Dead, but not buried; for thirty years the sealed coffin had been stored in the back of the receiving vault at Greenlawn Cemetery. Discovered on a November day in 1886 by undertaker Charles Kregelo while clearing the vault, the coffin bore the inscription “Mary D. Milliss” and revealed the “remarkably well preserved” features of the corpse of a young woman, visible through a glass plate. The curiosity drew thousands of people to the cemetery vault, at 10ȼ a peep, before the remains were moved to the undertaker’s rooms, 77 N. Delaware St, to await a proper burial. Meanwhile the public, “at the rate of four thousand a day,” continued viewing the “female mummy” for several days. Unfortunately, this ill regard for the dead was only the latest in the mismanagement of the city’s cemetery.
After Indianapolis was platted and the new settlement began to develop in 1821, the “sickly season” came and the city’s first cemetery, the “Old Graveyard,” was planned on a four-acre site along the east bank of White River, between Kentucky and Louisiana Avenues. Daniel Shaffer, one of the men who selected the cemetery’s site, became the first to be buried in it. The deaths from the first of many malarial epidemics led to an observation that Indianapolis was a “village of a dozen cabins,” and a cemetery of “sixteen graves.” Over time, the river bank eroded and a good deal of the graves tumbled into the water and were washed away.
New additions adjoining the “Old Graveyard” were laid out east of the original cemetery in 1833 and 1844 and became known as the “Union Cemetery.” What was left of the “Old Graveyard” then became a burial ground for the city’s “colored residents.” Union Cemetery was “very carefully platted and amply provided with carriage ways.” In 1852, a “more considerable addition on the east and north, extending from “the river to Kentucky Avenue, and northward to the Vandalia Railroad” expanded the city cemetery site and was referred to as the “New Graveyard.” Lot owners planted evergreens and a number of the original forest trees were retained, making the cemetery an “attractive spot…approaching a park.” In 1860 “an open tract of forest, beautifully undulating” along the river, north and west of the other cemeteries, was laid off in plots and called Greenlawn Cemetery, a name that would eventually be applied to the entire city cemetery site.
Sickness and disease took its toll among the Civil War soldiers stationed in Indianapolis. After the war, the remains of 712 Union soldiers were relocated from Greenlawn Cemetery to the portion of Crown Hill designated as a National Cemetery. Also, to properly care for the dead among the Confederate prisoners to Camp Morton, the federal government bought a narrow tract adjacent to the railroad where they were buried in plain wooden coffins. While many of the 2,172 Southern dead were later disinterred and returned to their families for burial, 1,616 Confederate soldiers remained interred in Greenlawn until 1931 when their remains were transferred to Crown Hill Cemetery.
Resurrectionists — body snatchers — stalked Greenlawn in the 1870s in search of fresh corpses for the medical schools. While most ghouls restored desecrated graves to a condition that one could hardly tell they had been violated, amateur grave robbers would leave the “grave partly filled and the clothing of the deceased scattered around.” The frequency of grave robbing led the cemetery sexton to ask the city council for two night watchmen to “patrol the grounds from sun down to sun up.” The request was initially sent to the committee on hospitals, but because of the numerous doctors on that committee it was referred to another committee; the body snatchers continued their work unhindered.
Maintenance at Greenlawn began to deteriorate and meetings were held to hear suggestions for improvements especially in the matter of putting up a new fence to keep cattle out. A more pressing issue was access to the plats of the cemetery. The widow of a former sexton retained the plats and would make them available “for a consideration.” Since there was no law regulating the depth of a burial, the absence of plats frequently led to multiple burials in one plot, and by the early 1880s city undertakers finally resolved to “bury no more bodies in Greenlawn Cemetery” unless they had the plats. By the end of the decade, conditions at the cemetery had become so badly managed and deplorable that the three receiving vaults controlled by undertakers were declared nuisances by reason of the stench and noxious odors arising from the dozens of decayed bodies resting within them. The city board of health said Greenlawn Cemetery should be condemned. Some bodies, claimed by relatives, were buried in Crown Hill Cemetery; most were placed en masse into immense graves that were dug beside the vaults.
In May 1890 a city ordinance “prohibited the burial of bodies in Greenlawn Cemetery,” and the following year the Indiana state legislature authorized Indianapolis to vacate the burial ground. An inspection of the cemetery found 6,000 adults and 4,000 children had been buried there. Among the early removals were the remains of former Indiana Gov. James Whitcomb, who died in 1852 and whose “body was in a remarkably good state of preservation.” After the casket was placed in a new case, it was re-interred in Crown Hill Cemetery. When relatives of many of those buried in recent years sought the removal of their loved ones, they discovered only the “shrouds and other grave clothes;” the graves had been violated by ghouls with the bodies becoming subjects for the medical colleges.
While the city pondered what to do with Greenlawn Cemetery, “weeds and thorns and nettles” took over the acreage. Scattered about, blackened and cracked monuments and headstones stood vigilant, some marking a final resting place, many marking a vacant depression where once a soul had been laid to rest. Greenlawn was eventually placed under the city park commissioners and for a time, it ceased to be a nuisance. Industry began encroaching on the edges of the former city cemetery, and by the end of World War I Diamond Chain Co. occupied much of Greenlawn. In the ensuing years, construction excavations on the site exposed numerous bones and skulls of unknown dead.