‘Potter’s Field’ markers discovered lining a lawn
Leaving no stone unturned is usually a method to crack riddles. Here’s a case where turned stones created a mystery.
Daniel Burke was making a U-turn at Scofield Manor when his trained eye noticed a block near the front steps with the number 302 carved into its Belgian marble. He knew it was from Potter’s Field between Scofield Magnet Middle School’s soccer field and Bartlett Arboretum, where Stamford’s indigent were buried for a century until 1970.
When Burke returned to the Stamford Historical Society, where he has been a longtime volunteer, he matched the number to a name. Dancy Melvin was a homeless man who died of exposure in 1957 at age 50 without any known family.
“They put him in the ground and put a number over it,” Burke says. “And there (the stone) was, decorating the front lawn of Scofield Manor.”
Burke returned to the residential care facility and told a staff member.
“So that’s what that is,” she told him. “That would explain the other ones.”
“What other ones?”
She led him to an S-shaped garden border of some 30 stones, and suggested there are others on the property. Burke asked permission to turn some over, which revealed more numbers. The only clues to the identities belonging to each grave marker had been buried by some unknown landscaper.
These are markers of The Forgotten, those whose names became numbers. Some of these lives may not have been remarkable, but too many of their stories are made indelible by grisly endings.
An unnamed baby was tied in a burlap bag and drowned in 1913, a 3-month-old strangled in 1929, a baby girl died two hours after her Dec. 12, 1915 birth as a result of what is listed as an “incapacity for life.” “Illegitimate” children commonly met such fates during the era.
Homicides, suicides, hangings and decapitations. A man smothered in mud in Stamford Harbor. Victims of trolley car accidents. Most were buried in cheap pine boxes, while babies and children were simply swathed in cloth.
Many were immigrants whose loved ones could only surmise their fates when the flow of letters stopped.
The phrase “potter’s field” is derived from a passage in the Bible (Matthew 27), about an area of Jerusalem where potters once worked in the clay earth. After Judas took his own life, priests used coins he collected for betraying Jesus to purchase the land for the burial of strangers, criminals and the impoverished. It is also referred to as a “field of blood.”
I offhandedly mention to Scofield Manor Property Manager Lavern Edwards that she and I could walk past the stones at the entrance without knowing their significance.
“I did!” she exclaims. “Every day.”
Edwards says Scofield Manor is “happy to get them back to their rightful place,” and an effort is underway to make that happen. Bartlett Arboretum Director of Education Mike Belletzkie says the plan is to swap the markers for bricks Bartlett saved from a cottage ravaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
“Dan’s discovery rocked our world a little bit,” says Belletzkie, who conducts tours of Potter’s Field, which is now painstakingly tended to by Bartlett Horticultural Associate Len Macari and volunteers led by coordinator Regina Campfield. The field and the Scofield Manor land are still owned by the city.
Potter’s Field suffered neglect so frequently across generations that it’s reasonable to assume someone collected the blocks and lugged them the length of a football field or so across Scofieldtown Road. Whether they knew the significance of the numbers is a distinction between naivete and heartlessness, innocence and malfeasance.
Though there are now obstacles between the field and Scofield Manor, historical maps indicate a direct path between the locations. Scofield Manor is where the city’s “Almshouse” (poorhouse) was once situated, near the town farm that put the destitute and homeless to work. It was later the Sunset Home, a grim dormitory for the aged with bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.
Belletzkie and I swap theories. We both favor those that do not involve grave robbers.
He speculates that the markers were scattered as growth overwhelmed the field in the 1970s, a period when University of Connecticut was next store and curious visitors left behind empty beer cans and drug paraphernalia. In 1976, 24-year-old Margo Olson was found there with an arrow through her heart in a grave so shallow her arm and feet were visible.
Over the years, a groundskeeper could have merely collected some scattered stones. Or, unused markers in storage at the Scofield Manor site might have been knowingly repurposed after burials were no longer conducted at the cemetery. Some found by Burke indicate higher numbers.
Belletzkie tilts toward an amalgamation of speculations. A previous tenant of the Scofield address may have recognized stones in the nearby woods as resembling ones from the property and retrieved them. Hence, the presence of older stones found by Burke.
There aren’t many markers left in Potter’s Field. A few are numbered in the teens before skipping to the 40s, then to the 90s, and a handful in the hundreds. As Burke says, the question for years has been “What happened to all these other stones?” The common assumption was that they simply sunk into the earth.
Historical Society volunteer Christine Varner led the 1997 effort to clear the grounds that had been forsaken for a quarter of a century while she was a member of Mayor Dannel Malloy’s administration. She recruited area dads with chainsaws (“Saturday afternoon cowboys,” she calls them), Boy Scouts and young Mormons on mission equipped with axes who “cut down trees faster than chain saws.” She had a plaque installed that greets visitors with the words of Mark Twain: “Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike.” The existence of the field proves those words are not always true.
When members of the crew asked about filling in newly revealed depressions in the soil, she recognized these were the only indicators of where the bodies were buried and made the call to leave them untouched.
“We did not want to make it look like a lawn,” Varner says.
Varner’s deepest digging wasn’t in the soil, but into records in Old Town Hall to count the dead. She came up with an estimate of 479, and the detail that some graves contain more than one body. The city’s tally of the inhabitants of Potter’s Field had been missing for years, but mysteriously turned up in an envelope left at the doorstep of the Historical Society. The handwritten records included details such as cause of death and names when they were available.
Malloy hosted a re-dedication of the graveyard on Nov. 1, 1997 — All Soul’s Day.
Some of these dead once broke up the rock that was used to pave city roads, or toiled in factories and the railroad, making them among the people who built the City of Stamford.
The Forgotten deserve better than to become numbers in earth that was once not seen as sacred. Their stories and resting place are finally being nurtured thanks to the passion of people such as Burke, Varner, Belletzkie, Macari and Campfield, who are already discussing a 2021 ceremony when the stones are taken to Potter’s Field.
For Burke, the mission is personal. While reviewing the Potter’s Field list, he found the name of his great-aunt.
“I just feel for people like that,” he says. “Having their gravestones used as garden liners was like the ultimate insult.”
This mystery may never be solved, but revealing the secrets in these stones finally gives The Forgotten a chance to be acknowledged.
These are markers of The Forgotten, those whose names became numbers. Some of these lives may not have been remarkable, but too many of their stories are made indelible by grisly endings.