No one knows how many bodies may lie beneath Schneider Park in West Akron.
Not a sign or headstone marks the hundreds buried there between 1875 and 1919. Records show about half spent their final days and years in a nearby infirmary. The county poorhouse served as Akron’s first welfare system. Early on, the operation was criticized for the mistreatment of its tenants, commonly called inmates.
Those buried are forgotten immigrants who built Akron, the unclaimed bodies of infants found in the canal and the victims of horrific murders. Most labored for a living, either on the infirmary farm, in rubber factories or laying bricks. Many were poor, disabled, some maimed in the Civil War.
Around the city-owned park today, the living walk their dogs. Children play on soccer fields painted over the suspected graves. Historians and archeologists have reason to believe that some of bodies remain below, though no one plans to dig to be sure.
The mystery of Schneider Park is steeped in haunting rumors, local folklore and the truth.
“I’ve always been fascinated with cemetery walk over there,” said Deborah Baird, a military wife who moved near the park 17 years ago. In the misty mornings, beneath the fog, frost sometimes outlines rectangular impressions along what some call “Graveyard Path.”
“I’m going to walk into the fog,” Baird said, recalling her first experience with an eeriness that attracts some and repels others.
The grass grows greener in these clearly visible rectangles, arranged in tight, straight rows like any other cemetery. Here, 14 anthropology students from the University of Akron have cordoned off 2.75 acres. For three weeks, they’re gauging subterranean magnetism and electric pulses with the meticulous frequency of 400 measurements per 10-meter square.
In essence, they’re mapping the softness of the spaces below.
The data they collect will be analyzed and presented July 7 to the public at the Highland Square Library from 3 to 5 p.m. What they hope to tell is whether the graves extend beyond what the naked eye sees.
“The general principle in archeology is you work from the known to the unknown. Then you find the edge. We might not be there,” explained UA Professor Tim Matney, who’s last exploration was a 98-acre buried Assyrian city in Southwest Turkey.
No one is planning to dig up Schneider Park, Matney said. “But I don’t know of anyone who’s ever counted how many graves are visible, partly because some of them are hard to see.”
The dead rise
Schneider Park’s deepest secret reached the broader community in 2009 when a Beacon Journal article reported how the city once treated its most vulnerable.
The reporting drew on the expertise of Michael Elliot, a retired library archivist who has combed historical documents to uncover the names of those buried at what is now Schneider Park. Then Eric Olson, a UA and Ball State graduate, came across the story a few years back.
Google satellite imagery confirmed the grave-shaped markings. “Then I went out to see it and saw people golfing on it and dogs going to the bathroom on graves,” said Olson, a Cuyahoga Falls resident and archeological researcher at the Ohio History Connection, formerly the Ohio Historical Society.
Olson digitized Elliot’s findings. The records, assembled in a single spreadsheet, tell of the injustices suffered in life and death by those buried below Schneider Park.
Facing the past
Elliot found 308 records, including death certificates, of bodies buried in the once swampy corner of Schnieder Park; 274 suspected burials included at least a last name. Olson suspects as many as two hundred more may have been buried there before and after record-keeping began.
The care and detail in which their last days were documented appears subject to the whims of the doctors who filed the death records.
“It’s not a happy story,” said Olson. “You could tell there was a lot of fast and lose documentation by the doctors at the time. After you look at 308 death certificates, man, it was a depressing day. You read about infants, still born babies, children who drowned in the canal and their parents didn’t claim them … mangled bodies found by the railroad tracks.”
“Historic prejudice,” Olson calls it. These are the forgotten sons and daughters of Irish and other immigrants who built the Ohio & Erie Canal or laid the railroad tracks that made Akron an industrial giant. Indigent, maimed, mentally ill and often discarded, these Akronites didn’t shop for their final resting place.
In June 1914, the Kletens had triplets, “small-sized and feeble at birth,” records show. Two died 10 days apart in August. The doctor, H. H. Jacob, mistakenly listed one as Hungarian and the other Romanian.
Cyrus Osbourn came home injured from the Civil War but was buried without mention of his service.
Italian immigrant Jacob R. Arkoneilo died in a “mob hit” on Williams Street, the victim of a shotgun blast to the neck by a Russian.
Some of this may be the conjecture of coroners and doctors, Olson said. But that’s how history was written.
The full list believed to have been buried at Schneider Park is available online with this story.
The infirmary
All the way to Market Street, the Summit County Infirmary operated a 230-acre farm on which inmates were forced to work for room and board. Two years after opening in 1866, an inspector documented ghastly treatment of tenants at the once exulted home for the indigent, disabled and mentally ill, the Beacon Journal reported in 2009.
“There were quite a number of filthy insane, idiotic and epileptic inmates,’’ A.G. Byers wrote in his 1868 report to the Ohio Board of State Charities.
Some inmates stayed outside in wooden pens. “In one, there was an insane man whose hip and knee joints were entirely anchylosed,’’ Byers wrote. ‘’He was entirely naked and performed locomotion by sliding about on his posterior with the aid of his hands … In the other pen were four females, one a miserable driveling idiot, eating its own filth, and the other three insane. They were also all of them entirely naked, and their condition was indescribably pitiable.’’
Philip H. Schneider later bought the farm. The 15 acres that is now Schneider Park, too swampy to farm and laden with graves, is all that wasn’t developed with upscale housing. Upon his death in 1935, Schneider gifted the land back to Akron, whose leaders created a park in his honor.
Schneider had demolished the infirmary. Some of the bodies were moved to Munroe Falls, where a new county poorhouse was built in 1915. But bones turned up years later.
“If there are any restless spirits on Earth, they would be here,” said Sarah Burgess, a senior in Matney’s summer experiential learning course.
Burgess and her team leader, graduate student Maeve Marino, walked over to where the silhouettes of graves give way to a sandy patch. That area, Marino said, is evidence that bodies were dug up and the graves were filled in all at once. This matches reports of a number of infant burials relocated to Munroe Falls in the 1930s.
But the uniform shape of the visible surrounding graves give Marino, Burgess, Matney and others the impression that the earth below hasn’t been touched since whatever, or whoever, is down there was put there.
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug .
