Historians find lost graveyard in downtown Evansville

EVANSVILLE, Ind. (AP) - Throughout Evansville's history, developers have repeatedly unearthed human remains Downtown.

The sporadic discoveries were usually written off. But new research suggests those remains aren't there by accident. They could be evidence of an unmarked -- and long forgotten -- graveyard extending beneath the heart of Downtown Evansville.

And it's not just any cemetery.

Evansville, local historians say, is likely built directly atop its first pioneer burial ground.

"Downtown just grew up over it," said Stan Schmitt, a Vanderburgh County historian. "There's a good chance there are still people buried there."

It's impossible to say for certain, he added. But in 2012, the state officially registered the area around Fourth and Vine streets as a cemetery at the request of Dennis Au, the county's historic preservation officer.

"From the evidence I've assembled, it's pretty conclusive that it was here," Au said, as he stood before the intersection.

Au hopes to have a historical marker installed near the intersection.

"That would do a whole lot to ensure this place is not forgotten," Au said.

Forgotten cemetery

Evansville's pioneer cemetery disappeared by the late 1800s, and it's not pictured on any known maps.

Au and Schmitt spent decades compiling old government records, newspaper articles and personal remembrances in an effort to locate the cemetery and track its history.

The search began in the late 1980s when Schmitt discovered a reference to the community graveyard in Vanderburgh County's early government records. The earliest documents date to March 1818. At that time, Evansville was an overgrown ferryboat stop. All of the land that would later become Downtown was owned by ferry operator Hugh McGary.

McGary donated all of his property to Vanderburgh County to build the city in the early 1800s. In the documents recording the donation, McGary made it clear: there was a cemetery that should remain forever. Little else about the graveyard was recorded.

"When you look at maps of Downtown from the time, I would have thought the cemetery would have been marked out, but you don't see that," Schmitt said. "I guess at the time everyone knew where the cemetery was. You didn't need to put it on a map."

For a few decades, McGary's graveyard was the Evansville's main burial ground. Several of McGary's children are there, as is his first wife. It contained other family plots, unmarked paupers' graves and a section for infants, Au said.

The cemetery fell from use in 1844. The area was prime real estate for the growing town, so the city established a new graveyard further from the town's center.

Officials and historians have long assumed that the bodies were moved to the new cemetery before the city built over the old one. And there may be some truth to that. At least one headstone at Oak Hill Cemetery was probably from moved from the pioneer cemetery.

"But they certainly didn't get everybody," Schmitt said.

Uncovering human remains

The graveyard slipped from collective memory. In its place came new construction. A canal was built, then a courthouse. Streets were widened. Churches were built and demolished. Small buildings were replaced with skyscrapers.

Downtown blossomed.

And every so often, unsuspecting developers stumbled across human remains.

Newspapers in the early 1900s recorded the discoveries without understanding their significance. In 1908, workers building the Furniture Exchange at Fourth and Vine streets dug up a skull; in 1916 men laying sewer pipes across the intersection unearthed four complete skeletons.

Rumors about the bones spread across the city. Officials announced the remains were from an old Native American burial ground. The city put the skeletons on display.

"I took that Native American reference with a grain of salt," Au said. "There are assumptions made by folks that have no training."

The first inkling of the site's true history appeared in 1931. A longtime Evansville resident, J.E. Inglehart, claimed he had firsthand knowledge that Hugh McGary's wife was still buried "in the old cemetery at Fourth and Vine (streets)."

Inglehart told a local newspaper that her grave was beneath the German Methodist Church at the intersection across from the Courthouse. Today, that area is a parking lot for Woods and Woods, LLP, a law firm.

"We always knew this building had a lot of history," said Steve Woods, with Woods and Woods. "I didn't know about the burial ground. We're right in the middle of it."

He stood in his firm's parking lot, a few feet from where Mary McGary is said to be buried beneath the asphalt. Woods plans to buy a plaque for Mary.

"There needs to be some kind of marker identifying her," he said. "Show her some respect."

Mapping the site

There is no way to know for certain that Mary McGary's body is still beneath the Woods and Woods parking lot, but there is strong evidence she could be.

The day after Inglehart's 1931 article about Mary McGary's grave appeared in The Press, an Evansville man named Earl Moser came forward with an even more compelling story.

Moser claimed that when he was a child, in the late 1800s, he and his father accidentally unearthed a woman's skull while digging in the German Methodist Church's basement. Moser's father was the church janitor.

He believed, based on Inglehart's description of the gravesite, that the skull belonged to Mary McGary.

"While digging, the shovel suddenly struck something which gave a hollow sound," Moser told the newspaper. "I remember Father stooping down and scooping out the earth with his hands. He brought up the skull of a woman from which the scalp, containing beautiful red hair, had fallen away."

The articles gave Au and Schmitt enough information to lay out possible boundaries for the pioneer cemetery by mapping the locations where various remains were discovered.

If that was Mary McGary's skull in the basement of the old Methodist Church, then the center point of the cemetery today sits somewhere just inside the Woods and Woods parking lot. From there, the burial ground would expand outward, running along Vine and Fourth streets. It may expand into the Old Court House lawn, and the Court building.

"Here lies Evansville," Au said. He stood before the Old Courthouse gazing across the intersection of Fourth and Vine.

"We're driving over our pioneers."

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Source: Evansville Courier and Press, http://bit.ly/2bxWreI

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Information from: Evansville Courier & Press, http://www.courierpress.com