Grave Matters: Unearthing the North Graveyard

Tim Fulton 00:08Welcome to the Confluence Cast, presented by Columbus Underground. We are a weekly Columbus-centric podcast focusing on the civics, lifestyle, entertainment, and people of our city. I'm your host, Tim Fulton. This week: there is often a complex interplay between preservation and progress. A year into his exploration, Columbus Underground reporter Jesse Bethea continues to sift through the story of how the removal of remains from what was once the North Market parking lot unfolded. From the contentious removal of centuries-old graves to the forensic analysis of unearthed remains, today's episode navigates the ethical, legal, and emotional complexities surrounding the issue. In the quest to honor the past while embracing the future, we examine what lies beneath the surface of urban development, and confront the ghosts of history that still shape our city today. You can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theconfluencecast.com. Enjoy the interview. Sitting down here with Jesse Bethea, a Columbus Underground freelance journalist. Jesse, how are you? I'm great, good. Last time we talked, we talked about the series of articles that you had done on the North Graveyard — the graveyard that was discovered in basically the parking lot of the North Market, just north of downtown Columbus, just south of the Short North. There have been some developments since then, so I basically wanted to check in. I also, at the beginning of this podcast, kind of want to give you a lot of credit for inspiring me — and, I think, our listeners a little bit — to think about Columbus in a slightly different way, to think of it as a place that maybe we haven't taken as much ownership over as we maybe should. So I wanted to give you that credit there. Well, thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Do you feel the same way about this story, I think, as you are running it down? Like, yeah, let's —

Jesse Bethea 02:20Let me be clear, I definitely think the same way. Okay. And let me put it like this. I see people sort of cheerleading Columbus, and I see people degrading Columbus, you know, and sort of back and forth all the time. And the place where they never seem to meet is the idea that Columbus has any sort of history. The people that degrade Columbus are sort of like, "We have no culture, we have no history, we didn't come from anywhere. This place is just sort of —" and, in a subtler way, on the side of people cheerleading, and always wanting the newest thing, they sort of do that without thinking, what are we losing as we chase after the newest thing?

Tim Fulton 03:01Well, and maybe I would frame their cheerleading sort of in the "we have this great opportunity to build," right? And it's like, yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. But building upon what, right? Which, I think, metaphorically, this story is that, right?

Jesse Bethea 03:17One great example of that — and this is far afield, so feel free to cut it out — but there's the plaque at Coleman's Point, on the side of the river, and it has a picture of Michael Coleman, and it has his famous quote, that the city that stays the same gets left behind. And it's beautiful, it's a great sentiment, but every time I think about it, or every time I walk by it, I'm like, I wonder if that's gonna get torn down one day to build something else. And that would be, in a way, following his mantra, his edict, right? But it also — he too is a part of Columbus history. And how would we who remember that part of Columbus history feel if it was destroyed? And in the same way, I think that erasing the North Graveyard, which is what's happening — I mean, it's already been mostly erased, paved over — so it's not, and that's another thing, it's not as if this development is erasing it. It's already been erased.

Tim Fulton 04:21So let's step back a little bit, for those that did not hear the first series. I invite you to do it. But what's the high-level story here?

Jesse Bethea 04:32Okay, this is a speed run. In the early 1800s, right as Columbus was founded, a plot of land was picked to be the city cemetery. Every city needs one, you know, people are always dying. Yes. So that's where they started burying people, and they kept burying people there until about the Civil War.

Tim Fulton 04:51To be clear, this is the location right behind where the North Market currently sits. Yes, got it.

Jesse Bethea 04:56To give people some dimensions, the land below Spruce, above Convention Center Drive, in between Park Street and High Street. So it was right on High Street, it was this sort of trapezoidal shape. And it's quite large.

Tim Fulton 05:12There's a reason why Char Bar in the basement is so creepy.

Jesse Bethea 05:18That was right there, perfectly. Yeah. So about 1864, it was too full, it was decrepit, tombstones were falling down. And so the city decided, we're not allowing people to be buried there anymore. A few years after that, they said, this is a really good piece of land, right? We're gonna start selling off pieces of this to developers that want to build, you know, railroads, they want to build tavern saloons.

Tim Fulton 05:46What was your first article named? "Come Get Your Dead"? Yes, yes.

Jesse Bethea 05:50And so, as part of this effort, they were like, obviously we're not going to build these buildings on top of people, if you have them. And they would put articles in the newspapers that would say, if you have anyone buried in the North Graveyard, please come get your dead. Now, obviously, what that depended on was that people saw that in the newspaper, right, or could still read in the 1870s, right, and that they still lived here. And if none of those things were true, then you had a bunch of people still buried under the North Graveyard that nobody knew were there. And so they dug up all the people they could find, and said, "Well, that's it." And so then the word was, the graveyard's cleared, and we can build whatever we want.

Tim Fulton 06:41Do you believe, at that time — and forgive me, I don't remember this — do you believe at that time that they thought there's no more bodies here?

Jesse Bethea 06:50I think that from then on, for the next 150 years, there was a lot of wishful thinking. I think that, you know, there are all of these stories from between that time and now saying, "Oh, yeah, we were digging a telegraph line or a telephone line, and we found a skull," or, "You know, we were building this and we found some bones." But I think the overarching wishful thinking was always, "Well, we got most of it, there's going to be a few."

Tim Fulton 07:20"These were one-offs, this was not a thing." Because there was —

Jesse Bethea 07:23No real way to know until you did a comprehensive archaeological excavation. Right, which is what we do.

Tim Fulton 07:32And we did that kind of like — that wasn't the point of it, right? The point of it was, we're gonna put this new tower behind the North Market, which, as we speak here on Leap Day, 2024, they're laying the foundation, they're done digging. Yeah. So fast forward at least a little bit in terms of your narrative. There was some obfuscating at that time, when we talked about, like, well, who's in charge of this, and frankly, whose responsibility is this? There were tents that were covering up the site of remains in the parking lot. It did indeed delay the construction of the North Market tower. But I think you found some additional things as well, like — what? Because I think originally the final resting place was meant to be Green Lawn Cemetery. That's still true. It is? Okay.

Jesse Bethea 08:31And this is kind of where the wishful thinking of it all felt like it kind of collapsed. Tara Rose Gaisano, who's one of the scientists working for Lawhon & Associates, she was one of the people responsible for excavating these remains. She actually said to city council, I think in July of last year, she said something to the effect of, "We thought we were gonna discover, you know, 200 mostly empty graves. And we discovered many multiples more." So, hundreds more.

Tim Fulton 09:03Sorry, dangling modifier there — hundreds more graves, but empty?

Jesse Bethea 09:11It's been very hard for me to discern that. I've heard —

Tim Fulton 09:16I'm gonna ask for another clarifying — no, that's fine. There are a lot of graves. There are a lot of graves — more graves than anyone thought. More. Yes. There remain —

Jesse Bethea 09:26But remains were found. Yes. And more remains than anyone thought would still be there.

Tim Fulton 09:31And do we have a concept of how many people? Maybe — because you showed me a map even at one point that was like, "Well, that looks like a grave, but see how it's constructed, that means that that's a site of graves, plural."

Jesse Bethea 09:49And some of the graves are on top of each other. Right? Exactly. Well, there's crosscutting graves as well. So it is very hard to pin down a specific number. Last time I talked to Tara Rose, she sort of said, "You know, if I tell you a number now, it could be different tomorrow." It's — they're taking a jumble of bones, more or less, and they're sorting them out into the individual people that those bones belong to, because there's not going to be three femurs, right. And that process takes time. It could take years. So I've heard estimates in the high 900s. But — sorry, it's very fluid — of individuals, remains. Yes, of individual people.

Tim Fulton 10:36Sorry, that's a lot to take in. But translating that back maybe a little bit — it's also entirely possible, "Hey, you came and got the remains for your family," and that excavation may not have been as thorough and proper as, I think, everyone would hope would happen.

Jesse Bethea 11:00I would say that's extremely likely, okay, in many cases. And so I think when all is said and done, and all the remains are reburied at Green Lawn, there's a very good chance there'll be people buried in multiple different spots at Green Lawn, because of what you just described — that they did such a slapdash job in the 1800s.

Tim Fulton 11:23There may even be people in Green Lawn that are in Green Lawn, that another, quote-unquote, part of them is now about to be in there.

Jesse Bethea 11:35That's exactly — yeah. So, well, just to answer your original question — because, yeah, they will be buried at Green Lawn, but there was a specific section in Green Lawn that was established in the 1800s for people who were being moved out of the North Graveyard. They found — sorry —

Tim Fulton 11:50This conversation is going to be like this, and that's okay. Let's say remains were not gathered by family or next of kin, however you want to refer to them. Through the city, it was believed that there was an attempt to migrate those bodies, even if they were unclaimed. Yes.

Jesse Bethea 12:09It depended entirely on — because a lot of the gravestones were missing at that time, or it was not well taken care of or documented. Apparently, it depended entirely on the institutional memory of the caretakers at the graveyard, to remember where people were buried.

Tim Fulton 12:31So, back to Green Lawn — sorry — there was a plot?

Jesse Bethea 12:34There was a plot specifically designated. And that is where, back in the early 2000s, they did an excavation along Spruce Street, and that's where those remains were buried. That's sort of the section for people who were buried in the North Graveyard. They found, in this last round of excavations in 2023, they found too many bones. And so they've actually chosen a new plot at Green Lawn that will be where these folks go. And so — I don't know where the plans sit now. Last time I talked to Randy Rogers, who is in charge of the Green Lawn Cemetery Association, he was saying they were going to build a new memorial there for these people, because, obviously, we're not going to be able to identify most of them, right. At least, it's extremely unlikely.

Tim Fulton 13:31And — so, talk to me about how — because it's fascinating to me that you're so ingrained in this one very specific — but it speaks to so many different things sometimes.

Jesse Bethea 13:44And this is why I'm depending on you, because I'm in the weeds on this. So, yeah.

Tim Fulton 13:50Yes. Because that's why I'm stopping you. Because you are so deep in a story like this, that it's like, "Oh, yeah, I got to tell you about this part of it," right. Like, it's like telling somebody, you know, "Why'd that marriage end?" or "Why did you break up?" It's like, "Well, we had a fight about this." That seems pretty dumb. Yeah. But if you consider the context —

Jesse Bethea 14:13Sometimes it's like, "Right, this is a dream I had last night." Yes.

Tim Fulton 14:16And there's a lot to it. So, when remains are discovered — a collection of remains, which I would hope is a fairly rare occurrence — there is a proper way to inter them, to bury them. You don't just put them all into one thing, if you can avoid it, you have to make a reasonable effort to sort of separate them. What have you learned about that? Like, how are they handling that?

Jesse Bethea 14:52So, what I was told by Mary Ellen O'Shaughnessy, who has sort of taken on the funerary aspects of all this — her intention is, once they have done all the analysis (and, again, this is going to be a years-long process), to do the osteological analysis —

Tim Fulton 15:10"Osteological" means bones, right?

Jesse Bethea 15:13— and have them separated into individuals, and saying, like, "These are all the bones that we can find of this individual," right. Some of that's going to be easier, because a lot of them were articulated, they were fully sort of complete skeletons. So those are going to be easier to separate into individuals. Once they're separated out, they're each going to be put into their own individual boxes — not a full casket box. Yeah, those boxes are going to fit into human-sized caskets. And then they're going to be buried in a vault, and then the vault is going to be under the ground at Green Lawn. So it's a bit of a Tetris situation, they're going to be putting boxes within boxes.

Tim Fulton 15:56Okay. But respectfully stored is really a way to sort of think about it.

Jesse Bethea 16:02Right. And they're going to be separated. And one of the reasons is —

Tim Fulton 16:06It brings — I have all due respect for human remains, right, but it sounds a little bit like almost a filing system of, like, "Hey, we know that this is this, and so we're gonna put it in this enclosed thing," which may then be, you know — and then the next one we discover is right next to it, and it's got its number or catalog reference associated to it.

Jesse Bethea 16:31It does feel clinical, but there's a way of looking at it and saying, like, that's almost the best you can do. Yeah, because there's no way to identify, right. And the reason they're going to be at Green Lawn is because, again, the remains previously that were moved out of the North Graveyard ended up there. So, presumably, they would be buried in the same cemetery as —

Tim Fulton 16:58Family, or at least folks who were around at the same time — contemporaries.

Jesse Bethea 17:01Right. Which is, again, as close as you can get without having any identification.

Tim Fulton 17:06And from an archaeological standpoint, we should say that there was not a bulldozer that, like, went through and got all these remains. As soon as they found remains, actual construction and digging stopped. And there — are they archaeologists that you would call them?

Jesse Bethea 17:23So, this is an interesting distinction. They are what's called CRM archaeologists. That's Cultural Resources Management. So they are archaeological contractors that people hire when they are going to be operating in a location that they know has, you know, human remains or archaeological — it'd be the same as if they were looking at a site that was known to be like a Native site. Got it. And it wasn't so much like, "We just start digging in, and stop if we hit bones," because they were aware. I mean, everyone knew this spot was —

Tim Fulton 18:02"This is gonna — when we do this — yeah, everybody —" Yeah. What was interesting to me at the time is, I felt like I knew that, and then when the story came out, and everybody was like, "What the fuck?" And I was like, "We knew that, like, we knew." But in hindsight, what you realize is, like, yeah, we knew it, but we don't talk about that. Yeah.

Jesse Bethea 18:25And it's funny that, like, I've done 11 of these things, and the comments are always sort of like, "What?" And I'm happy you're learning this, but, yeah, I don't know what else we need to tell. So I think that's a symptom of this sort of thing we have about Columbus, of like, "Yeah, there wasn't a Columbus before 1989. What are you talking about? How could there be a graveyard under North Market?"

Tim Fulton 18:50Right. City Center was our founding.

Jesse Bethea 18:53And so, yeah, I can understand why it's such a surprise. I actually had a really great conversation with Bucky Cutright, the person who runs the ghost tours. And he was saying, like, "Yeah, you know, it's annoying, but it's good for business, because I'm always surprising people." Like, all right, yeah.

Tim Fulton 19:12That's fair. So, fast forward a little bit. We've covered that it was an archaeological dig. They did this in a proper way. When remains were discovered — so now they're going through the process of basically separating out the remains, which may be a very long process. And not —

Jesse Bethea 19:35Not just separating, but they're going to try and determine age — you know, both age of the person when they died, and also how old the remains are, both those factors. They're trying to determine gender where they can, they're trying to determine ethnicity where they can, determine race where they can, and then also determine pathologies. So, if there are any obvious injuries that you can look at and be like, "Well, this person has a bullet hole in their skull, so I know how they died," you know. And so, that sort of thing — trying to determine how the people died, to the extent that they can. Basically any information that you can glean from the bones and, you know, if there was any clothing or artifacts they were buried with. They didn't get a lot of that, but there are some things they discovered, artifact-wise, that might help give you an idea of how old they are, where they came from. You know, if it's like, "Hey, this button was only made in Germany," or whatever, or "This button was only made at a certain time," exactly, or "This button is, you know, expensive, so this guy must have been a wealthy person." That sort of thing. And the same with, like, if their teeth are worn down, that might give you an idea of their economic status.

Tim Fulton 20:53And so, what would be done with that? Right, is that the kind of thing that, like, someone like you as a journalist would, right, you know, write the third third of your book about, like, "Here's the people that were there"?

Jesse Bethea 21:10Yeah, that would be compiled into a report — a public report. It would be, one imagines, quite lengthy, because they found a lot of people and a lot of things. And it's gonna take a long time for them to write it.

Tim Fulton 21:27Okay. Hopefully the book comes out first. So, we had been talking a little bit about how the folks who are doing that work have changed over time. Is that — before we get too far into it — should we read anything into that? Or is that just sort of administrative-state people, this person started the job and this person finished it? And so, is that aside, or — why did that happen?

Jesse Bethea 21:55Stuff happens. I've heard a lot of different reasons for why the osteological analysis leadership has sort of shifted, and kind of different reasons from different sources. I don't really want to speculate too much on that, of course. But I think, in general, there's a striving for efficiency, for accuracy, obviously. But this is part of — you know, they're doing a job. Lawhon & Associates are doing a job for their client, which is Rockbridge, the company that's building the Merchant Building. And so they're trying to do a good job, but also a speedy job, within reason. So I think that —

Tim Fulton 22:38That study doesn't sort of hold up — well, sorry, now that I say that, I know why. Right, it costs more. Yeah, okay. It certainly does. So that has sort of changed hands a little bit. Sure. But I guess what I'm trying to ask is, is that even important to talk about? Because we have another kind of juicy thing that you uncovered.

Jesse Bethea 22:59It's not unimportant. It's just, it's still very much in the infancy. You know, I think it's going to take a long time to do this. Even when I say trying to do it speedily, that's a relative term. Like, you could send all of them to, like, a DNA lab to see what DNA you can extract — and that's, we'll talk about that later, cholera — but that costs a lot of money, it takes a lot of time. And so maybe you decide it's worth it to do it for a sampling of the bones, but not all of them. And, in fact, it might be that they do a sampling of the bones to do the gender, the race, and the ethnicity — again, picking the most articulated ones, the ones that you have the most remains for — and saying, "Okay, let's just focus on these."

Tim Fulton 23:57And is that the smart way to do it? Because I feel like it's sampling, right? It's like polling. Like, intelligent people will know, we take a census, which is literally, "We're going to do every single thing." And with basically the amount of things they need to process — frankly, I don't believe there's any finite time we need to do it in, but, like, yeah, maybe we do a sampling. And this is, I think, what I'm advocating for — do a sampling, get a good idea of what we're looking at, and do an Occam's razor, like, "Oh, these are horses, not zebras," and then continue the work of categorizing these people.

Jesse Bethea 24:43The typical way of doing it, I believe, is doing the sampling based on the remains that you have a fuller picture of. They're definitely going to photograph and catalog all of the remains they discovered. But, like you were saying, if you just have a femur that doesn't belong to any other skeleton, and you're like, "Well, this clearly represents one individual, right, we just don't have the rest of them," there's really not more information you can get from that, other than, this is a femur, and maybe it has an injury or something, and we can maybe figure out how old it is. But comparing that to — we also have this articulated skeleton, or, you know, however many they have that are fully articulated — you're gonna be like, "Let's just focus on those, because we can get so much data out."

Tim Fulton 25:33There's so much more information. Right. So what other testing did you reference that they're doing?

Jesse Bethea 25:39Well, one thing I'll say is that Lawhon & Associates, at least when they were excavating, seemed to be more thorough than they necessarily needed to be. And, in particular, one of the ways is doing what's called photogrammetry. That's basically — they took, you know, several dozen different photographs of each grave, and from those photographs build a high-resolution 3D model of what was in there. They did that for every single grave, which is unusual — usually you wouldn't do that, and usually you wouldn't do it for empty graves. But they did it for the empty ones too. They found a grave, they were like, "This was clearly a grave," but they dug down six feet and there was nothing there — no remains, no artifacts, no anything — they still did the photogrammetry of the empty grave, so that they had that data as well. So they were very thorough in that regard. And so that is also going to be a very fascinating part of the report when it comes out.

Tim Fulton 26:37Because that will tell us both where the grave sites were, but also, I imagine, where they may have — what did you refer to it when one grave — crosscutting? Yeah. When they had graves like that, that will show that. And this is me speculating.

Jesse Bethea 26:52But I imagine it will also show a very clear dichotomy between articulated skeletons — all of which were buried with evidence, according to Lawhon & Associates. Every articulated skeleton was buried with evidence of a previous coffin. So they were clearly buried in a container of some sort. So it'll show a clear dichotomy between those and the sort of jumbles of —

Tim Fulton 27:18The jumbles — sorry, jumbles of bones, and, "Oh, look, there's no coffin here."

Jesse Bethea 27:24Yeah. Which could mean — it doesn't necessarily mean they were buried without one, but it could mean — so this is clearly evidence of, there was a grave here, there was a coffin here, there was an articulated skeleton, the coffin was exhumed, the skeleton was moved, but maybe they didn't do a good job, and all these bones were left behind.

Tim Fulton 27:42And that's probable, but also — I don't know enough about these things, but is it also possibly evidence that, like, this was the poor side of the graveyard? Sure. This is where — maybe they were coffins, but they're not as nice.

Jesse Bethea 27:58Historically, we know that that was the case, that there was a potter's field situation, because it was the city's cemetery. This is where, if you died in Columbus between 1813 and 1864, that's where you were buried — and especially if you couldn't afford to be buried elsewhere.

Tim Fulton 28:16Additionally, is it evidence that, like, maybe this area was less disturbed than another in the development that happened after that, when that land started being developed?

Jesse Bethea 28:26Well, I think the premise is that all of the — because they only dug under the parking lot — the parking lot area has been undisturbed, you know, at least under the ground. Like, there — they did find foundations of, like, the previous North Market, and the Quonset hut. But overall, compared to the rest of that area, this sort of square where the parking lot was was fairly undisturbed under the soil. And so, again, relatively — I think, no matter what, the expectation is there wouldn't have been very much disturbance.

Tim Fulton 28:59What other testing, in addition to —

Jesse Bethea 29:02So, one of the things they did was soil samples, and they were looking for a number of things, but one of the things I know they were looking for specifically is — I had a great conversation with an Italian archaeologist named Giuseppe Vercellotti. He was an advisor early on in the excavations, doing the photogrammetry, because he did very similar work at a place called the Harrison Township cholera cemetery down in Lockbourne, which is contemporary with North Market. So the people that were buried there roughly around the same time as the people buried at North Graveyard. But his specialty is bioarchaeology, and specifically chasing cholera cemeteries — he studied cholera cemeteries in the US, he studied them in Italy. And he did the soil samples at Harrison Township, and Tara Rose Gaisano, who I mentioned earlier, was working there as well. And so, when she was hired — there's a lot of overlap between these two, partially just because there aren't that many archaeologists in Central Ohio — but there's a lot of overlap between these two projects. And so they continued this system of doing soil samples. The process would have been to do samples at the head of a grave, the sort of mid-stomach area, groin area, and then the feet. The reason to do it at the feet is more of a control, because you did not expect any cholera DNA there. But you would expect it expelling from the orifices of a deceased person. And so, the point of that is to try and identify cholera DNA, because we know that it was very prevalent around that time. We know, historically, that people who died of cholera in Columbus during the two major cholera pandemics — that was 1833 and 1849 — a lot of those people would have been buried in the North Graveyard.

Tim Fulton 31:07The point — sorry — is knowing that simply, "Oh, we know how this person died"? Or is it additional, like, "Well, is it about that individual person? Or is it more for the historical record, of, oh, more people died of cholera than we were aware of in Columbus?" Or is there some significance, like, "Oh, we can identify this strain that happened in 1833"? Is it for modern use and purposes?

Jesse Bethea 31:40There's a couple of reasons why that would be significant. One of them would be — this is unlikely — but if we were like, "Oh, you know, this person died of cholera, historically we know that, and so maybe we can identify them based on that." But that's crazy unlikely. The second reason is for the historical record, to get an idea of how people with cholera were treated after they were deceased in the US. And it's interesting, because there are a lot of myths about cholera epidemics — a lot of stories about, like, mass graves, and people being tossed into pits and forgotten about. And Dr. Vercellotti said a lot of that is sort of false. He compared it to — a mass grave makes sense in a situation like a genocide, right, where the people doing the burying hate the people being buried. But in a pandemic situation, you're being buried by your loved ones, there's still an acknowledgment, right. And he said that did happen sometimes in European countries, where the scale of death was just so much that anything else was not an option. Those cholera cemeteries look very different from the ones he's studied in the US, got it. The third significant thing is, if they found cholera DNA at North Graveyard, that would be the first time anyone's ever found cholera DNA in a gravesite. They've never been able to find it, even in graves that they know are cholera graves.

Tim Fulton 33:13Okay, so we're looking for something we've been in the past trying to find. Yes. Got it.

Jesse Bethea 33:19Dr. Vercellotti says he did the samples at Harrison Township, where, again, he knows these were people who died of cholera and were buried. He found DNA of other pathogens, just general human DNA — which, of course, they could easily find from North Graveyard as well — but he never found cholera. And he's like —

Tim Fulton 33:39Isn't that a theory that you would be able to — if he's never found it — is it a theory that you would be able to find it?

Jesse Bethea 33:51Theoretically, you should be able to find it. But if he did find it — if they did find it — that would be the first time.

Tim Fulton 33:56We're putting Columbus on the map.

Jesse Bethea 34:01His theory is that cholera — I don't know how much you know about cholera. Not a lot. I, unfortunately, had to read a lot about it to write that story. But it just flushes out your system. That's how —

Tim Fulton 34:13And it's bad. One, it's bad, and two, it's gross. Yeah. Like, it's a bad gross.

Jesse Bethea 34:17You die of diarrhea, essentially. From dehydration due to uncontrollable diarrhea. And so his theory is, if a person is dying that way, they're flushing basically everything out of their system, and there's no cholera left when they're buried.

Tim Fulton 34:37Mm-hmm.

Jesse Bethea 34:38So he was saying, well —

Tim Fulton 34:39Or even, maybe, like, the embalming or interment process — it just wouldn't be right.

Jesse Bethea 34:44Right, because you would expect that, one, your family members wouldn't bury you with soiled clothing, for example; two, your family members may very well clean you — which, obviously, you would want — but would possibly spread the disease, right, cholera. So that's also dangerous. But so there's all sorts of reasons why they wouldn't find it. But if they found it, that'd be pretty exciting, you know, from a bioarchaeological point of view.

Tim Fulton 35:17And so, the testing aside — as you've continued to research this, I think that you've also done a good job of taking a higher-level view, that is not only, "Okay, this happened, how was it addressed?" but also sort of saying, like, how did the people that we entrust with handling these things address it? You actually did a FOIA request with the City of Columbus, and with the state agency that's empowered to address these. What's the agency — the State Historic Preservation Office? Yes, the State Historic Preservation Office. Both of them responded to your request in slightly different ways. Yes. Tell us about that first, because I think it's interesting.

Jesse Bethea 36:07So, I sent a FOIA request to the City of Columbus, and they responded pretty well, and pretty quickly. Matt Lorenz in particular — I've interviewed him, and I've worked with him a couple of times on the story — he sort of compiled all the emails that he had available during the process, specifically of the 2022 excavations, because that was what the city was involved in. They didn't really have much involvement with the big excavations in '23. But he sent sort of a folder full of stuff that I could look through. And then I sent a similar request to SHPO, to the State Historic Preservation Office, and got a different response. I was told that SHPO is underneath the Ohio History Connection, and so they told me they are technically a nonprofit, and not a state agency. Even though —

Tim Fulton 37:04Which is sort of true. I mean, they are an independent organization that is funded by the state.

Jesse Bethea 37:10Yeah. And the SHPO, you know, State Historic Preservation Officer, is appointed by the governor. So there's definitely some — it's more of a gray area than I think —

Tim Fulton 37:25I think what they did is they said, "Here are the emails, by the way, we don't have to give them to you."

Jesse Bethea 37:31Yeah, that was the gist of it. It was, "You know, we want to be helpful, here's everything we have, but we also don't have to give this to you."

Tim Fulton 37:39And so what did you find there?

Jesse Bethea 37:41I found a really good, candid look at the interactions between each of the different — I would say entities, because it's not just agencies, it's, you know, private companies, contractors, all the different entities involved in this — sending emails back and forth, just trying to get on the same page for years, in advance of the beginning of excavations in 2022.

Tim Fulton 38:07Did you ask for everything about the Merchant Building in general? Or was it like, "Hey, anything just about the excavation"?

Jesse Bethea 38:15Specifically — because I also knew that, like, any interactions that Lawhon & Associates had with Rockbridge, I don't have access to those. They're private companies, they don't have any responsibility to give that to the media. But anything that involves the city or state, to an extent, is more public. And so that's what I had access to. So I was sort of looking at it from the perspective of Matt Lorenz and from Crystal Horrocks, and from those two perspectives, I really got an idea of, like, who was talking to each other, who was not talking to each other, and kind of what the pitfalls were. And there was one incident in particular, like, right after they started excavations in 2022. The city had AEP out there on Park Street doing, like — it wasn't unrelated, in the sense that they were doing utility work, and it was for the Merchant Building. But apparently nobody really thought that they had to have that as part of the calculus. Because the story that I got from the emails, from Crystal Horrocks, is that they were out there, and they started their work, and some of the guys from Lawhon & Associates came over to them and said, "Hey, what are you doing? Do you know about the graveyard? Do you know there's bodies there?" Right. And the contractors are saying, "This is a cemetery, we should probably stop and see what's going on." And so Crystal Horrocks is learning this and saying, like, "This is bad, this is someone who dropped the ball here." And so you get the sense that SHPO determined that they had no authority to oversee any of this, because it didn't trigger any of the laws that they are concerned with.

Tim Fulton 40:12But who's — so it's a city issue?

Jesse Bethea 40:15It's complicated. There are three major — you can cut some of this out. Well, I'm interested. So, there are three major laws, two state, one federal. The federal law is Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. Yes. And that really stresses, any federal agency doing anything that might impact a cemetery has to be coordinating with the state SHPO.

Tim Fulton 40:50Got it, which makes it all the more publicly reportable — no one would — but, yeah, you can say no to my FOIA request.

Jesse Bethea 41:02SHPO determined that it didn't apply here, because no federal agency was involved.

Tim Fulton 41:07So, box checked. All right, our two state laws.

Jesse Bethea 41:13Yeah. Ohio Revised Code 149-point-something.

Tim Fulton 41:18I can't quite get the number, though. Like —

Jesse Bethea 41:19I think it's 149.07.

Tim Fulton 41:23We'll fact-check at the end of this episode.

Jesse Bethea 41:25So it's basically the same thing, except with state agencies. Any state entity that's doing anything to impact a cemetery has to —

Tim Fulton 41:32Work with SHPO. And guess what, these are private companies that are building on private land.

Jesse Bethea 41:38With $34 million of state tax credits, but —

Tim Fulton 41:41Yeah. Okay. But so —

Jesse Bethea 41:43But that still doesn't count.

Tim Fulton 41:47I point you to the Supreme Court saying, "Hey, if you're not — if you're not taking money from them, that's — you are not giving them money." And so, state credits — you're not giving them money. I wasn't saying that. The Supreme Court settled it. So, that's box number two.

Jesse Bethea 42:07So they're good. Okay.

Tim Fulton 42:08What's box three?

Jesse Bethea 42:11I'm gonna forget this one — the code number. The code, not important. I think it's 759. So this Ohio Revised Code number seven-something, it's an interesting one, because it says the municipality can sell land that was previously a cemetery but is now abandoned — North Market or North Graveyard, of course. But the buyer of that land cannot take possession of it without removing all of the graves. And it has this interesting language where it says you have to re-erect any monuments or tombstones found at that location, at the location of reburial.

Tim Fulton 42:59Which, in this case, would basically say, "They're going to Green Lawn, and that's what we did."

Jesse Bethea 43:06Put a pin in that, though. Under that law —

Tim Fulton 43:10That wasn't city land at that point, was it?

Jesse Bethea 43:13It was, because it belonged to North Market — well —

Tim Fulton 43:17Sorry, it belongs to the city, not the North Market, like, development region or whatever. But that's still a city entity, okay.

Jesse Bethea 43:24Legally, okay. So, that Ohio state law does not say anything about SHPO's involvement. And because of that, SHPO — there are these emails from Lawhon & Associates and from Rockbridge to Crystal Horrocks asking, "Hey —"

Tim Fulton 43:43"Can you sign off on this? Are we okay? Are we doing the right —" Okay, because that's what you, as a developer — your reading of the law — what authority can basically vouch that we did this the right way? "Here's our plan." Yeah. And then what did SHPO say?

Jesse Bethea 44:00She had to say, "You know, I can give you recommendations about what you should be doing and what you shouldn't be doing, but we don't have any jurisdiction over this. So I can't tell you if you're following the law or not," basically.

Tim Fulton 44:12And did they point to jurisdictional authority?

Jesse Bethea 44:15As close as they did — they said, "Under this revised code, we don't have any authority, we don't have any jurisdiction over that law." Who does?

Tim Fulton 44:27The municipality? Yes? So, okay — is that a yes, or is that a —

Jesse Bethea 44:32It's — I don't know. And this is sort of the question I'm working with now. This is where we're up to the limits of my knowledge about how any of this went down. Because the only definitive thing that's in those emails is, somebody from Rockbridge said, "We are in dialogue with the city about this question."

Tim Fulton 44:50Sorry, I'm remembering a very minor point of this. The city didn't sell the land. The city is — the city is allowing them to build on the land.

Jesse Bethea 45:06So that's an intricacy that I may not be —

Tim Fulton 45:09Look into that, and I might be wrong, and this again will be in the fact-check. But because what you said — at least what I heard — is, the city can sell land. There is no law that I imagine posited a situation where the — sorry, there should be one, because this happens all the time — where the city is like, "This is actually still ours." The reason why I believe that is because I know there was disagreement about what happens to the parking fees for the parking garage associated with the Merchant Tower. So that is still there, then.

Jesse Bethea 45:47I would be interested in the language of the law, then, whether it says "sell" or whether it says some other — we're looking at it. But basically, this was the question they were asking. "Okay, are we doing everything right under this specific law?"

Tim Fulton 46:01They went to SHPO, SHPO said, "Here's recommendations, but I can't sign off on it."

Jesse Bethea 46:06So then they went to the city. And, as far as — I don't know who they talked to with the city. Clearly somebody said, "You're good," because they're looking forward, right. But I don't know who that person was, and I don't know how they came to a decision.

Tim Fulton 46:20I imagine that the development company is large enough to have lawyers that would say, "Hey, you checked every box you could." Yeah. Even if nobody's telling you no, even if nobody's saying yes — if they're all not telling you no, then you're okay.

Jesse Bethea 46:35Right. And it kind of came up a few times. Because, remember, earlier I said about the monuments and the tombstones. So, at one point on Spruce Street, Lawhon & Associates did discover two footstones. Footstones, traditionally, would not have the name of the person in the grave that they are marking. That's important to remember. Usually, if they had any indication or inscription, it would just be the initials of the person. So there's no way of knowing who these footstones belong to. So, Lawhon & Associates, when they contacted SHPO, they were saying, "Hey" — and, again, they were going through the process they thought they were supposed to be going through — they were saying, "Hey, we found these. Our plan is to rebury them, not re-erect them the way the law says we should be doing, because we can't, we don't know who these footstones belong to. So when we rebury this at Green Lawn, we don't have an individual we can re-erect them and associate them with. So we consider them artifacts that we should be reburying." But they're giving this to SHPO as, like, "Hey —"

Tim Fulton 47:53"You tell us. Yeah, are we okay?"

Jesse Bethea 47:57"We think we're doing the right thing, but out of an abundance of caution, right." And the answer, again, is, "We don't have jurisdiction over that. We can't tell you what to do."

Tim Fulton 48:06I thought we were gonna go down a route of, like, "State law defines monuments this way." No? No, I don't know. So that's another question. But why is that — sorry, I didn't hear, in your original telling, that the monuments had anything to do with the remains.

Jesse Bethea 48:19They don't. Well, so, these monuments were discovered at a grave location, right. But it's one of those crosscutting graves. So it's not clear.

Tim Fulton 48:30Yeah. Okay. It's an interesting legal thing to think about.

Jesse Bethea 48:34But I think what it shows, though, is that the archaeologists were doing everything they could to keep everything within the bounds of the law. But there are just so many, like this, as well.

Tim Fulton 48:45And, to an extent, going above and beyond — the documentation that they're doing, the testing that they're doing — like, they're doing it right, as far as we can tell. Yeah. Well, folks, by and large, may not have been as informed as they should have been about, "Here's what's going to happen when we do this."

Jesse Bethea 49:03Yeah. So, the problem that everyone involved in this keeps running into is that it's a mess. It's just an absolute mess. It's been a mess for 150 years. And so, yeah, I think mostly people are trying to do the right thing — as much as that is a bit of a corporate sort of PR spray — but it's hard to do the right thing when something is this messy.

Tim Fulton 49:28Yeah, true. Jesse, thanks for your time.

Jesse Bethea 49:32Thank you.

Tim Fulton 49:33Thank you for listening to the Confluence Cast, presented by Columbus Underground. Again, you can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theconfluencecast.com. Please rate, subscribe, share this episode of the Confluence Cast with your friends, family, contacts, enemies, your favorite archaeologist. If you're interested in sponsoring the Confluence Cast, get in touch with us. We can be reached by email at info@theconfluencecast.com. Our theme music was composed by Benji Robinson. Our producer is Phil Cogley. I'm your host, Tim Fulton. Have a great week.