Searching for Answers in Milwaukee County’s City of the Dead

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“These bodies are not artifacts from some ancient civilization. They’re the remains of people who once walked the streets of our city” — Judy Houston, historian

History has a way of concealing itself, hiding in dark corners and musty attics. It takes a seasoned researcher or an indefatigable private detective to bring those secrets out into the open. Enter Judy Houston, a self-trained historian whose talents have led her to the various cemeteries located on the county grounds in Wauwatosa. When she learned that her great-aunt was buried in an unknown location on the property, Houston was motivated to form a non-profit organization, Descendant Community of Milwaukee County Grounds Cemeteries, Inc. Her group is comprised of 75 dedicated volunteers—including 10 lead genealogists—who share the seeming endless workload.

In 1860, the area near Wisconsin Avenue and the Watertown Plank Road was a green space that housed an almshouse and poor farm for homeless and needy people. A hospital was established to separate inmates with contagious diseases from the rest of the population, which included alcoholics, the blind and deaf and the mentally ill. That institution evolved into the present-day Milwaukee County Medical Complex. To bury the indigent residents, a cemetery was created to put the deceased in a final resting place. Within a short time, a second cemetery was opened, followed by a third and fourth. 

One hundred years after the burials began, the hospitals and medical buildings had expanded to the point where the cemeteries blocked further progress. In 1928, nursing facility construction dictated that some of the graves be moved to another location. Instead, bulldozers unearthed hundreds of graves at once. Cheap coffins cracked as they were pulled from the dirt, some oozing or dripping horrible liquids. The coffins and the bodies inside were ground up and used for landfill. A scandal ensued as newspapermen and women learned of the disrespect shown these burials and arrived at the scene to write their stories. 

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What Houston and her core of volunteers has discovered is shoddy, careless entries in several different ledgers. Often an identification of the corpse didn’t exist, and listed were ethnicity, sex, and an approximate age. From 1852 to 1974, it was estimated that more than 10,000 bodies lay in the once-wide open ground.  Houston said the remains of her great-aunt might be one of those bodies stored at the university.

Currently the Descendant Community workers are tracking down information from countless birth, marriage, and death records. Is it possible the old cemeteries are haunted by sad or angry entities who desperately want to be recognized after all these years? You’d have to ask Judy Houston. She’s the unofficial gatekeeper