Leon Bates first heard of Greenlawn Cemetery as a child from his mother.

As a nursing student at General Hospital, now Eskenazi, his mother sometimes heard of remains being brought in and examined by physicians. Riding in the car past 402 Kentucky Avenue, she would tell the story of the cemetery as a way to keep a curious, talkative kid preoccupied.

Decades later, the cemetery has resurfaced in Bates’ life as a topic of research and, now, advocacy.

[Update: City offers to buy Indy Eleven site, estimates 100s of remains exist]

[Ozdemir turns up Eleven Park heat with ad during Pacers game]

Over the past year, Bates has been part of a community of researchers — including historians, preservationists, genealogists and a city archivist — that has sprung up to uncover the history of the city’s first public cemetery before it is buried forever.

Two years ago, developer Ersal Ozdemir revealed he had acquired the property in the latest installment of a decade-long saga to find a permanent home for his professional soccer team. Last year, his company, Keystone Group, broke ground on Eleven Park, a $1.5-billion project to redevelop the roughly 20-acre site into apartments and commercial buildings anchored by a 20,000-seat soccer stadium.

Work also has started on the city’s Henry Street bridge project to connect the Keystone development on the east side of the river to the Elanco headquarters on the west side.

Both projects have already disturbed human remains, and advocates are certain they are likely to uncover more, including in an area that historical records describe as a segregated section of the city’s first public cemetery.

Watch Leon Bates here…

The situation shines a light on the limitations of state and federal regulations to preserve historic cemeteries. Federal laws are only triggered when a federal agency or funding is involved, which is not the case with Keystone’s project. And while state law requires archaeological plans to be filed with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, it does not mandate a full excavation. 

According to the plans, when human remains are found, work will stop and the remains will be documented and excavated by hand before construction continues.

That falls short of the demands of community members, who are advocating for a proactive archaeological dig on at least a portion of the site to find and carefully exhume remains.

City officials say such a dig is impractical if not impossible, due to the long history of development at the site and the absence of headstones or records that would indicate where people are still buried. But at least for the city bridge project, which involves about an acre of the former cemetery, city officials say they have committed to going above what’s required by state law, such as by using smaller equipment to prevent damaging any remains. They hope they can set an example for Keystone.

Keystone has made no such commitments, at least not publicly. A company spokesperson declined to answer specific questions about the company’s approach. In a statement this week to Mirror Indy, the spokesperson said Keystone “continues to work through the lawful process of excavation and reinterment under the advisement of our team of experts.”

In December, Keystone acknowledged the discovery of human remains at the site. As for how many, and whether any remains have been found since, Keystone won’t say.

Bates, a historian who has been researching the site’s history and working with the city in a community advisory group, is convinced there are several more bodies buried beneath the planned development. 

“We know African Americans were here from the very beginning,” Bates said. “So the question becomes: Before Crown Hill (Cemetery) opens in 1863, where were the African Americans buried?”

Uncovering the past

A couple of years ago, Bates was looking for a topic for an independent study as a Ph.D. student of pan-African studies at the University of Louisville. 

At the time, cities across the country were wrestling with what to do with Confederate monuments seen as celebrations of slavery and racial violence. He turned his attention to the monument that had sat in Garfield Park for nearly 100 years before being removed in 2020. 

That granite monument was dedicated to more than 1,000 Confederate soldiers who died imprisoned in Indianapolis’ Camp Morton. Although it was moved to Garfield Park in the 1920s, the monument was originally erected in one of the city’s earliest public cemeteries.

That’s when Bates began to dig into the complicated history of Greenlawn Cemetery — the name itself a somewhat misleading shorthand for four historic cemeteries, each with distinct histories and various levels of documentation. 

That complicated history raised questions about the final resting place for the city’s earliest African American residents, questions Bates and other researchers have set out to answer.

In order to better understand the history and future of the site, Mirror Indy relied on drafts of Bates’ research, two lectures hosted by Indiana Landmarks, dozens of newspaper articles and historical maps, and interviews with nearly a dozen people who have knowledge of the site and Greenlawn Cemetery’s history.

The first cemetery was established around 1821, when Indianapolis was still dense forest sparsely populated by settlers living in log cabins. It consisted of a four-acre plot of land located outside of city limits, which then consisted of what are now the boundaries of Mile Square.

As the city grew, so did the need for space to bury its dead, especially as sickness wracked the city. A six-acre lot east of the original burial grounds was purchased in 1834, another seven acres to the north in 1852 and, finally, a fourth area in the 1860s that carried the name Greenlawn Cemetery. Eventually, people used that name to describe all of the cemeteries. 

Fully understanding Greenlawn’s history is “a lot of detective work,” said Jordan Ryan, the city’s archivist. The city hired Ryan in late 2023 to sort and catalog a backlog of historical records. They’ve been assisting members of a community advisory group, which includes Bates and others and which the city established in response to public concerns raised about the people still buried there.

A cemetery sexton would have tracked the sales of grave plots and who was buried where, Ryan said, but there was no centralized place for those documents to go in the mid-19th century. Many are likely lost to time if they existed at all; in its earliest days, people would simply pick a spot and bury their loved one.

Historical maps show the shifting boundaries of the cemeteries, in particular as commercial interests took precedence over the cemeteries’ contents. Indianapolis’ meatpacking industry, and the railyards that supported it, cropped up around the cemeteries in the latter half of the 19th century and beyond. 

Eventually, the cemeteries disappeared from the map altogether.

“I think this is a story about land use, how land use changes over time, how we industrialize,” Ryan said. By the late 1920s, the cemeteries had largely disappeared from official maps, replaced by slaughterhouses, railyards and the Diamond Chain factory.

Bates is particularly interested in something that does not appear to have ever made it on any map.

Historical records refer to an area west of the original burying grounds, near the banks of the White River, where African American residents buried their dead. Records from an 1851 city council meeting say early African American residents at one point requested funding for a fence around their part of the cemetery. 

As he researched the Confederate marker, Bates learned of the dozen enslaved African Americans who were interred with Confederate prisoners of war at Greenlawn. They, along with the prisoners of war, were ultimately moved to Crown Hill. That, combined with the revelations about a segregated cemetery in Indianapolis, got Bates thinking: How many of Indy’s earliest African American residents were interred and never moved?

What happened to the city’s first African American residents, who records show were here at the city’s founding?

And given the incomplete record of reburials, how many of the city’s dead, of any race, might a developer find under 402 Kentucky Avenue?

Righting the wrongs

Many of the souls laid to rest at Greenlawn were rarely afforded peace for long. 

There were at least three cases of mass reinternments — the transfer first of 1,200 Union soldiers, then 1,600 Confederate prisoners of war who died in Indianapolis, to Crown Hill Cemetery. In 1924, remains from the oldest part of Greenlawn were disinterred and reburied, most of them in Floral Park Cemetery.

The removals were typically made in response to the demands of industry. The city quickly outgrew the Mile Square, and the land used as the cemeteries was quickly choked by economic interests on three sides, the fourth banked by the White River.

In some cases, families were left to find and move their own loved ones if they had the money. Others left their graves by much more violent means. Bodies buried at Greenlawn Cemetery were stolen and sold as cadavers to medical schools, according to newspaper accounts. And some of the remains simply fell victim to floods and erosion from the nearby White River.

Those mass reinternments and old newspaper reports of the closure of the cemeteries may have previously given some the impression that all the remains had been moved, said Jeannie Regan-Dinius, director of historic preservation at Crown Hill Foundation and former cemetery and burial ground registry coordinator for the state’s historic preservation office. 

But a closer examination of historical records has firmly cast doubt on that notion.

“What this project has also done is pushed historians into the archives in a way they hadn’t been before,” Regan-Dinius said. “We can prove that not everybody was moved. But the problem is we can’t prove how many.”

At many turns of the industrial screw, human remains have been discovered at the site. 

In 1925, during a dig to acquire backfill for the Kentucky Avenue bridge, workers collected “a small pile of bones and skulls, scooped up from their resting places by a large steam shovel and thrown aside by workmen,” according to an account in the Indianapolis News.

Many of the discoveries made during the 20th century were at the Diamond Chain site, according to two talks hosted by Indiana Landmarks. The company, which produced bicycle and automobile chains, began construction of a factory on the grounds of the historic cemeteries in 1917. 

Workers uncovered an iron coffin in 1947; during a 1967 expansion, workers found a dozen tombstones, a jawbone and hip bone. Human remains, casket fragments and tombstones were found in 1980, and in 1999, two full skeletons.

“Almost every time Diamond Chain expanded, they would unearth human remains or old grave markers,” said DeeDee Davis, a digital scholarship services specialist at IUPUI, in a 2020 talk. 

Davis, who has been researching the site as a subcontractor for an archaeology firm working for both the city and Keystone, declined to be interviewed for this article, citing a provision in her contract that does not allow her to discuss the work. 

Word about what appears to be the latest round of discoveries started circulating in December.

Roughly seven months after Keystone officially broke ground on the project, the company confirmed that “fragments of human remains” had been uncovered at the north end of the site. It’s unclear when the remains were found, and Keystone did not answer specific questions posed by Mirror Indy, including whether anything else has been found at the site.

In January, city officials revealed that workers also had found human remains — a human bone from an adult’s right hand — discovered six months prior during exploratory work for the Henry Street bridge project.

The city has not yet started construction on the east side of the river, and city officials said there have been no further discoveries.

But based on the amount of work being done at the Keystone site — an archaeological team was seen at the site as recently as mid-April — advocates and researchers believe the number of remains uncovered could be in the dozens if not more.

“History tells us that that cemetery was full to capacity. And in fact, people were being buried in layers,” said Eunice Trotter, director of the Black Heritage Preservation Program at Indiana Landmarks, who is also part of the community advisory group. “So we know there is a high potential for additional numbers of remains to be there.”

Uncertain future

Keystone’s renderings of Eleven Park show a full, brightly lit stadium and four glass and metal towers against a backdrop of the city’s skyline.

But that version of the future became much less certain on April 25. That’s when Mayor Joe Hogsett announced that the city plans to file an application for a Major League Soccer expansion club for Indianapolis and suggested another location.

Meanwhile, city contractors continue to work on the Henry Street project, but most of the work has been on the west side of the river. Brandon Herget, director of the city’s Department of Public Works, said the third phase of the project — which will include portions of the historic cemeteries — is set to start construction next year. 

In the meantime, Herget said his department has been working on a webpage dedicated to the research conducted by the community advisory group and where members of the public can submit questions or even information that will help add to the city’s understanding of the site.

Volunteer researchers also are working on cataloging the names of people buried at Greenlawn, in the hopes that living descendants might discover a connection to the historic cemeteries.

Last year, the Genealogical Society of Marion County created a database of Greenlawn burials. The group has documented nearly 10,000 records.

“The thing is, there’s estimates that there may have been as many as 20,000 people buried in Greenlawn. We can only account for less than half of that, maybe,” said Ron Darrah, vice president of the group.

Based on some of those records, Duane Perry has been conducting genealogical research into Black burials at Greenlawn.

Working from a list of African American deaths recorded in Marion County during a 10-year period, Perry has been trying to connect the dots between the city’s Black residents laid to rest at Greenlawn and their living descendants today.

One of those people may have been Cheney Lively, one of the first African Americans to call Indianapolis home. Born enslaved in Kentucky in the 1790s, Lively traveled to Indianapolis with Alexander Ralston, the man who would later lay the plans for the city’s Mile Square. She became a wealthy woman and landowner, and is the only Black woman in the city listed as head of a household in 1830.

Unlike Lively, we have a sense for where Ralston’s remains are. Forty-seven years after his death, a group of friends and workers located his unmarked grave in the old cemetery and helped reinter him in Crown Hill, though a newspaper report cast doubt on whether the remains were indeed his. Nevertheless, in 1937, the Indianapolis Teachers’ Federation coordinated the placement of a stone marking the site of his reburial, which the public can still visit today.

Perry hopes that his and others’ work to trace the genealogy of those known to be buried at Greenlawn will help living people connect to their broader family tree the way he did with his, and shed light on some of the often overlooked Black history of Indianapolis.

That includes Augustus Turner, who died in 1880 and was buried in the city cemetery. He was a wealthy, prominent Mason and barber who founded Bethel AME Church, Indianapolis’ oldest African American congregation and a stop on the Underground Railroad. His wife and many of his children were also interred at Greenlawn, as was Lively’s husband, John G. Britton, a prominent community leader and Black Mason.

“The story of these people needs to be told,” Perry said.

The road ahead

About a year ago, preservationist Trotter traveled to the former Diamond Chain site. 

“I had to see it for myself,” Trotter said. “To feel those spirits hanging in the air over there.”

When she visited the site last year, the Diamond Chain factory building still stood, and the grounds near the river were relatively green and lush. Now nothing remains above ground at 402 Kentucky Avenue, save for a few tall piles of dirt and gravel.

Watch Eunice Trotter here…

Trotter would like to see an archaeological dig at the segregated portion of Greenlawn. Late last year, she organized a ground-penetrating radar analysis of a small portion of the area where records suggest the segregated burial grounds were located. The radar found evidence of buried rail lines and utilities, as well as an “area of interest” near the site’s eastern edge. 

An archaeological dig has never been on the table for this site, said Herget, the DPW director. He said the radar report, which did not affirmatively show grave shafts in the area studied, supported the reasoning for the city’s approach.

“Given the compromised nature of the site, it was never a possibility,” he said.

As for how the city will memorialize the site, it’s too soon to say, Herget said. He and the department will continue to have conversations with the community advisory group.

Bates would like to see the area put to rest.

“If you just let the grass go, it becomes a green space and nobody will say anything,” Bates said, though he recognized that’s unlikely on such a large plot of land so close to downtown. The Indiana Library and Historical Board approved a historical marker for the site last year, but with the recent news about the city’s own soccer stadium plans, it’s hard to imagine what comes next.

Trotter, an author and journalist, has traced her own history back to the 1700s in Indiana, meaning her own relatives are possibly buried at Greenlawn.

“Any of us who have deep roots in Indiana could have ancestors there, regardless of your race,” Trotter said. “And they should be interested in the outcome of this research.”

Trotter said Keystone’s representatives seemed closer than ever to sharing information about what they’ve found so far — if not publicly, then at least with the community advisory group. 

Until then, it is anyone’s best, educated guess for who’s still buried at Greenlawn Cemetery.

Without a clear path forward, advocates are left wondering if Indianapolis will miss its chance to properly honor those still buried there.

“Are we going to right history today? This is our last chance to do that,” said Trotter. “Or are we going to be recorded in history burying those people under cement?”

Reach Mirror Indy reporter Emily Hopkins at 317-790-5268 or emily.hopkins@mirrorindy.org. Follow them on most social media @indyemapolis.