History

As of 2014, four locations on the Milwaukee County Grounds in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin have been identified as cemeteries representing the burial of more than 10,000 individuals. A number of different names have been used to refer to all and each of the individual cemeteries. Contemporary newspaper reports refer to burial on the County Grounds as burial in the Potters’ Cemetery or in the Pauper’s Cemetery. County records refer to the cemetery as County Cemetery or the Cemetery in Wauwatosa. Milwaukee County Death Certificates note place of burial as Potter’s Field, County Farm, or Poor Farm. The only surviving written documentation of the cemeteries is called the Register of Burial at Milwaukee County Poor Farm and dates from 1882 to 1974.

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Three of the four cemetery locations were “lost”, that is, utilized for other purposes soon after they ceased to be used for interments. The fourth cemetery is currently fenced and marked as the Milwaukee County Cemetery. The cemeteries are also officially catalogued by the Wisconsin Historical Society and have been assigned state site numbers. The four cemeteries are referred to by numbers that relate to their temporal sequence of use (1, 2, 3, and 4) and as a whole, by the location name described in the Register of Burial, the Milwaukee County Poor Farm (Cemetery). Thus, the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery is an umbrella term used to describe the four cemeteries that were used by Milwaukee County from 1878 through 1974.

Three of these cemeteries, 1, 3, and 4 are located on the periphery of the Milwaukee County Grounds and remain undisturbed. The fourth cemetery, Cemetery 2 (1882-1925), is located in one of the most densely used portions of the Regional Medical Center and has been disturbed multiple times since its closure.

In 1928, Milwaukee County began construction of a Nurse’s Residence directly east of Cemetery 2. To accommodate this construction, burials in Cemetery 2 were to be exhumed and re-buried in Cemetery 3. Contemporary accounts suggest the burials that were moved were those very few whose relatives visited regularly. However, while some of the Cemetery 2 graves do appear to have been moved at that time, the bulk of the burials were left in place. Grave markers were removed, and varying amounts of fill placed over the cemetery area. The fence delimiting the cemetery area was dismantled and the cemetery was no longer marked as a burial site. During the ensuing decades, a variety of developments including building construction, installation of steam tunnels and utility conduits, and road building severely disturbed the remaining Cemetery 2 grave sites. It is estimated that 55% of grave sites in Cemetery 2 were disturbed before 1990.

Operating under the Wisconsin Burial Site Preservation statute enacted in 1987 (§157.70), two archaeological excavations occurred at Cemetery 2, the first in 1991-1992 and the second in 2013. In 1991, burials were disturbed by initial construction stages of a major project on the grounds of the Milwaukee County Medical Complex. Construction was halted and permission to remove the uncatalogued burials uncovered by the construction was requested and subsequently granted by the Wisconsin Historical Society. Cemetery 2 was added to the Wisconsin Historical Society’s list of catalogued burial sites after the 1991-1992 excavation. The second excavation in 2013 was also related to an expansion of the Milwaukee Medical Grounds Complex. In this case, permission to disturb was requested and granted prior to any interference with the burial site. In both instances, archaeological excavation of burials was conducted in specific impact localities associated with the respective construction projects and related infrastructure. It is estimated that 32% of the total burials in Cemetery 2 were excavated archaeologically.

Today, Cemetery 2 includes approximately 0.8 acres, the last remaining portion of an irregularly shaped plot originally covering approximately 3.48 acres. It is estimated that 13% of the total burials in Cemetery 2 remain intact under Doyne Avenue.