Behind the search for thousands of bodies buried underground in West Price Hill Park

For years, Barney Killingsworth's family thought he had left them. A cold, silent goodbye with no warning, no note, no regard for the life he left behind. But all the while he lay in an unmarked grave on West Price Hill. All because of one typo.

"He died at General Hospital, they misspelled his name, so his body became a cadaver for the students," says Sandy Rice, Killingsworth's great-granddaughter. "They used him from 1944 to 1947, [when] his remains were cremated and buried at Potters Field. There are more than 5,000 people with similar stories."

The death certificate clearly shows an error that left Rice's family broken and confused for years: Barney "Killingsworth" was buried in Potters Field Cemetery in Cincinnati. Upon learning of Killingsworth's fate, Rice fell down the rabbit hole of genealogy, and her fall hasn't stopped since.

"No one would spend more than 10 years of their life identifying burials at Potters Field," Rice says with well-deserved confidence.

Welcome to Gurley Road

If the residents of Potters Field were a neighborhood in Cincinnati, they would be the third largest in the city, with 18,575 residents. At least that's Rice's latest count. It keeps changing as she sits over her iPad late into the night, filling out a spreadsheet with columns of names, places of death, causes of death - but if they're in the spreadsheet, they're in Potters.

Potter's Field is a common historical term for a place where communities buried the poor (otherwise known as "indigent"), the unidentified, prisoners, victims of infectious diseases, and other "undesirables." In Cincinnati, Potter's Field is about 26 acres in size and extends along the northwest side of Gurley Road to Rapid Run Park. That bodies were buried in a straight line is evident from the few surviving grave markers: a small flat stone with a metal plaque that, if you're lucky, shows the deceased's name and date of death. Some plaques bear only the plot number. Others have a small wooden cross, which has since been swallowed up by nature. Countless graves are completely unmarked, and many people are buried in stacks of three, one generation after another, with the top burial resting only 18 inches underground: the height of an American doll.

There are other potter's fields in town, but none as large as this one. Town officials say burials here began around 1852, but Rice has determined that a mother and child were buried here in 1849. Time and place are important to Rice, but the number of bodies underground and who they are keeps her up at night.

"I don't sleep much," Rice writes at 10:30 p.m. after 15 hours of research that day. "This is my mission."

That mission has become even broader. Today, Rice, who will turn 57 in November, is not just trying to document the burials at Potter's Field. She's also fighting to improve conditions for the final resting place of those souls. She has few friends at City Hall - she's made countless calls, emails, document requests over the years - and she can't help but suspect that leadership has a secret plan for the site.

But it all starts with research. Lynn Bereman is helping with this work.

"I met Sandy through Ancestry.com, and she and my husband are distant relatives," she says. "That's how we connected."

The couple decided that Bereman would tackle the earliest burials, from the mid-1800s through the turn of the century. They are now working on compiling a complete spreadsheet of all Potters Field burials.

"She knew how much I loved genealogy and asked me if I wanted to help her with a project I was working on," Bereman says. "I thought all I would be doing was collecting data, doing research and helping her; but it turned out to be much more stressful and thought-provoking work than I had envisioned."

The horrors of the Gilded Age

There are shocking, well-documented stories about Potter, including the infamous resurrectionists who dug up corpses for various Cincinnati medical colleges. But Bereman finds both thrills and solace in the stories of ordinary citizens who ended up in Potter.

"I met people from all walks of life," she says. "Among the occupations I encountered were shoemakers, tailors, cigar makers - lots of cigar makers! And I began to think these were the people who built Cincinnati."

Although Bereman lives in Indiana, she regularly visits Cincinnati through blurbs and documents, soaking up our local labor history like a thirsty sponge.

"A lot of the people I found were laborers in Germany or another country," she says. "Then they would get to the U.S. and continue to do what they were doing. For example, building ships, working in shipyards, building infrastructure. Remember, this was around 1850-1900, so as the city grew and was built, people like that were an integral part of the process."

Working in the Gilded Age was accompanied by injuries and fatalities. If your workplace did not yet have a union, you were likely risking your life with no protection, physical or financial.

"There were a lot of industrial accidents, people falling off buildings, falling into the river, and of course in those days there was no workers' compensation or benefits for people to bury their loved ones with," Bereman says. "Of course, with more and more people coming through the river, it was very difficult to find relatives. So after so many days, they would just bury them at Potters Field."

In careful handwriting, Bereman has traced only a handful of deaths from the time period she has specified. She assembles various fragments using death certificates, newspaper clippings, Ancestry.com - anything to match a name to a precinct number:

• Augustus Alakan, age 40; he was born in France in 1846 and died 40 years later in a railroad accident near Eastern Avenue. His grave number is 466.
• Agnes Archibald was only 22 years old when she died on October 21, 1874, in the City Hospital during childbirth. She was a seamstress. Her lot number was 320.
• Augusta Brehm was born in Germany in 1852; 30 years later she died in a city hospital of septicemia after an abortion. Her grave number is 140.
• A.F. Boch was killed while performing an abortion in a brothel, also known as a brothel. He was only 31 years old when a blow to the head sent him to Potter Hospital. His grave marker is located at 153rd Place.
• Mike Callahan is the oldest on this lot; he lived to be 48 years old before being boiled in a vat of glycerin at the Thomas Emory & Son candle factory on Vine Street on May 7, 1892. He is located on lot 291.
• George Williams, a black man, was born in South Carolina in 1834. He was 40 years old when he died of tuberculosis in a city hospital. His grave number is 412.
• Ben Warfield, a black Civil War veteran, was born in Ohio in 1847 and died 30 years later at the Good Samaritan Hospital of cholera. His grave number is also 412.
• All the children in the Laekamp family died of smallpox within days of each other in April 1882: twins Annie and Eddie at age 5, Louisa, age 12, and Willie, age 11. None of the Laekamp children are buried together.

"I made inquiries about [the children] to make sure they were family members. Because they didn't list that anywhere, just a last name and address, and that alerted me. I've been studying census records ever since," Bereman says. "When one family member got it, another family member got it. It's sad."

Bereman researches birth and death certificates, historical news articles and online services like findagrave.com to match a person to a plot. This was necessary after the fire that burned cemetery records in 1890. Never mind that most of the people buried at Potter have no visible headstones today; the area is completely overgrown and impossible to navigate. Bereman is preserving a history that seems designed to be forgotten.

"I feel a connection to them, a very strong connection," she says. "There are 505 former slaves living in the northern part of the city alone."

A new century, new records

With the turn of the century, the museum has a new caretaker: Sandy Rice. Re-downloading the records collected by the sextons who looked after Potters Field has opened up new opportunities for Rice. Although she too has a knack for finding records digitally, her real talent lies in cold calling.

She recalls finding a stack of Potter's notes at the Cincinnati Public Library.

"The records were in the county and they had to call a staff member who had retired to find out what happened to them," Rice said. "The records were actually transferred to the library in 2009. The library didn't do anything with them; they sat under the librarian's desk for 11 years. To my knowledge, she put her feet up on them."

Editor's note: After this article was published, this librarian, now retired from the Hamilton County Public Library, contacted CityBeat about Rice's characterization of document storage. The former employee denies ever putting her feet on the documents and clarified that she had asked to digitize them or catalog them, but was denied because of ongoing projects. The library told CityBeat that the records were digitized in 2018.

The documents themselves flow to Rice when she doesn't even ask for them, as when a descendant of a former acolyte handed her a large stack of photographs of Potter residents he had collected over the years.

As Rice began to approach the present in her quest to identify those buried at Potter's Field, she created a Facebook group where she chronicled her findings. She says 11% of the group's 470 members are direct descendants of those buried at Potter's Field. Everyone is looking for someone.

Fanny Landman

Steven Pastor's grandparents immigrated to Cincinnati from Austria. They lived in a small apartment building with no bathroom or electricity. He was used to hearing stories about that time, but what happened to his Aunt Fanny remained a mystery until Rice intervened.

"When I was growing up in the '50s, I learned that between my mother, who was the youngest, and my Uncle Israel, who was the third, another daughter named Fanny Landman had died," Pastor says. "My grandparents didn't have the money to bury her. It was what we call in Yiddish 'shonda' - they couldn't afford a Jewish burial. And my mother, I guess, found out about it at some point, but nobody ever talked about it because my grandparents were ashamed."

Pastor's aunts and uncles remember Fannie, but his mother was born well after Fannie's death at the age of seven on October 6, 1919.

"The official cause of her death was scarlatina," he says. "Realizing they didn't have the funds for it, the death certificate states that she was buried at Lick Run Jewish and the undertaker was the Weil-Schell Company at 1711 Race Street."

In an attempt to find his aunt's grave, Pastor, now 76, and his uncle Israel called Lick Run Jewish and Weil-Schell.

"For some unbelievable reason they had no record of her. I tried many options, but apparently Israel did everything I did and couldn't find any more information."

Eventually, a Jewish cemetery advised the pastor to contact Rice - she said local cemeteries are often helpful when someone is having trouble finding a loved one. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of Cincinnati cemeteries and isn't afraid to make phone calls on someone's behalf.

"I checked all the cemeteries - not Catholic cemeteries - to make sure she wasn't anywhere else: Baltimore Pike, Walnut Hills and Wesleyan Cemeteries I personally checked, all the Jewish cemeteries too," she said.

After searching and making phone calls to confirm what was listed on the death certificate, Rice told Pastor that she believed his aunt was at Potters Field.

"Remember, she was contagious and had to be buried before nightfall," Rice tells CityBeat.

The pastor was grateful to her for tracking him down.

"I was just amazed at her knowledge of Potter's Field," he says. "Her dedication to the cause is like a gift from God."

Despite this, he said his heart was squeezed when he learned of his aunt's likely resting place. He told CityBeat that he would have felt differently about his aunt being at Potter's if the place looked even close to respectable.

"It made sense to me. It does," he says. "But I'm certainly not satisfied with it because, well, have you been to Potter's Field?"

Half of Potters Field was transformed into what is known today as Rapid Run Park. Formerly known as Lick Run Park, the Cincinnati City Council transferred half of Potters Field to the Parks Department in 1934. The area underwent renovations in the 1940s that included the creation of a large man-made pond. Rice says that during excavations, workers discovered human bones. Over the years, the park has added playgrounds and walking paths, but it's hard to tell from the sporadic grave markings where a person's final resting place ends and a place for children to play begins.

In contrast, Potter's second half looks like something out of The Last of Us. Invasive plants like honeysuckle and non-native vines sprout thickly from ivy thickets. Not far from where Rice says many veterans are buried, a homeless encampment lurks in the dense thicket. Scattered throughout Potter's various plots is trash, often left behind by curious wanderers or those seeking shelter. To find the remaining grave markers, you'll have to search on your hands and knees or wait for winter to thin out the thickets.

Pastor himself has not been to Potter's, but the stories of tangled vines and desolation drive him to the core.

"Not only is it offensive, but it plays on people's basic needs for their loved ones to be able to rest in peace and dignity. Lives. Lives!"

Robert James Vaughn

As with any cemetery, cancer sometimes takes over.

"My dad and I were very close," Eileen Vaughn Glancy tells CityBeat . "We were best buddies. He was my rock."

Glancy shared a photo with CityBeat of her as a child cradling her father's leg on the beach, her widest smile stretched so wide it could touch both sides of her beach scarf.

"I love this picture," says Glancy, now 68, admiring the photo as if seeing it for the first time.

"My dad was co-owner of Tiffany's photography studio," she says. "My dad would sit me down at my own desk, I was only 12, and my dad would sit at another desk and say, 'Oh, you have to buy this package! Look at this little guy! Look at this baby - he's so wonderful!"."".

Vaughn's skills as a photographer made him a valuable asset during numerous wars.

"In the Coast Guard and the Navy, I think he started out in portraits, then he transferred to the Marines for four months, and I think that was about his photography skills," Glancy says. "By World War II, he was already using a TriMech camera. He knew how to operate the camera in the air."

It wasn't until '72 that Vaughn had to think about how he wanted to use his body after death.

"In April '72, we found out he had been taken to the hospital for hepatitis," she says. "He had colon cancer that had spread throughout his body. They shut him down, said there was nothing they could do, and gave him three months to live."

Glancy calls her father's reason for being in Potter's "the million-dollar question."

"My dad's brothers and I at the memorial service asked the lawyer [...] to return my dad's ashes," she recounts. "Dad's brothers wanted to bury him in Paris, Illinois, in the family plot. They had a grave for him."

But Vaughn had other plans. He donated his body to science - in the words of his daughter - so that "no one else would have to go through this."

"My father had a passion for medicine," she says.

"He was a huge figure in his siblings' lives, in my life," she says. "The brothers would call me about the ashes situation, and I would answer: "I'll call a lawyer."

While Glancy's mother dealt with the financial issues surrounding her father's death, Glancy took on the task of retrieving his ashes when his body was no longer being used to teach medical students.

"It went on for about a year and four months," she says.

Glancy continued to press the family attorney for answers about her father's ashes - no one told her the medical school could use cadavers for more than two years. She says the attorney and the college knew they wanted to return his ashes to the family for a proper burial in the family plot, but by the summer of '73, Glancy says, the attorney informed her that the ashes had been lost.

She entered high school with her best friend, but by the time she was packing her bags for college in England to study archaeology, he had disappeared. Like her father, who had been in the service many times, she bravely jumped on an airplane to go in search of adventure. But it would be decades before she learned how his life ended.

Stumbling across Rice's Potters Field Facebook group, Glancy's cousin Phyllis confirmed that her uncle's ashes were buried at Potters Field using records obtained by Rice from the University of Cincinnati; these records are not normally available to the public. The UC Department of Medical Education, like most anatomy departments, buried the ashes of their cadavers in large groups at Potters Field, sometimes in paper bags or pine boxes, many of which are unmarked to this day. Beginning in 1985, UC's body donation program began burying cremations in the beautiful and beloved Spring Grove Cemetery. There, families of the bereaved can visit a memorial with the inscription, "Through their thoughtfulness, knowledge grows." The college holds an annual memorial service for those who have given their bodies to science, featuring speakers of various faiths; a choir sings angelic songs and a projector scrolls images of the deceased.

Vaughn didn't have that honor of reaching his final resting place. Nearly 50 years after Glancy grabbed her father's leg on the beach, she finally knew where her father was; she just couldn't get through the thicket to find him.

"I cried for probably months. I had a hard time communicating at all," Glancy says. "I was completely devastated because of his service to his country, because of the kind of person he was."

Grief eats away at Glancy as she imagines her father in a mass grave, virtually inaccessible because of the overgrowth. She says Rice showed her compassion.

"Sandy really comforted me," she says. "I talked to her with tears in my eyes, completely broken that 50 years later my father, who served in all branches of the military, who was larger than life, was at Potters Field."

In the months that followed, Glancy gradually came to terms with the fact that her father's resting place would be his last. She believes that her father would have been fine with being in Potter. In her words, it took four months to come to terms with it.

"I figured my father, being a religious man, would think, 'I'm gone, my spirit is with God, I don't want my ashes found,' you know? I accepted that," she says. "I figured Dad wasn't the kind of person who was prejudiced or judged people or thought he was better than others."

Sue Stone

Like Rice, Sue Stone believes it was a misspelling (and miscarriage of justice) that resulted in her grandfather's ashes ending up in Potter's ashes.

"None of my family knew he was there. My mom was three years old when he went to Longview (an insane asylum). She never knew, she had four sisters," she says.

Stone's mother, her four sisters and their father, Charles Agustus Wise, were living in an apartment behind Findlay Market when, according to Stone, her grandfather was taken from the home and forcibly admitted to Longview Hospital in 1927.

"He came home one day and told my grandmother that someone was chasing him, some guys," Stone recounts. "He got scared, went to his apartment, got a gun and said he could hear their voices outside and shot out the window, the bedroom window. Someone called the police from a phone booth on a nearby street, and the police said, 'We have to take him under surveillance.'"

Stone says her grandfather was given a choice: three days in jail or three days in Longview. In hindsight, he would have been better off in jail.

"He was taken to Longview Hospital, and he never came out of there," Stone said.

The family knew Wise had been taken to Longview, but after his third and final day as a ward of the state there was confusion as to his whereabouts. According to Stone, he died in Longview on September 16, 1955.

"No one knew where he was," she says. "I wasn't the only one. My mom always wanted to know where her father was. After my mother passed away, we knew how much grief he had caused our mother over the years. So my brother, my sister and one of my cousins took it upon themselves to search for our grandfather."

Letters, phone calls and Internet searches eventually led Stone to hire an attorney to help locate her grandfather's remains.

"She wrote letters to Longview because that was the only place we knew he was supposed to be," Stone says. "They responded that yes, that he was indeed there, that they had sent [his body] to the anatomy department and that they had notified the family. They didn't notify the family. My grandmother lived in the same place for 25 years and then she moved out of those apartments because she got old herself. She moved in with one of her daughters in Seiler Park."

According to Stone, the failure to connect Wise with his family began with a clerical error. Another Longview patient's last name was spelled "Wise," she said. That last name, Stone said, stuck with Wise, causing his family to be unable to get any answers from the hospital.

After the attorney discovered that Wise was permanently located in Longview, Stone's brother visited the hospital where he met a reverend who claimed to know Wise.

"This reverend told my brother and sister that he made all the furniture and tables in Longview," Stone says.

According to Sue, Wise, a carpenter by training, had never before shown any signs of mental illness.

"When we questioned him," Stone says. "Why did you leave him behind? What was wrong with him? Why did he stay so long?", he said there was nothing in the ledger."

In her 73 years, the anger in Stone's voice cuts sharply through the phone lines stretching from Ohio to her new home in Texas.

"They didn't give him any diagnosis," she says.

What's next for the Potter's?

Thanks to Rice's efforts, more people are learning about near and distant ancestors buried at Potters Field, and many are beginning to take the state of burial to heart.

As for Stone, she's not just infatuated with "Potter," she's furious.

"My grandfather is buried here, and I should be able to go up to his grave to pay my respects. I'm not asking any more or less than any of you who go to the cemetery to visit a loved one," she says.

Glancy wants something done to the neighborhood so that its regular residents get the respect they deserve.

"Wouldn't it be great if Cincinnati honored Potter's Field? Allocate some money in the budget for Potter's Field," she says. "It seems like the city of Cincinnati is saying, 'We don't care,' you know? Let's just let it go."

Giving hope

But taking care of long-abandoned graves is rarely a municipality's priority. After all, dead people don't vote. And while the city has made some efforts in recent years, not everyone is happy with the pace of progress and plans.

After Potters stopped accepting bodies in 1981, Cincinnati city officials took responsibility for landscape maintenance, but only the park above the graves received attention. In 2022, more than 30 years after the last burial, Cincinnati Parks authorized an archaeological review to begin the process of determining the extent and density of burials at Potter's Field. Cincinnati Parks did not pay for the project - it was funded by an Equal Rights History (HER) grant from the Historic Preservation Fund administered by the National Park Service.

The $34,694 grant was received in May 2022 by Mike Morgan, an attorney, adjunct instructor of horticulture at the University of Cincinnati and local beer history expert. Morgan received the grant through Price Hill Will, a nonprofit community development corporation. He told CityBeat that it's rare for an urban pottery site to receive such a grant, let alone federal money.

"Other towns were already doing things and struggling with their pottery fields," Morgan said. "I don't know of anyone else getting a grant like this to work on a potter's field."

The fundraising appeal, Morgan said, was particularly focused on the economic malaise that has left many stranded at Potters Field in Cincinnati and the long, shameful treatment of their final resting place.

"There are two pools of federal money, one focused on civil rights for African Americans and one focused on equal rights more broadly," Morgan says. "The essence of the grant application was that the people buried at this site were treated unfairly compared to how we as a society treat our dead as a whole."

Collection of archaeological facts

The HER grant project ended up looking like something between a preservation assessment and a crime scene investigation.

Beginning the week of October 18, 2022, the Archaeological Research Institute (ARI), a non-profit organization based in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, began three different methods of searching different areas of Potter to determine the approximate location of human remains.

Pedestrian Survey: This search assessed what could be observed on the surface and noted that, according to "local lore", human remains had been seen emerging from the ground due to years of erosion. The search did not find conclusive evidence of surface bones, but did note "crumbling" of some visible grave markers due to "natural gravitational pull."

Human Remains Detection (HRD) dogs: K9 search dogs have been brought in to help identify the presence of decomposed bodies in areas where ground cover has been particularly thick. The report notes that HRD dogs are most often used in forensic cases to accurately identify the recently deceased, but in recent archaeological searches these dogs have shown "promising results." As expected, the dogs made about 100 "matches" that indicated the presence of human remains. These matches were made in very limited areas that do not represent the entire extent of the park, in part due to the presence of "unsafe" dogs at a homeless encampment that often appears in the wooded area between the park and Gurley Road. According to the report, this posed "a safety hazard to HRD K9 staff and dogs." The report notes that this is "unfortunate" because the area is near where the acolyte's house once stood.

Geophysical Survey: Going beyond what can be spotted with human eyes or dog sniffing, the geophysical survey used technology to identify changes in soil distribution indicating burial. But the report said results from magnetometers, GPR and electromagnetic induction meters corroborate the famous Paul Potter story with what technology could not find. While not everyone buried in Potter's Field was poor, all received a poor man's burial. The unceremonious dumping of bodies in simple pine boxes, coupled with wild brush in many parts of the park, resulted in people decomposing quickly along with the coffin.

Although a geographic search did not yield a detailed map of those buried in Potter, Morgan found beauty in this explanation.

"Today it could be considered a 'green burial ground,'" Morgan says. "As a result, dogs would always snuff out the trees because the root system would draw in the odors that came from the erosion of the people buried there. It's really quite beautiful to walk there and think that these trees are a kind of memorial. These trees are thousands of forgotten people."

Rice, like Stone, expressed deep distrust of both the ARI site study and the intentions of all its participants.

"They penetrated the ground with rods! They know these burials are 18 inches deep, most of them, because the ground has been turned over five times. But they stick rods in the ground? I'm sorry, but that's desecration," Rice said.

The study was dubbed "Phase 1" because at the time Morgan and others hoped the preliminary results would be a starting point for creating a more just and respectful resting place for Potter's forgotten people.

"This project was totally part of the first step in getting a better understanding to then start a community discussion about what to do with the site," Morgan says. "That's what the whole project was about."

But nearly a year after the study began, city officials and Morgan told CityBeat that they have no plans to continue the project for now.

In an email sent to Rice after she filed multiple complaints and requested documents on the matter, Jason Barron, Cincinnati Parks director, told Rice that nothing is planned at Potters Field.

"The reality is that we have nothing to provide beyond what has already been provided. And the reason for that is simple: we have no plans to develop Potters Field," Barron wrote in an email. "There is no Phase II, Phase III or Phase IV, and therefore we cannot provide something that does not exist. We also do not have anyone working on any plans."

Although Morgan does not work in city government, he supported the allegations, saying: "The city is not going to do anything. They're not going to spend a dime on Potters Field. They didn't care about it before. They cared about it for 10 minutes when it was all very positive, and then when they had to start wasting staff time with constant phone calls, emails and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, they became hostile to the concept."

Morgan is referring to Rice. He says his academic background in horticulture and passion for Potter informed his desire to unite community members who want Potter's Field to be more dignified. He told CityBeat he considers Rice's ongoing research on those buried in the cemetery a very valuable asset, but conversations broke down when Rice demonstrated a deep distrust of many of the nascent project's participants.

"The city told me it didn't matter if I showed up with a million dollars in federal funding, because the number of FOIA requests it was filing about Potters Field made it impossible to do anything to improve it," Morgan says.

In an email forwarded to the CityBeat editorial board by Rice from Cincinnati City Manager Cheryl Long, Long tells Rice that they have reached an impasse.

"While all citizens are allowed and encouraged to participate in the Park Board planning process, it has been noted that over the years city staff, in addition to the mayor, council members and my office, have received numerous phone calls and emails from you regarding the cemetery," Long wrote. "Staff has often spent up to an hour or more with you in a single phone conversation, often discussing previously addressed issues/problems."

When asked if the city has any current or future plans for Potters Field, Long's office told CityBeat via email, "There are no plans to develop or change Potters Field."

Rice strongly disbelieves the word of city officials.

"There's nothing from the city I trust right now. There's nothing. They're covering up and lying," Rice said. "They've already gone over and called Potters Field a 'Fast Run Park,' you can go into the CAGIS system and see that."

Stone, who stands in solidarity with Rice, also doesn't believe it.

"They're doing something, they're improving something, and they're not just going to do it," Stone says. "I don't believe what he's saying, I think there's a big picture here."

For Rice and Stone, this "big picture" comes in the form of an expanded Rapid Run fleet, concerns about commercial development, and theories that those involved will fill their pockets in the process.

Morgan told CityBeat that technically the city has every legal right to build whatever it wants on top of Potters Field - not that he wants them to exercise that right.

"There's no defense against what you do with an inactive cemetery," Morgan says. "It means the city can do whatever it wants, so this project was important to me to make sure that from a decency standpoint it doesn't happen."

Historical future

The results of the HER grant project were used to apply for Potter's listing on the National Park Service's Historic Register. This registry represents the nation's historic and cultural areas worthy of preservation. According to Morgan, historic sites are generally thought of as protecting historic buildings, but a cemetery in need of care is different.

"When it comes to guidelines and standards, we're going to have to look at what that's going to look like, because it's going to be much more lenient standards than it would be for a completely intact 1820s building because of the nature of the place and its history," Morgan says. "The state is not going to prevent it from being restored, landscaped, weeds removed, but it will have a problem with doing something clearly inappropriate and disrespectful to its use and history as a cemetery."

For now, Bereman and Rice continue their search to identify as many of the souls buried at Potters Field as possible. They hope to obtain enough data to identify and publicize the demographics of those who rest beneath the feet of West Price Hill.

"At the end of the day, we'll be able to tell how many people died from a particular disease, how many were from a particular country, how many were from different races, other demographic groups, such as occupations," Bereman said.

As for Rice, she will continue to connect families with their loved ones, to fight for answers to questions about Potter and to respect the place of their final resting place they now call home.

"We all want the same thing," Rice says. "We would like to see the cemetery become respected again."