SEATTLE — Tucked among an industrial neighborhood in south Seattle, lies a century-old question: Where exactly are the remains of 3,260 people? Their final resting place now gives rise to processing plants and warehouses in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood.
"Under our feet, literally," said Cari Simson of Friends of Georgetown History, "Really it's a story that no one knows about."
Simson and local filmmaker Elke Hautala have been unearthing this graveyard mystery.
"Just really eye-opening and heartbreaking," Hautala said.
Located near the old King County Hospital, Georgetown's Potter's Field was a cemetery for the indigent and unknown at the turn of the last century.
"This whole area was called the 'poor farm,'" Simson said, pointing out the land around South Seattle College's Georgetown campus.
"I'm just so fascinated by finding out and helping share these people's stories," Hautala added.
Some were victims of an epidemic, who lived their final days in miserable isolation.
"They literally had a tuberculosis sanatorium out here on the grass in these tents," Simson said. "And hundreds and hundreds of people died that way."
Among the cemetery's inhabitants was Nick Burley, a young prizefighter who presumably fell on hard times.
"He ended up dying pretty young on Western Avenue in Seattle," Hautala said.
A notorious criminal named Thomas Hamilton Blanck was also interred there. The five-time murderer known as the "Jesse James of the Pacific Northwest" escaped from a Seattle jail with a fake gun he'd crafted behind bars, before getting killed in a police shootout.
"They had him at the Butterworth Funeral Home and 18,000 people came to see his body," Simson said.
In 1912, when the once-twisting path of the Duwamish River was straightened and the area around it redeveloped for industry, the 2-acre cemetery was closed down, and its residents removed.
"It literally was in the path of the dredgers," Simson said.
The remains were cremated at a specially built facility.
"Unfortunately, the work was done very horribly," Simson said.
"And 1,912 had no names, no numbers, and no headboards," Hautala added.
That's where the official account ends, and the mystery begins.
"After that, we don't know what happened to the ashes," Simson said.
The state auditor ruled that the exhumation had been botched.
"The whole process was so horrible that it just was 'beyond understanding,' and we think they ordered the county to dispose of the ashes," Simson explained.
No one knows their final destination.
So when a graveyard is not the end of a story, where exactly does that story lead? Hautala said that's what she and Simson hope to discover.
"We're going to keep diving in."
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