Greenwich Village | Page 4

present square. The extreme western part, a strip extending east
of Macdougal Street to the Brook, a scant thirty feet,--was bought from
the Warren heirs.
Minetta Lane, which was close by, had a few aristocratic country
residents by that time, and everyone was quite outraged by the notion
of having a paupers' graveyard so near. Several rich people of the
countryside even offered to present the city corporation with a much
larger and more valuable plot of ground somewhere else; but the
officials were firm. The public notice was relentlessly made, of the
purchase of ground "bounded on the road leading from the Bowerie
Lane at the two-mile stone to Greenwich."
When you next stroll through the little quiet park in the shadow of the
Arch and Turini's great statue of Garibaldi, watching the children at
play, the tramps and wayfarers resting, the tired horses drinking from
the fountain the S.P.C.A. has placed there for their service and comfort,
the old dreaming of the past, and the young dreaming of the future,--see,
if you please, if it is not rather a wistfully pleasant thought to recall the
poor and the old and the nameless and the humble who were put to rest
there a century and a quarter ago?
The Aceldama of the Priests of Jerusalem was "the potter's field to bury
strangers in," according to St. Matthew; and in the Syriac version that
meant literally "the field of sleep." It is true that when they made use of
Judas Iscariot's pieces of silver, they twisted the syllables to mean the

"field of blood," but it was a play upon words only. The Field of Sleep
was the Potter's Field, where the weary "strangers" rested, at home at
last.
There is nothing intrinsically repellent in the memories attached to a
Potter's Field,--save, possibly, in this case, a certain scandalous old
story of robbing it of its dead for the benefit of the medical students of
the town. That was a disgraceful business if you like! But public
feeling was so bitter and retributive that the practice was speedily
discontinued. So, again, there is nothing to make us recoil, here among
the green shadows of the square, from the recollection of the Potter's
Field. But there is always something fundamentally shocking in any
place of public punishment. And,--alas!--there is that stain upon the fair
history of this square of which we are writing.
For--there was a gallows in the old Potter's Field. Upon the very spot
where you may be watching the sparrows or the budding leaves,
offenders were hanged for the edification or intimidation of huge
crowds of people. Twenty highwaymen were despatched there, and at
least one historian insists that they were all executed at once, and that
Lafayette watched the performance. Certainly a score seems rather a
large number, even in the days of our stern forefathers; one cannot help
wondering if the event were presented to the great Frenchman as a form
of entertainment.
In 1795 came one of those constantly recurring epidemics of yellow
fever which used to devastate early Manhattan; and in 1797 came a
worse one. Many bodies were brought from other burying grounds, and
when the scourge of small-pox killed off two thousand persons in one
short space, six hundred and sixty-seven of them were laid in this
particular public cemetery. During one very bad time, the rich as well
as the poor were brought there, and there were nearly two thousand
bodies sleeping in the Potter's Field.
People who had died from yellow fever were wrapped in great yellow
sheets before they were buried,--a curious touch of symbolism in
keeping with the fantastic habit of mind which we find everywhere in
the early annals of America. Mr. E.N. Tailer, among others, can recall,

many years later, seeing the crumbling yellow folds of shrouds
uncovered by breaking coffin walls, when the heavy guns placed in the
Square sank too weightily into the ground, and crushed the
trench-vaults.
It would be interesting to examine, in fancy, those lost and sometimes
non-existent headstones of the Field,--that is, to try to tell a few of the
tales that cling about those who were buried there. But the task is
difficult, and after all, tombstones yield but cheerless reading. That the
sleepers in the Potter's Field very often had not even that shelter of
tombstones makes their stories the more elusive and the more
melancholy. One or two slight records stand out among the rest,
notably the curious one attached to the last of the stones to be removed
from Washington Square. I believe that it was in 1857 that Dr. John
Francis, in an address before the Historical Society of New York, told
this odd story, which must here be only touched upon.
One Benjamin Perkins, "a charlatan