Conversations with Headstones Podcast
Lena Newlin, host
Guest: Scott Hunter, Parks Manager, City of Laramie
Lena: [Voiceover] Hello, and welcome to today's episode of Conversations with Headstones, a podcast focused on unearthing stories of the past. I'm Lena Newlin, and today we'll be at a cemetery in southeastern Wyoming.
[sound of birds singing]
Greenhill Cemetery sits in the heart of Laramie, Wyoming, bordered on all sides by streets and obscured by a chain link fence and trees. It's easy to forget that the final resting place of many of Laramie's citizens, both historical and contemporary, is surrounded entirely by the University of Wyoming campus. With its dirt paths, resident mule deer, large pine trees and community gardens, it's a peaceful and wind-protected refuge that attracts walkers and runners in addition to those in mourning.
Established in the late 1800s, there are headstones of some of Laramie's prominent early citizens, names that also appear on local street signs and buildings: Edward and Jane Ivinson, Aven Nelson, Stephen and June Downey, Wilbur and Emma Knight, Nellie Oakley Lovejoy, and Nellis Cortell, just to name a few. There are also plots without markers, and plots with markers so weathered they are indistinguishable. These are some of Laramie’s forgotten or barely recalled citizens. These can be found in the southwest side of Greenhill Cemetery in an area called Potter's Field.
I became interested in Potter's Field because of a book I was reading about early Japanese immigrant labor on the railroad in Wyoming beginning in 1892. The book talks about how some of those Japanese immigrants were buried in Potter's Field at Greenhill Cemetery. As a descendant of Japanese railroad workers in Wyoming, I was intrigued, and since Potter's Field is only about a mile from my house, I decided to go to the cemetery to talk with somebody about it.
Scott: Hi, my name is Scott Hunter. I'm the City of Laramie Parks Manager. I actually ran the cemetery for about 15 years. I started in 1994 as a seasonal, summer seasonal, and I've just kind of worked my way up through the system. When I started, I started here at the cemetery mowing grass and doing funerals and whatnot, so it's been kind of a full circle type of a thing.
Lena: [voiceover] I had heard that researching Potter's Field was a pet project for Scott.
[Lena and Scott walking through Potter’s Field section of Greenhill Cemetery]
Scott: So back in 1994—okay, I'm a provisional, I'm just a seasonal guy, right?—the full-time people at the time charged me with finding the grave in Potter's Field for a family whose grandma was buried there and they wanted to put a stone there because they—I mean, Potter's Field is just an odd spot, and they were kind of like, “Well, Scott, you do this because you're kind of into the cemetery thing.” I'm like, “Okay.”
And so I started, you know, I located it, and the sexton at the time and I were kind of butting heads a lot. She had it in one spot and I had it in a different spot and, you know, I'm just a provisional, I'm just a seasonal guy and I'm like, “Well, this is all the stuff that I found. This is where I would put it,” and they would put it where she thought it needed to go, and then about two months later, they moved the stone to where I had it. [laughs] And so ever since then, I've been kind of doing Potter's Field stuff.
And the thing about Potter's Field is back in the, you know, late 1880s, you know, the cemetery staff didn't have to track who they buried out there. There was no statutes, there was no rules or regulations on that. As you get into like the 1880s and the 1890s, then they're like, “You know what? We should be tracking where all of our burials are.” And so, you know, late 1800s, there's a lot of knowns out there. Potter's Field, they had big rows, one through like, let's say 14, and they had an east side and a west side, and both of them are nine feet wide. And so, you're looking at an 18-foot row with 13-foot alleyways in between each of those rows. Then there's people buried there prior to that, right? And so they kind of moved some stuff around and did some things.
And in the ‘30s, there was someone’s brilliant idea to sell some spaces in the alleyways. So there's actually what they call “Northside Singles” in Potter's Field, which is deeded property, which just blows my mind. But because of their deeded property, some of those spaces had headstones on them and they had concrete borders. And because they did that, which is good for me and kind of blows my mind, is I can measure off of all those to find locations.
Now, it was back in the day, every grave out there had some kind of marker, wooden or stone or whatever and, then over the years, all those markers have disappeared. And so where they could have went out back in the day and said, “Well, everybody's been here, here, here. Let's start bringing people here.” I go out there. I can't find any of the original markers. So I had to kind of rework how they would think to measure everything out there, and I'm still struggling with some things because they never measured everything exact back then. They were just kind of like, “Yeah, let's do that.” “Oh, we'll put one here. We'll put one here.” And so, in your brain, you're thinking, “Well, if it was me, I would do it like this and this and this and this, and this is the measurements off this and this and this. So my best guess, my gut feeling, is like here.”
Lena: [Voiceover] Scott is a friendly person and easy to talk with. As we left his office, he brought with him his Starbucks cup and a Ziploc bag of peanuts. From the cemetery office, we walked north past rows of older and newer headstones. A handful of crows followed us and Scott dropped peanuts for them, and then we came upon an open field. The grass was freshly mowed and there were only a handful of stones, but the depressions in the meadow, like stationary waves, miniature rolling hills, suggested that despite the lack of headstones, bodies rested below the surface. This was Potter's Field.
Scott: So back in 1994, I'm looking for spaces and trying to figure things out, whatever. I had my boss—They watered the crap out of this place and they sunk all the graves so I could see the rows.
Lena: Oh, so that was intentional.
Scott: That was intentional. So I could see there's a row here, there's a row here, there's a row there. And so that gave me a lot of things to kind of go off of as well.
Lena: Oh, interesting.
Scott: Old graves sink.
Lena: [Voiceover] We walked around Potter's Field and Scott told me stories about some of the people buried there.
Scott: Story-wise, I find a lot of the stories that I've come across from Potter's Field are very sad, you know, especially back in the day when—I mean, people think that we're kind of big into stuff these days, you know what I mean? Back then, it was like, it was pretty rampant, it was bad. So the more research I do into that stuff, it's like, yeah, it makes me heart heavy sometimes. It’s really lying, lies. The Crawfords, a young black lady back in the ‘30s, was right over here with her kid. That's a really bad story. She was walking home one night and the vehicle ran over ‘em like six times.
Lena: [gasps]
Scott: Yeah, I mean, it's just like—And then they found her kid up on the hill smothered in a snowbank.
Lena: Ohhh.
Scott: Yeah. So it was... yeah.
Lena: And they're buried here?
Scott: They're buried here too.
Lena: Are they marked?
Scott: No, they're not, but they're buried right over in this area here.
Lena: [Voiceover] We found a headstone with Japanese writing on it. It was for a man named Yakichi Nishitani, who had died in 1914 of exposure just outside of Laramie.
[Standing by headstone] So this is Nishitani's right here?
Scott: Yep.
Lena: I put these flowers here. I'm going to take care of it. Yeah. But that stone is just, it's a really nice stone. And I had it translated and the people said that some of the kanji on here is really like antiquated kanji and it was hard for them to translate because it's not used anymore. So then it makes me think—‘Cause I think it looks like maybe, I don't know, 30, 40 years old.
Scott: Oh, it’s older than that.
Lena: But then they said, because it's really old kanji that maybe it is from—So he must have had somebody care enough to put a stone here. And Japanese.
Scott: Well, and if he was well-liked enough back then, I mean, you know, all the other people could have scrounged up enough money to put something together too, instead of just a, you know, just a family member or whatnot.
Lena: And he was the one that was found that died from exposure—
Scott: Yep.
Lena: So maybe it was just...
Scott: And he was working for an individual at the time, you know, and so he was just starting out, if I remember correctly, in the area at the time. But he had a job, you know, he was doing stuff and he just got caught out in the elements, however that works out. And so maybe his boss even might have, might have put a stone out here.
Lena: Yeah. Interesting there's no English on it though, too, but yeah.
Scott: Yeah, that would have been a really interesting story to, I mean, to go back and find out why, right?
Lena: Yeah.
Scott: Yeah. Because I mean, you look at this one, 1916, it's an infant.
Lena: Mm-hmm. And that's a nice stone.
Scott: It's a nice stone too, but this is a newer one, kind of like that one over there. I mean, they probably didn't have it back in 1916, this was probably the 1930s or something like that. So the McClellans[?] probably had money at some point to finally do something. I don't know, they did, but very rarely will I find a baby or an infant headstone.
Lena: Yeah. Out here.
Scott: But it would give me a mark.
Lena: [Voiceover] And not too far from his grave were blue pin flags. Scott had placed them there to identify where he thinks two other Japanese men are buried. Buichi Mori and Osomu Hiromota were killed in a railroad accident in 1908.
Scott: Now these two blue spots right here are the two grave spaces, Mori and Hiromota, and they would be on this side here like this. So it would be from here to here would be their spaces.
Lena: And then a few paces away, a headstone placed by the Albany County Historic Society.
Scott: So here's that Joe Martin up here now.
Lena: Yeah. Yeah.
Scott: That Black American lynched in Laramie.
Lena: The stone says he was a Black American lynched in Laramie, August 1904.
Scott: I've had a lot of people, especially over here, not really like this stone. [wry chuckle] This is old Oddfellows. This family here was very bahhh! about that popping up right there.
Lena: Really?
Scott: Yeah.
Lena: And do you know if he was actually, if this is where he is?
Scott: Yeah, that’s his space.
Lena: This is where he is.
Scott: We measured this out to right here.
Lena: [Voiceover] Finally, we walk over to another area of Potter's Field. Scott had done the research and calculations to find the unmarked grave of a man who had died in the early 1900s and was buried in Potter's Field. A family believed the man to be their relative and they wanted to exhume him to confirm their suspicions through DNA testing.
Scott: This is the gentleman that we exhumed. You can't really see it much anymore. He was right here.
Lena: Oh.
Scott: He was right in front of Arthur Woods.
Lena: Okay.
Scott: His grave space is like right here, right? That was actually a foot off this way, so we had to dig another foot this way.
Lena: Did that feel kind of neat for you to be within a foot?
Scott: Yes, it did. Well, because you have a family that shows up who's spending money to have someone to exhume for a DNA test, which costs more money, you know, and in your brain you're thinking, “If I'm wrong, they're wasting all this time, all this effort, all this stuff,” right? And even though we own the property and I could have said, “No, we're not going to do any of this,” you know, you want to be a good neighbor. You want to be, you know, because the gentleman could have family someplace. And so, after we did it all, it's like, “Okay, you know, everything that I've done, everything that I've done makes you feel good now because I did a good job,” right? With limited information, limited data, limited points, limited everything. And it turns out that I was within a foot.
Lena: That's amazing.
Scott: It’s like, I'm okay. I can live with that. I can live within a foot.
Lena: [Voiceover] The research Scott has done in Potter's Field is incredible, and I find myself feeling humbled and grateful for the care and compassion he has dedicated in helping to identify and preserve the people buried here.
Scott: I just feel bad that there's a lot of people in here that there's no marks. You know, you think about how many people have passed away in like the history of humanity. I mean, does anybody know like the old Romans or the Greeks or the Persians or, I mean, there's a lot of people that are unknown around the world, but if you have the ability to be able to say, hey, you know, Philip was here, you know, Marvin was here, whatever was here. You don't have family anymore, but at least they are—
Lena: They're remembered.
Scott: Yeah. You know, and that makes me feel kind of good.
Lena: [Voiceover] I can only hope that someday when I'm gone, someone will care about my final resting place and the preservation of the memory of my life as much as Scott does for the people buried in Greenhill Cemetery.
Thank you for joining me for today's episode of Conversations with Headstones. Special thanks to Scott Hunter of the City of Laramie Parks Department and the student consultants at the University of Wyoming's Studio Co. for helping to make this recording possible. And to my listeners, I hope you tune in again if I ever do another podcast.