Mystery deepens in Potter’s Field soil
Here’s a false ending to “The Potter’s Field Mystery.”
The message on my phone provokes thoughts of the trail so many journalists have followed since Jimmy Breslin’s famed interview with the man who dug President John F. Kennedy’s final resting place: Find the gravedigger.
The call came a few days after my column last week about how grave markers from Potter’s Field in Stamford mysteriously turned up edging the lawn at nearby Scofield Manor.
John Baldino was no gravedigger, but immediately acknowledged he planted unused markers in the soil while working as Scofield Manor’s facility manager from 1986 through 2013. He had some answers. He raised more questions.
“I’ve never even walked into Potter’s Field,” he says. “It’s kind of ghoulish. When I read (the column) I felt a little embarrassed.”
He needn’t. His placement of unused stones aligned with theories speculated in the column. It made sense that grave markers bearing only numerals would not be made one at a time. Numbers awaiting bodies, if not names.
The conundrum is in stones at the residential care facility that do have names attached to them. Stamford Historical Society volunteer Dan Burke, who spotted the markers while making a U-turn, offered a false ending of his own in recent days. He returned to Scofield Manor and got permission to pry the rest of the 30 markers from where they shaped a curve, numbers down, in the dirt. Most had higher figures that never made the grim march to Potter’s Field on the flank of Bartlett Arboretum.
Burke is “mortified” he might have misled me. I reassure him that neither of us should be any more embarrassed than Baldino. After all, there are still at least six or so markers at Scofield Manor that do have names attached to them.
Baldino also expresses confidence that at least 50 other unused bricks of Belgian marble never left their resting place in a storage facility on the property.
I summon the image of a wall of pewter-colored stones in sequential order, interrupted from their assigned purpose when the City of Stamford stopped using Potter’s Field after a century in 1970.
“No, they were not in sequence,” Baldino says. “I’d remember that. I’m a numbers guy.”
He knows plenty of other history about the site, which the city used for decades as a poorhouse and town farm to give shelter and work to its poorest residents. He casually notes the presence of old jail cells from its days as a “drunk tank” when staffers carried billy clubs.
The storage garage was once a barn, made during the Depression as a Works Progress Administration project, hence its construction with the same rockfaced granite as Stamford High School’s Boyle Stadium. The broad sliding metal door is a vestige of its days as a stable.
He kept tractors and tools in the space. It had also been used to store furniture when Stamford’s welfare department issued evictions.
“There are a lot of mysteries up there,” he says. He clears up part of this one. He put unused stones to various uses, including as garden liners about 25 years ago. Their weight caused them to sink, which could explain why so many of the ones put to use in the field are not visible.
“I used one as a door stop for years,” says Baldino, a longtime Stamford resident who now resides in Norwalk.
Then he insists that if someone went to the former barn they would find more stones.
Burke did exactly that Thursday. There were obstacles, including old furniture. But he found a wall of anticipated death ... and more mysteries.
The first one he stumbled across during his interrupted U-turn earlier this year was No. 302, which he traced to Dancy Melvin, who froze to death in 1957. That number was on the end of the brick.
Part of the stack that is visible begins with 305. They run sequentially for a while, but were lined up haphazardly, as a toddler might do while playing a stacking game. It seems to end at 484.
Burke has also photographed 93 visible stones in Potter’s Field, though he was only able to match names to 43. The gravediggers did not always drop bricks in numerical order, another indignity for the dead whose existence was poorly recorded. The records that are available end in the mid-1960s.
Most of those 43 names were men. Too many represented discarded babies. Whether the numbers are in the 300s or limited to the six in the garden, it’s essential to dignify each stone as the representation of a life. The font and size of the figures changes over the years, a signal of when a new batch of stones were needed to prepare for the arrival of more dead.
There remains a potential that some of the stones at Scofield Manor are duplicates. At least one in the garden, for James Enk (1874-1950), seems to have a twin in Potter’s Field.
“This is a mystery,” Burke says, not for the first time.
It may never be resolved, even with plans under way to bring appropriate stones to Potter’s Field.
Of the stones Baldino did repurpose, not all were used as garden liners, door stops or to prop pallets. Two served a purpose true to the spirit of their intent. Nineteen years ago he took a random pair and placed them vertically next to one another to emulate the Twin Towers as part of a 9/11 memorial.
Those stones are now gone too.