Opinion piece by Rudi Steiner

Last week I had to do some work at Lincoln Park Zoo in downtown Chicago.

As I rode in a golf cart going about my business I passed some giraffes, camels, bears, tigers, lions, hippos, and hundreds of 4th graders on field trips acting like monkeys.

Winding through the park my journey took me past the “Couch family tomb” the only remaining gravesite left in what was once Chicago’s first city cemetery.

Lincoln Park has not always been an urban green space and habit for farm animals and other exotic animals. In the 1850s it was the habitat for Chicago’s city cemetery for 35,000 dead residents. It also housed a Catholic cemetery, a Jewish cemetery and the burial ground for paupers and 4,000 confederate soldiers who died at Chicago’s Camp Douglas during the Civil War. 

Around 1868 the city fathers began to remove bodies from the old city cemetery moving them to several new city cemeteries beyond the city limits – which was up by Wriggly Field.

In 1871 Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern and burned the whole place to the ground including the Chicago city cemetery. Because most cemetery markers where were made of wood or marble they too were destroyed.

Over the years the cemetery records were burned in a conflagration, destroyed, and misplaced. The place became a real mess so nobody knew “who was buried where.”

In 1874 some swans and a cubby bear (a gift from the Philly Zoo) showed up and that’s when it became a zoo.  Ernie, my golf cart driver, told me human bones have been discovered in Lincoln Park as late as 2010.

Historians estimate that as many as 12,000 bodies still remain buried in Lincoln Park beneath the animal habitats, ball fields and Lake Front cycling paths. 

I guess my point is this... one of Chicago’s most popular and famous visitor sites is built on the site of the city’s first cemetery.

Bluffton and Chicago are about the same age, both have come of age at the same time, both are proud communities who honor their living and respect their dead.

A public area honoring Bluffton’s early heritage and pioneers could be a beautiful thing. If you “do it right” I’ll probably drive back home just to see it, even if you don’t have any beavers, polar bears or residents acting like monkeys.

My great-grandpa Rudy Althaus won’t be honored there because he wasn’t buried in old Shannon cemetery, Rudy was “a progressive” and voted to change name of Shannon to Bluffton he’s buried in Maple Grove, but I’ll show up anyway.

Rudi Steiner, Homewood, Illinois
4th generation Blufftonite,
Bluffton HS and Bluffton College grad