The Couch Tomb
A sealed limestone vault sits on a lawn in Lincoln Park and nobody can say who is inside it. The plaques are blank. It is the last thing left of a cemetery that closed in 1866, and roughly 12,000 of the people buried there were never moved.
Field Guide Entry
Ira Couch ran the Tremont House, one of the first good hotels in Chicago. He died in 1857, and the following year the architects John Van Osdel and Frederick Baumann built him a limestone vault in the Chicago City Cemetery. It is still there. Everything around it is gone.
The cemetery was the city's public burial ground from 1843 to 1866. It sat on sandy ground beside the lake, the water table was too high, and after a cholera scare the city closed it and began moving bodies out to Graceland and Rosehill. The removal was never finished. Pamela Bannos, whose Northwestern project reconstructed the cemetery from Tribune archives and city records, estimates that of roughly 35,600 people buried there, about 12,000 were left in the ground.
Lincoln Park was laid out on top of them.
Who is in the vault
Couch's own grandson estimated in 1911 that about eight people had been interred in it. No record confirms that any of them are still there. The marble plaques on the front were never inscribed. In 2013 the writer Adam Selzer photographed the interior by taping a phone to a wire coat hanger and pushing it through a crack beneath the front slab, and found an antechamber with a second, larger door behind the outer one. Nobody has opened it.
The vault survived the Great Chicago Fire, which makes it the oldest structure standing inside the burn zone.
The bodies keep coming up
In 1998 archaeologists monitoring the excavation for the Chicago History Museum parking garage recovered parts of 81 skeletons and one intact iron coffin with a body still inside it. The coffin was reburied elsewhere and the loose bones went to the Illinois State Museum.
Lester Fisher, a former director of Lincoln Park Zoo, told researchers that in 1962 workers digging a foundation for the zoo barn hit a casket, got no guidance from the city about what to do, and poured the concrete over it.
Visiting Information
Free, in an open park, visible at any hour, though daylight is better for reading the blank plaques. The tomb stands on the lawn immediately north of the Chicago History Museum with a low fence around it and no interpretive sign of its own.
The Chicago City Cemetery marker nearby is worth finding in the same visit, since it is the only thing on site that explains what the ground used to be.
The museum entrance is a short walk away and the North Avenue and Clark bus stops are close. Ten minutes covers the tomb itself, which is why it works better paired with the museum than as a trip on its own.
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