Reed Dunning

Beneath the ground here lies the remains of a wide assortment of souls, many of whom went to the grave without a ceremony or a certificate to document their passing.

The unclaimed bodies from the City Cemetery's potter's field were reportedly exhumed and moved to here beginning in September 1872. The County Farm, also known as the County Poor Farm, located in the township of Jefferson (today's Jefferson Park within the Chicago city limits) has a confusing history of its own. The dead who were buried within these grounds, include those who died in the county's "Insane Asylum", unclaimed victims of the Chicago Fire, and others, including "inmates" who lived within the grounds during its various functions. It later became known simply as "Dunning", the family name of the original owners of the town of the same name located within Jefferson Township.

Like many poor farms and mental hospitals in Illinois, the Cook County Poor Farm (and the asylum built upon it) had a tragic history. This tragedy spawned a diaspora of ghost stories as the modern City of Chicago spread around it and, eventually, over the site itself. The original poor farm, established in 1851, occupied over 150 acres. The Cook County Insane Asylum was built there in 1858 and housed nearly 600 patients by 1885. When much of the complex was finally demolished a century later, the real estate developer who purchased the land was shocked to discover that her construction crews were digging up bodies. Archaeologists conducted an excavation and discovered three cemeteries on the property. The bodies were removed and reburied in a 3-acre park now called Read-Dunning Memorial Park. The Chicago-Read Mental Health Center is also located on land formerly belonging to the poor farm. Residents of the area have told of various ghostly encounters in the stores and other buildings constructed over the original poor farm property, including sightings of a specter of an elderly woman in a hospital gown.

Placks:

COOK COUNTY CEMETERY

AT DUNNING - 1854

An institutional cemetery was established on this site in 1854 on land that was a part of the 320 acre Cook County Poor Farm. It soon became the Potter's Field for the forgotten and poor of Chicago and Cook County.

Buried here are as many as 38,000 people including children, inmates of the poor house and insane asylum, 117 victims of the Chicago Fire of 1871, and Civil War Veterans.

Often referred to as the County Ground, Cook County Farm Cemetery, Cemetery at Jefferson, or Poor House Cemetery, it was renamed Chicago State Hospital Cemetery in 1912.

Official records list burials through 1922, although they probably occurred for a much longer period, possibly into the 1930s.

This marks the site of the main section of this historic burial ground. Another section of the cemetery is located west of the intersection of Irving Park Road and Oak Park Avenue.

As you walk through this three acre memorial park, you will come across markers dedicated to those who died at various periods in Cook County's History.

Peace be upon them all.

It was never actually named Dunning. But the property just south of it was owned by the Dunning family — so when the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway extended a line to the area in 1882, the stop was named Dunning Station. And then people started calling the institution “Dunning.” (In its early years, people sometimes called it “Jefferson,” since it’s part of Jefferson Township.)

When it opened in 1854, it wasn’t an insane asylum. The Cook County Infirmary was a “poor farm” and almshouse. County officials opened its doors to people who had fallen on hard times and found themselves unable to earn a living.

But from the very beginning, many of the poor people who were sent to live at the almshouse had mental illnesses. “In some ways, it’s almost similar to what we have today,” “in that we have a lot of people who are homeless and living on the streets, and a significant portion of them are people who are mentally ill.”

So the county added an “Insane Department” at the almshouse. And then, in 1870, it built a separate Cook County Insane Asylum on the grounds.

In 1874, a Tribune reporter described Dunning’s poorhouse as “a shambling, helter-skelter series of wooden buildings” where dejected-looking people with matted hair and tattered clothing were “crowded and herded together like sheep in the shambles, or hogs in the slaughtering-pens.”

“The rooms swarm with vermin,” an attendant told the reporter. “The cots and bed-clothing are literally alive with them. We cannot keep the men clean, and we cannot drive the parasites away unless they are clean.”

Political corruption was part of the problem at Dunning. County officials treated it as a patronage haven, hiring pals and cronies who had no expertise in handling mental patients. Employees got drunk on duty, partying and dancing late at night in the asylum. Some of the asylum’s top authorities used taxpayer money to decorate their offices and hold lavish parties while patients were suffering in squalor.

In an 1889 court case, Cook County Judge Richard Prendergast described Dunning as “a tomb for the living.” He criticized the asylum for squeezing 1,000 patients into a space better suited for 500. “The presence of so many lunatics in a room irritates all,” Prendergast said. “Fighting among the patients at night is frequent.”

That same year, two attendants at the Dunning asylum were charged with murdering patient Robert Burns. They’d kicked him in the stomach and given him a gash on the head. A defense attorney claimed these “blows and kicks … were beneficial to the insane man, as they were a sort of stimulus or tonic,” according to the Tribune. Jurors acquitted the attendants, blaming Dunning’s overcrowding rather than the actions of individual employees.

Even under the best of conditions, doctors didn’t have many effective treatments for people suffering from mental illness. The only drugs they had at their disposal were sedatives. “If a person was terribly agitated, they might dose them with chloral hydrate, which would pretty much knock them out,”

According to an 1886 state investigation, one of the sedatives used at Dunning was a mixture containing chloral hydrate as well as cannabis, hops and potash. The investigation also found that Dunning was serving two kegs of beer a day; patients as well as employees were apparently drinking the beer.

The same state probe harshly criticized the food Dunning served to its inmates. A lack of fruit and fresh vegetables had caused an epidemic of scurvy, with about 200 patients suffering from the illness.

In spite of all their appalling discoveries, the investigators quoted one doctor who said “there were some attendants who were most excellent, who were conscientious, and endeavored to mitigate the sufferings of the insane in every way possible.” But these employees were in the minority, and they felt intimidated by Dunning’s irresponsible workers.

The situation inside the Dunning poorhouse seemed somewhat better by 1892. A journalist who visited that year didn’t encounter the same horrors others had witnessed in earlier times. But she reported that many of the poorhouse residents were “too old and infirm to do anything except sit about in joyless groups.” The superintendent told her that many people ended up in the poorhouse as a result of alcoholism. “Whisky brings the most of them,” he said, adding, “They’re foreigners mostly.”

In 1910, Dunning’s poorhouse residents were moved to a new infirmary in Oak Forest. And in 1912, the state took over the Dunning asylum from Cook County, changing the official name to Chicago State Hospital.

Conditions had already been improving at Dunning over the previous decade, Mehr says. One reason was the construction of smaller buildings to house patients. And a civil service law passed in 1895 had decreased the problems with patronage. After the state took control, Mehr says, “It ended the scandals around the issue of graft and corruption.” But incidents of patients being abused still made news from time to time, he says.

Here’s a sample of several cases reported in 1897:

Frank Johnson was committed to Dunning after he cut off his right hand in a fit of religious mania. “I think he will grow again,” he told a judge.

John E.N., 28, believed he was Jesus Christ.

Timothy O’B. became “a raving maniac” after a policeman struck him in the head.

William Mitchell, 43, an extremely emaciated African-American man, said he was hearing “the voices of spirits” and believed that people were “after him for murderous purposes.”

Theresa K., 35, was sent to Dunning after she refused to eat, declaring that her food was poisoned.

Catherine T., 56, “was something like a wild cat.”

Maggie Mc., who may have fractured her skull five years earlier, was described as “silly, helpless, Irish, very poor, and 28 years of age.”

Fredericka W., 35, who was unkempt with a weather-beaten complexion, was sent to Dunning after a policeman found her sitting in a park. She said she “was searching for a prince, who had promised her marriage.”

William L., 45, was arrested when a policeman found him “wandering about the boulevards ogling women and girls.” After hearing the details of the case, a judge declared, “Dunning.” As the bailiff quickly hustled William L. toward the door, the patient turned around and shouted, “It doesn’t take long to do up a man here!”

Patients like these were sent by train from the Cook County Detention Hospital to Dunning.  The train was called the ‘crazy train.’ … There was a guard on both ends so people couldn’t get out.”

About half of Dunning’s patients suffered from “chronic mania,” according to the asylum’s annual report for 1890. Other patients had conditions described as melancholia, impulsive insanity, monomania (exaggerated or obsessive enthusiasm for or preoccupation with one thing), and circular insanity. The doctors listed masturbation as one of the most common “exciting causes” of insanity among Dunning’s male patients. According to the report, other patients had become insane as a result of religious excitement, domestic trouble, spiritualism, sunstrokes, disappointment in love, alcohol, abortion, narcotics, puberty and overwork.

In the first half of the 20th century, Chicago State Hospital used several different treatments for mental illness. Hydrotherapy used hot or cold water to soothe people who were depressed or agitated. Fever treatments induced high temperatures to kill off bacteria in the brains of patients with syphilis.

For a time, some patients at Dunning and other Illinois hospitals were given electroshock therapy “once a day, every day for years

At the end of July in 1919, the temperatures were soaring.  It was near 100 degrees out, & six patients of the Cook County Insane Asylum at Dunning escaped.

Escaped patients, in need of treatment and/or a threat to themselves or others is bad enough.  The officials at Dunning, however, decided that it’d be best to just ignore the whole situation.  Police were not properly notified, & worst of all, neither were the families. 

The escape occurred while officials were meeting in an attempt to figure out how to prevent worse crimes from happening.  The patients were described as all afflicted with dementia praecox.  Three returned willingly, but the other three wandered off the hospital grounds.  No one bothered to go after them.

One such man was Aaron Rabinovich.  Aaron had been committed after threatening to kill multiple family members the previous year, & had been in the institution ever since.  After his escape, he turned up in his family’s neighborhood, at a local store.  According to one of his sisters,

“He chased all the customers out of the store and threatened to kill my sister.  She was hysterical.  She telephoned me and said that Aaron was in the store and was waiving his arms and going mad.  I called u the hospital at Dunning and asked them if they knew Aaron was out.  They told me that he was in the hospital.  The police took him back to Dunning.”

There is little more terrifying than knowing that someone who has made threats on your life is out & after you.

Another man, Walter Rattey, also escaped, & wasn’t as easily found.  His escape was only discovered after his sister went to visit him.  Officials claimed they had told his wife of his disappearance, but she knew nothing of it.

A Tribune reporter went to the hospital to speak with Dr. George Leininger, superintendent of the hospital, about the disappearances.  “You must be mistaken my boy.  Evidently you are referring to the story in one of the papers the other day about six persons escaping from the Peoria asylum”.

The reporter was not mistaken.  Going to the records room, Leininger went to make a fool of him by showing that no one had escaped.  But, the woman dutifully told the doctor that six had indeed escaped, & none had returned.  When asked if the proper people had been notified, the woman replied that neither police nor families were immediately informed. Other doctors had told her to not say anything, hoping to find the patients before causing an alarm. 

That obviously didn’t work.

A new era of psychiatric treatment began in 1954, with the discovery Thorazine, the first in a new wave of drugs that directly affected the symptoms of mental illness.

Chicago State Hospital’s buildings closed after it merged in 1970 with the nearby Charles F. Read Zone Center, which had opened on the west side of Oak Park Avenue in 1965. Since 1970, it has been known as Chicago-Read Mental Health Center. Today, for better or worse, fewer people with mental illnesses stay for prolonged periods of time in hospitals.

Throughout its early history, Dunning also included cemeteries — not only for poorhouse residents and asylum inmates who died, but also for anyone who died in Cook County and whose family couldn’t afford to pay for a burial. The people buried at Dunning include 117 victims of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and Civil War veterans — including Thomas Hamilton McCray, a Confederate brigadier general who moved to Chicago after the war and died in 1891.

One of the most notorious people buried at Dunning was Johann Hoch, He traveled the country marrying, often, wealthy widows. It is believed he may have married as many as 44 women, and murdered as many as 15 of them. Usually his method was slow poisoning with arsenic. When the women became ill he would call a local doctor who would usually diagnose kidney disease, for which there was no treatment. After spending a short time in the Cook County jail for swindling, he sped up the process, murdering some of his wives within a week of their marriage. His last victim was Marie Walcker whom he married in Chicago on December 5, 1904. He poisoned her only days after. On the night of Marie's death, her sister Amelia came to the home. True to form, Johann proposed to her that same night. He maintained his innocence even on the gallows when he was hanged in 1906, other cemeteries refused to accept his body. “In a little box that they had made at the jail, the remains of Hoch were buried anonymously somewhere on the grounds

The same fate befell George Gorciak, a Hungarian immigrant who died penniless in 1895, succumbing to typhoid. His family took his body to Graceland Cemetery, apparently unaware that they needed to pay for a plot there. By the end of the day, they’d hauled his coffin out to Dunning, where burials were free in the potter’s field.

The burials at Dunning included many orphans and infants — and adults whose identities were a mystery. In 1912, an “Unknown Man” who’d apparently stabbed himself to death was placed in the ground at Dunning.

Scandals sometimes erupted over bodies being stolen from Dunning’s cemetery by people who wanted them for anatomy demonstrations. In one 1897 case, four bodies were taken as they were being prepared for burial. Henry Ullrich, a watchman who worked at Dunning, was convicted of selling the corpses to Dr. William Smith, a medical professor in Missouri.

The professor claimed that the watchman had offered to kill a “freak” and sell him the body. Smith recalled telling Ullrich, “I only want the dead ones.” Ullrich supposedly replied, “That’s all right, Doc … he’s in the ‘killer ward’ and they’d just think he’d wandered off. They’re always doing that, you know.”

County officials denied the existence of a “killer ward.”

Modern Day

"We want a dignified disposition for the unclaimed, indigent and unidentified remains," said Cook County Medical Examiner Dr. Ponni Arunkumar. "After 30 days, if bodies are unclaimed or the family says they do not have the funds for burial we start the indigent process. We look for next of kin if they're available we notify them that can pick up the body, otherwise we'll take care of the disposition"

The unborn came from hospitals, including stillborn births and miscarriages, and aborted fetal remains.

The four unknowns have been at the medical examiner's office since 2015. The cremains of the 34 indigent persons have been held for two years to give families the chance to find the funds to bury their loved ones.

All scientific methods are employed to identify the unknowns. When that fails, an indigent coordinator, a newly created position in the medical examiner's office, takes to Facebook and the internet to put a name behind face.

"The unidentified we have marked in case there are methods to identify them," Dr. Arunkumar said. "If families want to claim them we're able to exhume the bodies and give them to the families. It ensures a respectful disposition."

The deceased that come through the medical examiner's office have passed away from the usual manners of death. Some have died of natural causes, others are homicides and suicides.

"There is nothing that distinguishes them from other cases," the medical examiner said. "We want to bury them in a dignified manner. They don't have family to be able to fund the burial or they have no next of kin."

The county has cremated identified, unclaimed deceased persons, which Dr. Arunkumar describes as a "cleaner process" for disposition. Some families request that loved ones be donated for scientific research or medical schools arranged through the Anatomical Gift Association of Illinois.

Members of the Cook County Funeral Directors Association, an alliance of the county's funeral homes, have volunteered their services to prepare the dead for burial. The association has participated in 17 indigent burial projects.

"It's in our structure and out makeup as funeral directors to take care of everyone," said Leonard Zielinski, president of the CCFDA. "When all this began several years ago we, as an association, stepped forward to volunteer. How can we help Cook County transfer these decedents to this cemetery ground given up by Catholic Cemeteries as a place of permanent for these individuals."

Rev. Larry Sullivan, pastor of Christ the King Church and the associate director of Catholic Cemeteries, starts the committal service. The eight boxes sit on the rolling ground of Olivet Cemetery, marked with intake cards of the names and dates of death of the people inside.

The remains of the unknowns are identified by numbers. There are holy cards on the boxes: "You are not forgotten." The unborn children's box is decorated with holy cards of childlike angels and lambs.

"Our faith calls us to be of service to our neighbor and in doing so we gladly assist in caring for those we commend to the Lord this day," Fr. Sullivan's voice booms across the cemetery. "God's love knows no bounds. Those we bury today are deserving of our respect, deserving of our prayers and deserving of entrance into God's kingdom."

After the prayers, students in blue scrubs from the Worsham College of Mortuary Science pass out daisies to place on the boxes. Fr. Sullivan moves from box to box, shaking holy water on the plain wooden caskets.