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George Town Potter's Field
11 Plays2 months ago
Georgetown Potter’s Field in Seattle was a pauper cemetery where the poor, unidentified, and unclaimed were buried from the late 1800s into the early 1900s. As the city expanded, the graves were poorly documented, partially relocated, and eventually built over, leaving many remains beneath modern industrial sites. Today, the former burial ground stands as a reminder of early Seattle’s forgotten and marginalized residents.
Special shout-out to Invisible Histories Podcast — a phenomenal show amplifying voices and experiences that too often go unheard. If you’re not already listening, go check them out and give them some love.
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📚Full source list and supplemental materials are available on our website at Beneaththeevergreens.com.
⚠️ Content Warning: This episode includes references to abuse, trauma, and death. Listener discretion is advised.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Beneath the Evergreens'
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Beneath the Evergreens, where murder, mysteries, and mayhem lurk in the shadows of the Pacific Northwest. I'm Jess. And I'm Anna. From haunted forests and unsolved disappearances, to true crime cases buried deep in the moss and the mist, we're digging into the dark secrets hiding under the evergreens.
00:00:18
Speaker
Each episode will explore real cases, eerie encounters, and the legends that keep the Pacific Northwest up at night. So grab your flashlights, lock your doors, and join us Beneath the Evergreens.
Excitement about Seattle's Untold History
00:00:52
Speaker
Welcome back. i am super excited for today's episode. This one, so this isn't super eerie. It is, there definitely is some crime involved. Yeah. But it's a lot of untold history of the Seattle area.
00:01:07
Speaker
I'm so excited. I love history. It's super cool. So honestly, i kind of started thinking about it after last week's episode when we were talking about early Seattle. Okay. Because I think the whole idea of just that growing city and how wild the West was at that time, does it just fascinated me.
00:01:24
Speaker
And this story that actually a friend told me about. and I was like, oh, this fits in perfectly with but everything that we're we're talking about. Oh, I'm so excited. a Yeah, I love the history, especially of a place where you live because it, I don't know, just brings it home. And you're like, wait, I've been stomping these streets for how long? And I didn't know this. Yeah, I love it.
Listener Engagement and Shoutouts
00:01:42
Speaker
Before you get started, though, we do have some shout outs. Yes, we do. shout out to one of our devoted listeners Jaime thank you for listening I've heard that you are a big fan and I very much appreciate you so thank you so much and then I have a shout out to a very special person named Emma you know who you are and all I've got to say is olive juice all right so moving on
00:02:08
Speaker
Thank you guys for listening. And if you want to shout out, leave a comment, reach out to us. We'd love to talk about all our listeners and say hello. Yes. All of our social medias are up under Beneath the Evergreens or BT Evergreens.
00:02:22
Speaker
We've got a website, so you should check it out. It's BeneathTheEvergreens.com. You can email us. We'd love some listener engagement. So feel free to reach out. We'd love to hear from you.
Historical Incident in Georgetown
00:02:32
Speaker
All righty, so we're going jump right in The story that I'm going to tell you today, Jessie, actually takes place in Georgetown. Georgetown, okay. So Georgetown is very near and dear to my heart.
00:02:45
Speaker
The gym that I go to is right there, and this story actually takes takes place just down the street. Georgetown Morgue is all I know about. So south of Georgetown Morgue. Okay. So we're going to talk about the Potter's Field in Georgetown. Georgetown.
00:03:00
Speaker
you potter's field in Georgetown? There was a potter's field in Georgetown. Oh, okay. First, what even is a potter's field? This one that I actually had no idea. My brain goes like Harry butt either harry Potter or pottery.
00:03:15
Speaker
But fun fact, it actually does have to do with pottery. So it actually is a biblical reference because potters used to go out into these fields. They would dig up clay and then there'd just be holes in the field. Oh, nice.
00:03:25
Speaker
And then that would be essentially where people that didn't have anywhere else to go after they died, they'd be buried there. Interesting. I didn't realize that was the precursor.
00:03:36
Speaker
that Yeah. Okay. So, Potter's field is just a generalized term for essentially graveyard slash cemetery for, people that can't afford to go anywhere else.
00:03:47
Speaker
And it's honestly really sad. A Potter's field, especially at this time, it was a really, really sad fate. no one wanted to be buried there. You really were trying to do everything you could have any family around that donate funds so that you weren't going to end up here.
00:04:03
Speaker
So one of the most <unk> infamous potter's fields in Seattle during the the early days was actually in
Georgetown's Wild West Culture
00:04:10
Speaker
Georgetown. So before we dig too much into potter's field and this land, we're going to about Georgetown at this time.
00:04:17
Speaker
So people that actually inhabited, so settlers inhabited Georgetown Before the Denny party even made to Alki. So, like, the Denny party is considered, founders of Seattle. yeah Right?
00:04:28
Speaker
All in quotation marks. The Duwamish people lived in Georgetown long, long before. And they actually had huge, row houses out along the the Duwamish River where they housed canoes and do all their fishing for salmon and the like.
00:04:42
Speaker
but Which is crazy because now the Duwamish is yeah i wouldn't want to swim in that. Right. Or eat anything out of there. No. Yeah. It's, it's not that one to move is beautiful river that was just, it ran into the sound yeah and it was a main lifeline for a lot of people. Yeah.
00:04:57
Speaker
So we have these settlers that come in to Georgetown and they start building up a city. So at this time we have all of our neighborhoods of Seattle as we know them now, like Ballard, West Seattle, Georgetown, they were all actually separate cities.
00:05:11
Speaker
So downtown Seattle was Seattle. Okay. And i mean, when you're using horses and walking, Georgetown's pretty far away. It's about four or five miles south of downtown. Yeah.
Georgetown's Poor Farm and Sanitarium
00:05:23
Speaker
A bit of a trek if you're in the the mid eighteen hundreds right? So Georgetown was little rambunctious. That was where people that, they like to have a little bit of fun.
00:05:34
Speaker
A lot of breweries started in Georgetown. there were a lot of bars that had lodging attached. you you know, know what i mean? A little pricey affection, you will? yes. There was a lot of, race horses. Okay. So if you're interested in gambling, all the debauchery took place in Georgetown. So it was like the red light, kind of.
00:05:57
Speaker
Essentially, yeah. Yeah. For a while, there was kind of a, not a prohibition of sorts, but, people in Seattle were trying to get away from drinking. laws were kind of in-state to prohibit drinking. okay But only in Seattle.
00:06:09
Speaker
So Georgetown, you can go nuts. You can go nuts down there and no one really cared. Okay. that kind of sets the tone for a place where you would end up having a potter's field, right? There was just a lot of what you might call unsavory activities and people that were often down on their luck lived in Georgetown.
00:06:29
Speaker
So eventually all the neighborhoods ended up coming together into Seattle, which a fun fact was because of clean water. You're able to get cleaner water yeah in the city of Seattle, so it kind of spread out.
00:06:43
Speaker
Oh, that's kind of cool. I wouldn't expected that. I don't know why, but that's interesting. fun fact. Georgetown is it's a little crazy, and people that needed work ended up working on what's called a pour farm down in Georgetown.
00:06:59
Speaker
That sounds like the saddest job you could ever have in your life. Right. you're getting some money if you don't have any other job, but you're just, you're farming, you're making minimal, wages and you're in this kind of sad area of the city, but you just kind of almost pushed to the outskirts.
00:07:16
Speaker
I feel like in this day and age, if you ran across something that was called the poor farm, it'd be tongue in cheek, the poor farm. But I feel in this day and age, it's really your last option. Absolutely.
00:07:25
Speaker
Absolutely. So down in Georgetown, there was this poor farm. There was a sanitarium down there. So kind of like a low income hospital. There's also, unfortunately, a bunch of tuberculosis tents.
00:07:38
Speaker
So when tuberculosis was running through the city, people were sent down to Georgetown to isolate there and mean, most of them did ultimately die. Yeah. Which leads us to our potter's field.
Exploration of Potter's Field History
00:07:50
Speaker
So I really want to shout out another podcast and two amazing women have been doing a ton of research onto this potter's field. Their podcast is Invisible Histories. And they've done so much research into finding out even where this potter's field was located because for a long time, there was references to it, but the exact location wasn't known to the masses.
00:08:11
Speaker
Yikes. I really don't like that. Right? No, it's it's really sad. So, yeah, but no, they've done incredible research digging into all things that had to do with this Potter's Field and the people that were ended up being buried there. Shout out to them. i feel like that's almost an unsung hero. yeah know Absolutely.
00:08:31
Speaker
So there was this, at this Potter's Field, which, fun fact, is currently... on the west side of East Marginal in Georgetown, right off the banks of the Duwamish, kind of.
00:08:42
Speaker
yeah So if you're at South Seattle Community College, it's kind of just west of there. Okay. So there were about 3,000 people buried at this Potter's. 3,000? Mm-hmm. 3,000 people 1873 the about 1910. and been 35 years. We have...
00:08:59
Speaker
to about the nineteenth and about nineteenth ten so and it's been about thirty five years we have 3,000 people buried there. In 35 years. Oh my gosh. That's a large number of people.
00:09:12
Speaker
It's obvious a lot of people. Yeah. yeah and you know, now again, like I said earlier, people were doing everything they could to not end up at a place like this.
00:09:22
Speaker
So you're having to kind of scrounging at their dying days trying to find enough cash or in contact with family members to get them out of here. yeah But a lot of times it was you know criminals, people that didn't have family around, yeah immigrants, just people that really didn't have anyone around. yeah And i think that's the saddest part because when they were buried in this potter's field, a good chunk of the time, there were the graves were unmarked.
00:09:49
Speaker
About two-thirds of the people that were buried there, they did not have any markings whatsoever on their graves. I hate that. I hate that so much. There are some records of you know who died at certain times, so sometimes you can kind of piece the pieces together, but after the ages, right? yeah youre You don't know who was where.
00:10:12
Speaker
And I think that's the, one of the saddest bits for me that these people did have family at some point. Right. And they maybe did have people that were, would look for them given different circumstances. Right. they had, if they were immigrants, they had family overseas. Or what if i don't know, in the 1800s, you didn't really have a telephone or could just text someone hey here I am.
00:10:30
Speaker
You could have just had an accident while you were traveling and that's it. And then you're stuck. Oh, that would be a heartbreaking. Right. yeah. So this, Just in general, in the Potter's Field is really sad. Yeah. But it gets worse, unfortunately. No, thank you. Actually, you stop right now.
00:10:48
Speaker
I like this sentence. Okay. So we talked about the Duwamish flowing through Georgetown, right? No.
Failed Exhumation by American Contracting Co.
00:10:57
Speaker
Stop it. No. So the Duwamish naturally is very twisty and turny. It winds along, right? Yeah.
00:11:05
Speaker
However... in the 1910s the panama canal is being built the idea of creating rivers for ship traffic is becoming more and more popular so what do we have in this large industrial area next to this large city a windy river is not going to cut it so we need to straighten it so since the potter's field was on the banks of the duwamish An American contracting company. That's the name of the company, actually. American contracting company. It's not. It's just a weird description. oh
00:11:37
Speaker
They were hired to exhume all of the bodies of the people that were buried at the potter's field. Yeah. Cremate them and then transfer them to other locations. But the locations are unknown, I'm guessing.
00:11:49
Speaker
Well, we're not even going to get that far. Oh, Jesus. So... It was found out that one, when they started exhuming, that the burials of people in the potter's field were atrocious.
00:12:03
Speaker
I'm talking people that were too tall for the cheap pine boxes that they had that were just kind of bent in. There were kids, children and babies that died that were just in paper boxes.
00:12:16
Speaker
That's heartbreaking. Right? These see people, they couldn't... They had nothing. They... It just... From a human level, right? It just makes you so sad that one, they couldn't afford even just a name to say, hey, I was here. And they're just they're just kind of shoved into the ground.
00:12:35
Speaker
Some of the the coffins were only two feet underground. They weren't even... Oh my gosh. Yeah. So it was very... you no one cared. No, there was just there was no respect given for people that had passed away. So sad.
00:12:49
Speaker
Yeah. But unfortunately, it does keep getting worse. This American contracting company that was hired to lead the exclamation of all these people, yeah there was an undertaker actually from Seattle that was assigned to work with them to cremate all of the bodies.
00:13:07
Speaker
So essentially what happened is, since a lot of the graves weren't marked, They couldn't figure out who was who. People were just kind of placed in boxes. Yeah. And if they could identify one name, there was maybe three bodies in one box with one name on it.
00:13:21
Speaker
That's messed up. Yeah. I don't like that. Absolutely. And then they cremated all of these people. And it is... The idea is that we can't can't prove any of this after the fact, right? Yeah. But there was a mysterious amount of ashes that can't find.
00:13:41
Speaker
And it's hypothesized that those ashes were just spread out over the floor of the crematorium and just used as dirt. and these Wow. I just keep going back to these are people.
00:13:52
Speaker
These were people that they worked hard, right? they were They were down on their luck, but do they deserve to just be... some floor? Yeah.
00:14:02
Speaker
And is not respected in any capacity. So... We have 3,000 people that were exhumed and cremated. And the idea was they're supposed to be nicely, theyre but their their ashes preserved somewhere else.
00:14:21
Speaker
Yeah. They were given about 40, they did them at 40 days. There's no. 3,000 people in 40 days. There is no way you could respectfully, I'm going to say. yeah Remove.
00:14:34
Speaker
cremate and spread ashes of people in 40 days no way they were no way they were just dumped like it was just a essentially grab grab people grab the dirt and just toss it so oh my gosh yeah also the private company was doing all this yeah and the county never confirmed how many people were actually cremated So there's no confirmation that everyone that was actually buried there was even cremated after the fact.
00:15:07
Speaker
So there could have just been people still chilling underneath. Yes. And with how messy the burials even were, who even knows what happened? crazy. Yeah.
00:15:17
Speaker
They could still be there. They could be under the Duvalmish. They could have been washed away. who knows at this point? It's been over a hundred years since
Botched Exhumation and Cover-Up
00:15:23
Speaker
this happened. Yeah. And that area is very much industrialized. Yeah.
00:15:28
Speaker
So there's and it's all concrete. Yeah, it's concrete. You have just warehouses. i mean, you have a bunch of stuff going on on the Duwamish, right? You have ships going in and out.
00:15:40
Speaker
Yeah, you just... That's really sad. It's it's so sad. so once it was discovered that this whole exhumation activity was basically botched, yeah a grand jury grand jury convened to investigate you know what happened by the undertaker and the contracting company.
00:15:59
Speaker
So the jurors heard about the atrocities. They then went to go visit the crematorium, which was a fun fact created just for these bodies. So they they erected a whole crematorium just to cremate these 3000 people in this Potter's field. That's crazy. And then you're still not going to do Exactly. You're still going to mess it up Yeah.
00:16:19
Speaker
So these jurors, they went to that crematorium to you know see what happened and they found lovely staff who Were so helpful. They found clear records of other cremations. They were treated to a lovely dinner afterwards.
00:16:37
Speaker
Of course they were. Right? And then no action came. There's nothing to see here. No repercussions for... just haphazardly disposing of 3,000 people.
00:16:48
Speaker
That's crazy. I don't like that. No. No, it's just, it's a huge injustice. it's just so, it's so sad to me. And... Yeah, it is.
00:16:57
Speaker
Oh, that makes me up my stomach hurt. And unfortunately, that's kind of where the story ends. It's one of those stories that there's not a ton of information on.
00:17:08
Speaker
will say... Invisible Histories did, they did gather a lot more information in their studies, but that's all the information that is easily available on these people.
00:17:18
Speaker
but And I think the big reason that I want to talk about it was just to bring some more attention to The horrible, horrible treatment of people that we just are sweeping under the rug and no one no one cares about it.
00:17:31
Speaker
I didn't know about any of this. no idea. And I actually worked right over there. One of the places I used to work was literally, I would walk out the hangar and then there was the Duwamish right there. we drive there all the time.
00:17:43
Speaker
i like said, the gym I go to is right there. Yeah. I could see it. If I were to look, I could probably see where the Potter's Field once was. And there's nothing.
00:17:53
Speaker
There's nothing to even, like, say, hey, this could be a location, a so historical location for a potter's field. Yeah. That's wild. We have the underground tour going through the the cool parts of Seattle history. Yeah. But at no point we talk about all of these people that were just manhandled and thrown away. That's devastating.
00:18:13
Speaker
It's so sad. It's sad and it's horrible. And I just... it just kind of makes me appalled that people can even do this, that you're,
00:18:24
Speaker
You're doing this operation, right? Yeah. And the not even a single piece of you has that. I feel like the human element of being wow, this is another person. Yeah. I understand to a degree rushing through your work, right? I just want to get this done. i just want to move this dirt. But there's humans in there.
00:18:40
Speaker
Yeah. there isn't. you're telling me there's no connection at all? There's no connection. And then even if you don't have a connection, like you're not even thinking about what are like the health impacts here? Like essentially, you know, there's.
00:18:54
Speaker
rotting bodies under here. I mean, if you can't even humanize it the where you should care that this is another human's body. You should at least care about the potential disease that could be coming up or something like that, but no.
00:19:08
Speaker
Oh my god. this reminds me This actually, i feel like, way more common than we think. is I think there was a story in the news the other day about this same thing, where there was...
00:19:21
Speaker
a grocery store or something that was paved over a Potter's field and there was still bodies underneath. They didn't even bother to move. Yeah. There's, the, is it the Kentucky music hall or something like that, where it was, there was also like thousands of bodies buried there where they built it and they kept finding, bones the basement and stuff. And so they put them in the elevator shaft.
00:19:47
Speaker
What? this is where the track record is crazy, but I had no idea that it was in. i would Georgetown would have never. I didn't know about this at all. And that's kind of sad. We should, I don't know, reclaim history and at least give a slight nod in the direction.
00:20:06
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. The woman I was talking about that run the Invisible Histories podcast, they have a ton more information about the Potter's Field and they actually do a tour.
00:20:16
Speaker
Where they you can walk with them. and So we're going. yeah Absolutely. Yes. Okay. Yes. Okay. But they are really doing the work to kind of elevate the people that were just so horribly mistreated.
00:20:29
Speaker
have to go. I really want to go. put together. Yeah. think that's really important. This is so cool that they're doing this too. Yeah. Huge shout out. Yes. If you're in the Seattle area, let's all support them and go to this tour because I think this is super important. That is so interesting. Right? Yeah.
00:20:47
Speaker
They actually have of a whole memorial project that they're working on as well to try to give some you know respect back to these people. Oh, I love that. Okay, now we got to come together.
00:20:59
Speaker
Absolutely. Well, that was an incredible story. Thank you. and i mean, incredible... Yeah, I know. It was incredible, but I'm slightly traumatized. Now, every time I go over there, I'm going be like as respectful as possible.
00:21:14
Speaker
I drove through there yesterday, and I was just looking around. Because sometimes you yeah don't notice things, right? So driving through, and I was like, is there anything that I'm seeing?
00:21:25
Speaker
Nothing.
Reflecting on Historical Negligence
00:21:26
Speaker
I think that's one of the things, too, that I've been learning with our podcast is lots of things in history just kind of get lost. there's these weird connections that you can still see. So last week we were talking about Mother Damnedable, her gravestone is still there. And I would have never known that this person existed and had such a backstory. Yeah.
00:21:48
Speaker
If, well someone didn't do the work to try to figure it out. And it's the same with these ladies. they're doing the work to try to bring light to history. And i really love that. That makes, makes me feel good. gives me hope for the future. Yeah.
00:22:03
Speaker
That's it for today's dive into the dark corners of the Pacific Northwest. If you love the stories or shivered a little, be sure to subscribe and follow. So you don't miss what's lurking beneath the evergreens next time.
00:22:14
Speaker
Thanks for joining us on beneath the evergreens. We appreciate you diving into the mysteries with us. Until next time, keep your eyes open and your doors locked.