting place. The lush grass hides everything. Walk through it and one will stumble over headboards. On these penciled inscriptions sometimes tell the names of the dead, and sometimes simply register the body as unknown, giving the date of death" ("No Rest ...").
Mark of Shame
Even for the poor, burial in the potter's field was a mark of shame, and many did whatever they could to avoid it. In 1901, John Evans died at Providence Hospital. The body was removed to the Bonney & Stewart funeral home (later renamed Bonney Watson funeral home). There was no money for a burial, but for two weeks a woman claiming to be his widow refused to let the undertakers remove the body. First, she spun yarns that her husband "had a fortune somewhere" ("Haunts the Morgue"). When that failed to materialize, she said her husband had two rich brothers living in San Francisco, but there was no contact from them either. Despite assurances from the funeral home that the body could be exhumed if a relative or a friend later showed up with the necessary funds -- a common practice in those days -- she was unrelenting. Bonney & Stewart finally took matters into its own hands and buried the body in the potter's field, where it remained until it was disinterred in 1912 along with the cemetery's other graves in preparation for the straightening and dredging of the Duwamish River as part of development for an industrial area in Seattle.
Others took care to avoid such an ignominious end. In 1904, Charles Thompson, age 25, committed suicide in his room at the Silver Bow boarding house on 1st Avenue S. Little information about him could be gleaned from his neighbors and his body lay at Bonney Watson for several days in the hope that someone would come forward to claim it. After three days, a subsequent boarder at the Silver Bow found two notes that Thompson had left under the bed. One was a short, angry goodbye to his enemies (real or perceived), but the second letter contained careful instructions directing the reader to a certificate of deposit as well as cash in the inside pocket of his vest. "I would like to have it used to give me a decent burial so I will not be buried in the potter's field," the instructions concluded ("Man Hounded ..."). The funds were duly turned over to county coroner Charles Hoye.
Others were spared interment in the cemetery by last-minute intervention from their friends. In 1911, "Zither Joe" Reisland of Fairbanks, Alaska -- the nickname came from his skill with the zither, a stringed instrument like a guitar but flat -- was found dead in a lumber pile at the foot of Seattle's University Street with an empty bottle of carbolic acid at his side. At first, it looked like he might end up in the potter's field. However, whenever a derelict body was found in King County there was generally an effort made by the Seattle press to notify the public in hopes of finding someone to claim it. Five days after Reisland was found, two of his friends appeared at Butterworth Funeral Home to confirm his identity. When they learned of his pending destiny they took swift action, as described by The Seattle Times:
"'Just give us an hour and we will see that 'Zither Joe' gets a decent burial; no Alaskan can be buried in a Potter's Field' ... Within less than an hour, the two men returned and laid down the money with which to defray the burial expenses and the cost of a lot at the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery for Joe Reisland" ("Zither Joe ...").
But for all the unknowns buried in the potter's field, there were a few well-knowns. At the top of the list was Thomas Blanck (1870-1895). Blanck was a notorious killer who ranged through the West between British Columbia and California in the early and mid-1890s, robbing banks, hotels, saloons, and any other handy establishment, and shooting anyone who tried to fight back. Historians have confirmed that he murdered at least six men, one apparently accidentally as he was shooting at another man. He had an adept ability for not getting caught and an even better ability for escaping when he did.
In 1894, Blanck was convicted of the murder of a King County bartender and sentenced to hang. Dubbed the "Jesse James of the Pacific Northwest" by a fawning press, he gained an almost cult status among the public. In March 1895 he engineered a clever mass breakout from the King County Jail, but he was shot to death in a gun battle with sheriff's deputies four days later. His body was exhibited at Butterworth's for three days, and the Post-Intelligencer reported that at least 18,000 people visited on the first day alone. But that did not translate into anyone coming forward to pay for a burial, and Blanck was interred without ceremony in the potter's field, the site marked only by a concrete post with a number.
Dismal Disposal
By the early 1910s, planning was well under way for the industrial development of the Duwamish River and the surrounding area. Twenty million cubic yards of mud and sand were to be dredged and moved to fill in the river's twists and turns, leaving a much straighter and deeper waterway that could handle the ship traffic that would come with development, and the Duwamish Cemetery was in the way. A 1912 article in the Post-Intelligencer reported that the potter's field and surrounding area was one of the first lots to be sold, said to be for the development of a "gas engine concern" ("Burn Pauper Dead ..."). Plans were underway by the spring of 1912 to exhume and cremate the cemetery's 3,260 dead, and an attractive crematorium with a chapel was built on the poor farm. It was finished by October, but by then time was growing short: The project was scheduled to get underway the following year, leaving little more than two months for more than 3,000 corpses to be exhumed and cremated from a total of eight acres of graves.
The county awarded the American Contracting Company a contract to exhume, box, and deliver the remains at $2.50 per head. The term "head" was deliberate. So many bodies had been buried for so long that they had decomposed to almost nothing, leaving only skulls to provide an accurate count. But the Board of Health refused to grant a permit for the work until it was put in charge of an undertaker, and a Georgetown mortician, C. E. Noice, got the job. The delay pushed the start date into November. Once work got underway, Noice was charged with delivering roughly 85 bodies a day to the crematorium in 39 days. He did, but the overall job was done in such a haphazard manner that it led to a grand jury investigation the following spring.
As the bodies were exhumed, workmen discovered that many burials had been sloppy. They found wooden coffins that had been buried only two or three feet below ground instead of the usual six, and they found some bodies that had been folded up in caskets that were too short for them. They also found the remains of babies and young children in cheap paper boxes. Despite a few headboards naming some of the decedents, identification of the remains was otherwise impossible and was not attempted. Of the graves, 855 had names and dates on headboards, 493 had only numbers on headboards, and 1,912 had no identification whatsoever. A representative of the crematorium later explained that the lack of identification on more than half the graves was caused by a brush fire that swept the potter's field in 1910 or 1911 and destroyed many identifying markers. By the end of December, a reported 3,260 bodies had been delivered to the crematorium and disposed of.
In early 1913, two state examiners for the State Board of Supervision and Inspection examined the process used to exhume and cremate the remains, as well as conditions generally at the county hospital and poor farm. They filed a scathing report in March. It said their investigation had found examples where the American Contracting Company had failed to provide a box for each body as expected but instead placed several of them together in a single box. The report further described another instance in which the ashes of 163 bodies were raked together onto the floor of the crematorium, divided, and placed into individual receptacles, each with a single name claiming to represent a single decedent. The investigation also found that while undertaker Noice had been paid $8,150 for the removal of 3,260 bodies, the exact number said to have been delivered to the crematorium had not been verified by the county, and the report alleged that the 9,000 cubic yards of dirt said to have been moved in exhuming the graves could not have been accomplished in 39 days by the number of men employed to do the work. Noice complained that he had receipts from the crematorium confirming the number of dead delivered, and claimed he had asked the county board to send someone to the cemetery to confirm the work done, adding "It is not my fault that none was furnished" ("Says County ...").
Without a Trace
In May, a grand jury was convened to further investigate. In addition to confirming the state examiners' findings, the jurors established that there had been no attempt to confirm the identity of any of the remains, even those which had been identified with a headboard. They also found that because of time constraints, "Scores of skeletons, wooden containers and all, were incinerated in a single day" ("Inquisitors Are Probing ..."). The crematorium was typically able to properly incinerate four bodies per day, and the roughly 85 bodies that Noice delivered daily to the facility were far beyond its capacity. But the requirement for individual urns with the names of the dead was followed, even though it was a farce, as explained by the Post-Intelligencer on May 13: "the ashes [were] deposited rather with an idea of 'having enough to go around' rather than with the intention of separate designation. The urns were filled, said an employe [sic], 'just like you fill salt cellars, only from a pile of ashes that was raked out of the furnaces each morning before the fires were started'" ("Inquisitors Are Probing ...").
The following week the grand jury visited the crematorium, where its employees couldn't have been more cooperative. The Post-Intelligencer reported that the jurors were shown some of the remains in individual "neat little quart cans with their names and numbers on the front of the canister ... The grand jurors were permitted to look into the cans of lime dust and even to pass the chalky substance through their fingers" ("Poor Farm ..."). The paper noted that "The women of the grand jury were much impressed with the coziness of the new chapel in the crematory building and the nifty little tinted envelopes which are large enough to hold the ashes of babies and very young children. Nearly 100 of these carefully marked envelopes can be filed away in one quart can, which, it was remarked, is a great economy of space" ("Poor Farm ..."). The visitors were subsequently treated to a nice meal from the poor farm's kitchen and then returned to Seattle, apparently impressed with what they had seen. No action came from the investigation.
Afterward, the ashes vanished without a trace. The story faded from public memory, and the site was quickly developed. In 2024, it serves as the home of the Seattle Boiler Works and other industrial sites. Given its past history, it's perhaps symbolic that, just as it did more than a century ago, the place lies on a broken road leading to a dead end.
