Will county retain burial ground at health center?
Observer-Reporter
Potters’ Field at Washington County Health Center
Stones in rows with numbers but no names line the hillside in Potter’s Field.
Observer-Reporter
A stone with the number 196 marks the grave of an unidentified person buried in Potters’ Field at Washington County Home in Arden.
Observer-Reporter
The sun shines through a tree at Potters’ Field.
Line of stones in several rows make up Potter’s Field just below Washington County Health Center.
Discussions about the potential marketing and sale of Washington County Health Center have, naturally, focused on the 149,000-square-foot building, but another component of the 45-acre site in Arden, Chartiers Township, is a cemetery.
Whether the property, as advertised for sale, will include the cemetery, known as Potter’s Field, has not been decided, but the description of exactly what’s to be included should be finalized within the next few weeks.
“We’re looking into that,” said Washington County Commission Chairman Larry Maggi. “That may be separated. Obviously, it’s going to remain a cemetery.”
A map the county prepared in advance of a Jan. 5 presentation by an attorney from the law firm hired by the county to handle the sale shows the former juvenile detention center, now the Tyler Technologies Inc. reassessment headquarters building, is excluded from the approximately 45-acre tract. This one-story building on Hickory Ridge Road, around the corner from the health center, is slated to become the offices of the Washington County Conservation District.
“Once you sell it, you’re never going to get property back,” Maggi said, noting that with the nearby Washington County fairgrounds serving as a center for the local agricultural community, “we want to retain control over what that environment is going to be like out there.”
The commissioners have said in their discussions about the fate of the 288-bed health center, with 200-some employees, that they want to it to continue to be used as a nursing home.
If the cemetery were to be included in the property being sold, “We would be sure to make some covenant part of the contract with the new purchaser,” said commission Vice Chairman Diana Irey Vaughan. “We’re going to have conditions of sale if we were to include that part of the property with the sale.”
Potter’s Field, the name of the health center’s cemetery, is a Biblical one. The 27th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew tells of betrayer Judas Iscariot, prior to the Crucifixion, throwing 30 pieces of silver back to officials before committing suicide. The question arose of what to do with the coins, and verses 6 and 7 read, “But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, ‘It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since they are blood money.’ So they took counsel and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.”
It seems unlikely that survivors or descendants of the dead would demand input on any decision about the cemetery’s future, because the identities of the more than 297 people buried there are largely unknown.
“We’ve tried to find a record in years past,” said Tim Kimmel, health center administrator and Washington County director of human services. “From what I understand, there was a men’s home and a women’s home, and the cemetery was created when those two facilities were in operation. People who couldn’t afford a cemetery plot and had no family were buried there. That’s what I was told.”
The county planning department, keeper of various county documents, has no information about who is buried there, and there is meager information in the courthouse law library.
Only one grave has what would be considered a conventional stone. Joseph Larrison, who was born in 1876, died in 1931, according to his plaque. The graves have numbers, and Larrison is number 39.
It’s likely that more than one body has been buried in scores of graves, because the sketchy information notes interment of 502 individuals, many of whom may have fallen victim to tuberculosis.
A longtime health center employee can’t recall any burials since she began working for the county in 1975.
The health center combined older, separate facilities known as the county homes for aged men and aged women, which also stood along North Main Street Extension in Arden. And pre-dating them in the vicinity were an orphanage and poorhouse going back to 1830.
If Washington County would choose to go that route, selling a county nursing home that includes a cemetery is not unheard of. The website asylumprojects.org notes that when Schuylkill County sold its nursing facility in 2015 to Nationwide Health Care Services of Brick, N.J., for $12.5 million, it also contained a burial ground. A call Thursday to the Schuylkill County administrator in Pottsville was not immediately returned.