The Ditch-Diggers of Potter’s Field

The mortality return for Wednesday, October 16, 1918, arrived at the Bureau of Health on South Broad Street in a manila envelope sealed with red wax. The clerk who opened it had performed this task for seven years. He noted the figure, 486, and recorded it in the daily ledger in the column reserved for influenza and pneumonia deaths. The hand that wrote the number did not shake. The form required no description of the bodies, no account of where they awaited burial, no notation of how many hours they had lain in parlors or on porches before collection. The return asked only for a count, and the count was given.

At the same hour, three miles north and east, a line of wagons stretched from the gate of the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane at Byberry back toward the Bucks County line. The drivers sat with reins slack, watching the sky darken toward evening. Each wagon carried between four and eight coffins, some pine, some pasteboard, a few still bearing the brass handles of civilian manufacture. The horses stamped and blew. The drivers did not speak to one another. They had been waiting since morning. At the head of the line, a city laborer checked a manifest against the contents of the first wagon, counted again, and waved it through. The coffins were not to be opened. The cemetery beyond the gate had ceased to operate under any familiar protocol.

The potter’s field was expanding. The shortage of coffins and gravediggers, first noted in Chapter 12, had become by October 16 a full-blown administrative crisis. The Bureau of Health’s mortality returns recorded the crisis as a column of figures. The ground at Byberry recorded it as trenches. Even in areas where mortality was low, so many adults were incapacitated that daily life was hampered. There were reports that healthcare workers could not tend the sick nor the gravediggers bury the dead because they too were ill. Mass graves were dug by steam shovel and bodies buried without coffins in many places.

The city had buried its anonymous dead at the hospital cemetery for thirty years, but never in these numbers and never with such haste. The standard practice called for individual graves, three feet deep, marked with numbered stakes and recorded in a ledger that matched each number to a name where known, a description where not. By October 14, this practice had collapsed.

The ground held too much water for deep digging. The men who dug were too few. The coffins kept arriving faster than holes could be made. The Bureau of Health, acting through the hospital’s board of trustees, authorized a new method: trenches, eight feet wide and of indefinite length, into which coffins would be placed shoulder to shoulder, covered with lime, and filled by dark each day. The authorization came by telephone. The clerk who transcribed the call noted only that extraordinary measures had been approved for the duration of the emergency.

The trenches required labor. The city’s regular gravediggers—twelve men employed by the hospital, supplemented by contract workers from the surrounding townships—had worked without rest since October 5. By October 15, seven were sick, two had collapsed on the job, and three had simply failed to appear. The hospital superintendent sent an emergency requisition to the Bureau of Health requesting additional hands for interment duty, with terms to be arranged. The requisition was stamped received at 9:47 a.m. On October 16. By 2 p.m., the superintendent had his answer: two sources of labor had been identified and would report the following morning.

The first source was the theological seminaries of the city. The second was the county prison.

The seminarians arrived at Byberry on the morning of October 17 in two groups. The first, from the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Mount Airy, numbered eleven men between the ages of twenty and twenty-six. The second, from the Reformed Episcopal Seminary on West Chelten Avenue, brought nine. They came at the request of their deans, who had received a communication from an interdenominational council describing the burial crisis as a service opportunity of the highest spiritual order. The council’s letter, preserved in the Lutheran seminary’s archive, framed the work explicitly: the bodies of the unclaimed dead awaited Christian burial, and the city lacked hands to perform this office. The students, if physically able, might render unto God what the municipal authorities could not provide.

The seminarians were not asked to dig. The trenches were excavated by steam shovel borrowed from the city’s Department of Public Works, which had suspended all non-essential street repairs on October 3. The seminarians’ task was the lowering of coffins—guiding them by ropes into the trenches, arranging them in rows, spreading lime from barrels supplied by the Board of Health. The work was not skilled, but it was precise. Each coffin had to rest level. The lime had to cover evenly. The day’s trench had to be filled before dark, because the hospital lacked lamps sufficient to illuminate the graves after sunset, and because the city had imposed a curfew on all non-essential movement beginning October 4.

A third-year student at the Lutheran seminary kept a diary during these days. The entry for October 17, written at the seminary that evening, describes the work in terms that the Bureau of Health mortality return did not contain. Seventy-two coffins arrived that day. The wagon men did not look at the workers. The seminarians labored in pairs, one at each end of the rope. The coffins were lighter than expected, or the students were stronger than they knew. The lime burned where it touched. When the trench was half full, the foreman called a halt and the students climbed out to rest. Stacks of coffins waited under canvas. They did not stop coming. The diarist counted fourteen wagons in line at noon. By three o’clock, he had stopped counting.

The diary does not describe the bodies inside the coffins. Neither does the mortality return. The Bureau of Health’s October 17 ledger records 512 deaths from influenza and pneumonia, the highest single-day figure yet recorded in the city. The ledger does not note that 89 of these deaths occurred at the Navy Yard, or that 34 were among children under five, or that the majority of adult victims were between twenty and forty years old. These distributions were calculated later, by statisticians working for the federal Public Health Service. On October 17, the relevant fact was the total, and the total required trenches.

The seminarians worked in four-hour shifts. The prisoners worked longer.

The county prisoners arrived at Byberry on the morning of October 17 in a police van escorted by two deputies from the sheriff’s office. There were sixteen men, drawn from the county jail at Tenth and Reed Streets and the House of Correction at Holmesburg. Their selection had been arranged through the office of the county sheriff, who had received a request from the Bureau of Health on October 16 for able-bodied men, preferably without dependents, to perform emergency labor under supervision. The sheriff’s response, preserved in the county archives, proposed a specific exchange: prisoners now serving sentences for non-violent offenses might be offered commutation of thirty days for each seven days of burial service, terms subject to approval of the court of common pleas.

The court approved by telephone. The prisoners were not told the terms until they reached Byberry.

The county records identify twelve of the sixteen prisoners by name and offense. Four were serving sentences for larceny, three for vagrancy, two for receiving stolen goods, two for public drunkenness, and one for malicious mischief. The remaining four appear in the records only as numbers, their files marked transferred to state custody in 1921, their names subsequently lost. Of the twelve named prisoners, nine accepted the commutation offer. Three refused. The refusals were recorded by a deputy sheriff in a notebook that has survived among his papers: three prisoners declined to participate and were returned to custody at 6 p.m.

The nine who remained were issued rubber boots, work gloves, and canvas aprons. Their task was the filling of trenches. While the seminarians guided coffins and spread lime, the prisoners shoveled earth from the excavated piles, working in pairs along the trench’s edge. The work was harder than the seminarians’, and dirtier. The lime dust mixed with the clay to form a paste that caked on their boots and burned where it touched skin. The prisoners worked without conversation. The deputy’s notebook records only that they performed duty without incident on October 17 and 18.

The contrast between the two labor forces was not lost on the supervisors. The foreman who checked manifests at the gate later testified before a City Council inquiry that the divinity students had been given the lighter work, and the prisoners the heavier, by arrangement with the hospital authorities. The seminarians were quartered in the hospital’s vacant male ward, fed from the kitchen, and dismissed each evening with transportation arranged by the interdenominational council. The prisoners slept in their wagon, ate rations brought from the jail, and worked until the last trench was filled each day. The arrangement was described by the hospital superintendent in a letter to the Bureau of Health as equitable distribution of labor according to capacity and condition.

The trenches themselves became a subject of administrative correspondence. The standard military grave, as specified in War Department regulations, measured six feet by two and a half by six feet deep. The Byberry trenches measured eight feet wide and varied in length from twenty to forty feet, depending on the steam shovel’s reach and the condition of the ground. The depth was four feet, not six, because the water table rose at that level and deeper excavation flooded. The coffins were placed in two layers where possible, separated by twelve inches of earth and lime. The arrangement saved space but complicated the ledger. The hospital’s burial book, which had previously recorded each interment with a name or description and a numbered stake, now carried entries like Trench 7, Layer A, Positions 1–18: Unclaimed, influenza, coffins city-supplied.

The Bureau of Health received weekly reports from Byberry, but the reports did not describe the trenches. They gave totals: interments by category, costs by line item, labor hours by source. The report for the week ending October 19, 1918, noted 847 interments in the potter’s field, compared with 23 for the corresponding week in 1917. The increase was attributed to epidemic conditions. The report did not mention seminarians or prisoners. It did not mention that the trenches were already full and that new excavation had begun on higher ground to the north, or that the steam shovel had broken down on October 18 and been replaced by hand labor for six hours, or that the deputy had requested and been denied additional deputies for prisoner supervision.

The mortality return for October 18 recorded 489 deaths. The return for October 19, prepared on a Sunday by a substitute clerk, recorded 446. These were the peak days, though no one knew it at the time. The Bureau of Health’s statistical summary for October, published in November, would identify the week of October 12–19 as the city’s maximum mortality, with 4, 597 deaths from influenza and pneumonia. The summary would not identify where those bodies were buried, or by whom.

The seminarians worked three days. The prisoners worked five.

The diary entry for October 19, the last day of the seminary assignment, describes a scene that appears in no official record. The new ground was higher and harder. The shovel men worked slower. The students had learned to place the coffins without speaking, to spread the lime in measured handfuls, to climb out when the trench was full and watch the earth go back in. That day a wagon arrived with small coffins, six of them, all the same size. The driver said they were from St. Mary’s, the orphanage. The students placed them in a row at the end of Trench 9. The foreman said the place would be marked later. The diarist did not know if he did.

The orphanage coffins were indeed recorded, though not in the burial book. A separate ledger maintained by the Catholic Diocese of Philadelphia lists six deaths at St. Mary’s Female Orphan Asylum between October 15 and 18, 1918, all attributed to influenza. The ledger gives names and approximate ages: Margaret, 7; Catherine, 9; two girls named Mary, 11 and 13; Agnes, 14; and a girl recorded only as Bridget, infant. The diocesan record notes that burial was arranged through city authorities, location unknown. The location was Trench 9, Layer B, positions not specified.

The prisoners completed their assignment on October 21. The deputy’s final notebook entry for the detail records that the prisoners returned to Holmesburg at 7 p.m., sentences commuted per agreement, no disciplinary issues. The nine named prisoners disappear from the county records at this point. Their commuted sentences would have expired in late November or early December 1918, depending on their original terms. Whether they returned to Philadelphia or left the city, whether they survived the epidemic’s later waves, whether they ever spoke of the trenches—none of this was recorded.

The steam shovel remained at Byberry until November 3, when it was returned to the Department of Public Works for street repairs on Chestnut Street. The trenches were leveled and seeded with grass in the spring of 1919. The numbered stakes were removed, the burial book closed, the hospital’s attention returned to its living patients. In 1921, the city transferred the potter’s field to the state, which incorporated it into the grounds of the newly renamed Philadelphia State Hospital. The trenches became lawn. The records became archives.

But on October 18, 1918, the work was not finished and the ground was not still. The wagons kept coming, the drivers silent, the horses stamping in the dark. The foreman checked manifests by lantern light after the curfew exemption expired, counting coffins he could not identify for burial in trenches he could not number, while somewhere in the city the Bureau of Health clerk prepared the mortality return that would record none of this, only the figure, only the column, only the count that made the abstraction seem managed and the management seem sufficient.

The most visceral symbol of the city’s breakdown was not the overflowing hospital wards but the expansion of its potter’s field, an operation sustained by coerced and conscripted labor that exposed the moral and logistical limits of civic order. The wards could be described as heroic struggle, the nurses as martyrs, the doctors as overwhelmed but resolute. The trenches admitted no such narrative. They were not a medical intervention. They were an administrative solution to a problem that had exceeded every category of normal response, and the labor that filled them came from men who had not chosen it—seminarians drafted by their deans, prisoners offered commutation they could not refuse, city workers pressed into supervision they had not trained for.

Trenches were chosen because the coffins would not stop coming and the gravediggers had stopped coming to work.

Prisoners were chosen because the free labor market had failed and the military could not spare men from the war.

Seminarians were chosen because the churches needed to demonstrate their utility and the students needed to demonstrate their vocation.

Lime was chosen because the ground was wet and the decomposition rapid and the hospital superintendent feared contamination of the water supply.

Names were omitted because the mortality return required none, and the burial book had no space, and the stakes could not be placed in ground that would be disturbed again tomorrow.

Each answer led to another question, each question to a deeper layer of institutional adaptation. The Bureau of Health had not planned for trenches. The hospital had not planned for steam shovels. The sheriff had not planned for commutation. These were improvisations, made in hours rather than days, authorized by telephone rather than ordinance, recorded in notebooks rather than codes. They represented not the failure of the city’s systems but their transformation under pressure—not a collapse into chaos but a reorganization around a new priority: the disposal of the dead at a speed that would permit the living to continue.

The transformation had costs that the mortality return could not measure. The seminary diary, read in full, reveals a student who entered the assignment with confidence in its spiritual meaning and ended it with something else—not doubt, exactly, but a silence where confidence had been. His final entry, dated October 22, describes a service at the seminary chapel for those they had buried, attended by eight of the eleven students who had worked at Byberry. The prayers were said. The diarist could not say them. The entry does not explain. The diary ends three days later, with no further reference to the epidemic.

The prisoners left no comparable record. The deputy’s notebook is silent on their psychological state, their conversations, their reasons for accepting or refusing the assignment. We know only that three refused and nine accepted, that they worked without incident, that they were returned to custody and their sentences commuted. The county archives contain no petition for pardon, no letter of complaint, no request for additional compensation. The silence may indicate satisfaction with the arrangement, or fear of recording dissatisfaction, or simply the destruction of records when the House of Correction was demolished in 1958.

What remains is the ground itself, and the documents that measured it. The Bureau of Health’s mortality returns for October 16–19, 1918, survive in the city archives, their figures now checked against hospital records, newspaper accounts, and the federal census of deaths. The totals have been verified: 486, 512, 489, 446. The burial book from Byberry survives in the state archives, its pages photographed and transcribed. The trenches have been located by ground-penetrating radar, their dimensions confirmed, their contents estimated. The seminarians’ names appear in their institutions’ records, the prisoners’ names in the county docket, the supervisors’ names in City Council testimony and Bureau of Health correspondence.

But the experience of the work—the weight of the ropes, the burn of the lime, the sound of the wagons in the dark, the sight of six small coffins all the same size—this survives only in the single diary and in the gaps between official statements. The Bureau of Health reported that emergency measures were successfully implemented. The hospital reported that interments were completed according to modified procedure. The sheriff reported that prisoner labor was utilized without incident. Each report was true. None was sufficient.

The gap between the true and the sufficient became, in the months following the epidemic, a zone of administrative forgetting. The City Council inquiry of November 1918, convened to investigate the city’s epidemic response, heard testimony from Wilmer Krusen, from the hospital superintendent, from the foreman, from the deputy. It did not hear from the seminary diarist or from any of the prisoners. The council’s final report, issued in January 1919, praised the prompt and effective measures taken to address the burial crisis and noted that voluntary and assigned labor was mobilized without disorder. The word trenches appeared once, in reference to military graves overseas. The word prisoners did not appear.

The administrative aftermath restored boundaries, erased particular lives from local memory, and transformed improvised crisis measures into normalized procedure. The trenches at Byberry were not the last mass graves in Philadelphia’s history—similar excavations would be made during later epidemics, during the Depression, during times of urban renewal when cemeteries were relocated for development. But they were the first on this scale, and they established a template: when the count exceeds the capacity, conscript the labor, modify the form, record only the total.

Back in 1918, the administrative innovations had saved lives and dissolved boundaries; their administrative aftermath restored the boundaries and erased the lives from local memory. What remained was the ground itself, and the knowledge of what it contained, passed not through official record but through the witnesses who had handled the ropes and spread the lime and watched the earth go back in. The seminarian told his story to his diary. The foreman told his to the City Council, carefully, within the limits of his role. The prisoners told no one, or their telling was not preserved.

The wagons stopped coming to Byberry on October 22. The mortality return for that day recorded 401 deaths, a decline that the clerk noted without comment. The steam shovel was idle by noon. The seminarians had returned to their studies, the prisoners to their cells, the supervisors to their regular duties. The trenches were full. The grass would grow in spring. The abstraction would prevail.

But on the morning of October 18, while the seminarians worked in pairs and the prisoners shoveled and the wagons waited in line, a city health inspector made a routine visit to the hospital cemetery to verify compliance with Board of Health regulations. His report, filed that evening, contains a single sentence that does not appear in any other document: Labor conditions satisfactory, interments proceeding, grounds orderly, but the number of dead exceeds all precedent and the men are tired. The inspector recommended additional labor. The recommendation was approved. The labor came, and came again, until the count began to fall. The tiredness was not recorded again.