Coroner to honor ‘forgotten souls’ in ceremony
WEST GOSHEN >> When Dr. Christina VandePol took over as Chester County coroner in January, she did what any new head of an office would do — she explored her new surroundings.
The coroner’s office is located in the basement of the county’s Government Services Center is a semilabyrinth of rooms and offices, and in one of the various storage rooms VandePol encountered a wall of boxes. “What are these for?” she remembers asking.
What VandePol learned has led this week to a unique and remarkable ceremony in which she, in her official capacity, will help lay to rest the remains of more than two dozen people who died in the county under indigent circumstances. They had no funeral plans, no family who could or would claim their bodies, and no place to be laid in rest in peace.
“I was very surprised,” said VandePol in a recent interview at her office. Not only were there the cremated remains of 54 people from all across the county, but their deaths dated back as far as 2011. The last time there had been an interment was sometime in 2012, she was told. “Sometimes people claim the remains, sometimes they don’t.”
Knowledge of the remains led VandePol on a mission to learn more about what becomes of those who die without means in the county and whose bodies are tuned over to her office for final disposition. “I was curious,” she said. “How does this happen.”
What she learned was that in the past, the county ran a “poor house,” a hospital-sanitarium of sorts in the village of Embreeville, part of West Bradford. And across Route 162 from the hospital, near a branch line of the Wilmington Northern Railroad, there is located a piece of ground where the cremated remains of those who died there and whose bodies were not claimed by family or friends were interred. In days gone by, the space was known as the county’s “Potter’s Field.”
The plot of land, still cared for, is framed by four evergreens, and fenced with a rickety blue gate, but only about a third of the square plot is taken up by the graves. Numbers rather than names identify the stones that mark the graves, and records of who is buried where and when they died have gone missing, the coroner learned.
The 6-by-12 inch stones are semi-polished granite, and have their numbers placed in the center. There are six rows of stones, with numbered-sequences, up to 204. Some rows have more than 40 stones, the last has only 20. The stones are identical, the only difference is the amount of cement they rest on protruding from the earth.
“I love history, so this has been a truly interesting exploration,” VandePol said. There is a ow a poster in her offices paying homage to the “forgotten souls” in the Potter’s Field.
The people whose remains are now under the care of the county are not as unknown as those in the Potter’s Field. VandePol knows as much as can be known from official documents about them — their names, their ages, their general medical circumstances — but finding herself wishes she knew more.
“They tend to be older people, who had outlived their friends,’ VandePol told an interviewer, having read all the reports on the 54 people whose custody the Coroner’s Office had taken on. Perhaps they were estranged from their families for some reason, or had no family left. “We are now the survivors.”
The people died in hospitals or in whatever homes they had. Sometimes the death was accidental, sometimes from drug overdoses or alcohol-related disease, or simply just natural causes — “old age,” as they say. Their ages range from 48 to 86, their places of death from Oxford in the south to Spring City in the north. “They are all kinds,” she said. “It all seems kind of desolate and sad.”
On Thursday, VandePol and invited guests will hold a ceremony at an undisclosed location to inter the remains, giving those who died penniless a sense of dignity in their death. There will be flowers, there will be music, there will be a service of sorts. The sites are being donated by a county cemetery, at no cost to the county.
“I believe that death is part of life,” she said. “Everyone, regardless of their circumstances, deserve a burial. The least we can do is take care of people when they die. This could happen to any one of us. We can do better” than to not recognize their deaths.
“I am happy to do this,” she ended. “This is a counterpart to the sadder part of our job here.”
A list of the deceased is available on the Coroner’s Office Facebook page. If you are the next of kin or an interested party who would like to claim someone’s cremains, please call the Office at 610-344-6165.