In Potter's Fields

I'm not sure the concept of a "Potter's Field" is well known these days, although some Covid related stories have touched on it.  Simply put it is a burial place for the poor.  The name and concept are very old.  In the Book of Matthew it is said that Judas had remorse after betraying Christ.  He tried to give back the 30 pieces of silver but the High Priests would not accept it as it was "blood money".  Eventually they used it to buy a patch of waste ground, previously used for potters to dig up clay.  It's lack of suitability for agriculture and the pits already present made it an obvious, and probably economical, choice.  It was used to bury "strangers", likely a catch all term for the poor, the infidels, and the unknowns.  The spot tradition associated with the original Potter's Field was actually used to bury non Jews until the early 19th century.

Potter's Fields are pretty common in the US.  Here in my little town of Chippewa Falls there are two of them.   Naturally the stories associated with them are rather sad.

The older one is on the site of the former County Poor Farm.  This institution goes back to 1877, and ironically the first resident of it was Jean Brunet, the founder of Chippewa Falls.  The site had a batch of the best farm land in the county, now sadly a mostly failed development with "Shovel Ready" signs standing in weedy fields next to unoccupied streets.

This cemetery is near my former office but I had no idea it was there.  Until a tidy up a few years ago I think you'd really have to be looking to find any trace of it.  It's hard to reconcile the age of the Poor Farm with the first recorded burial there in 1901.  Jean Brunet for instance died there soon after his arrival.  Likely the earlier burials were just poorly marked or perhaps in a now unknown location.

Certainly some of the simple grave markers reflect this uncertainty.  Probably from the cemetery restoration, this is a bit modern and would have been pricey back then.

Although others like early this one don't tell you very much more....

The other Potter's Field in town is on the expansive grounds of The Northern Wisconsin Center.  It's actually just across the river from the Poor Farm.  The Northern Center began operation in 1897 as one of two facilities in the state to house what we would now call Developmentally Disabled individuals.  Early names of the facility use less kind descriptive terms that I feel no need to repeat.   Like the Poor Farm it's population grew during economic hard times.  When jobs are scarce and families just scraping by the added responsibilities of caring for the less able sometimes became severe.  At its peak it had 2,203 residents.  Basically a small town's worth.  Some of them are buried here:

The markers are mostly plain, and give just the basics.

Notice the little touch of ornamentation in the form of colored gravel pressed into the cement.

The Poor Farm cemetery seemed like a forgotten place.  It is back behind the 1970's era nursing home that replaced it, and dumpsters and a forlorn picnic table for exiled smokers hardly makes it seem contemplative.    But the Northern Center is still a going concern.  Sort of.  With the trend in recent decades towards community based living for the developmentally disabled the population there has aged and contracted.  Only a few buildings of the vast campus are now in use.  But there are a few newer gravestones to be seen, done in a more modern and less severe granite.  And even among the older memorials, modest though they are, you see signs that sometimes somebody remembers the people buried in a Potter's Field.