A place of rest: Remains found on former Chautauqua poor farm fuels plans to clean cemetery
DEWITTVILLE, N.Y. — A septic system dug on a farm in this quiet Chautauqua County community near the northeastern end of Chautauqua Lake unearthed a mystery on the afternoon of May 24.
Human remains found in the dirt in a shady spot near a creek on a portion of Country Ayre Farms halted the digging and sent authorities to the property off Meadows Road, a short distance from Dewittville's historic community cemetery.
The questions started piling up. How many sets of remains are there? How old are they? Who are they?
Some of the answers came quickly.
Members of Mercyhurst University's department of applied forensic sciences visited the site the next day and recovered bones from at least two sets of human remains. They determined the bones were quite old, and were found on property that once contained a farm that housed Chautauqua County's indigent and unwanted, according to the Chautauqua County Sheriff's Office.
Still unknown is who these people were and when they were buried.
It's a mystery similar to one that played out in Erie County in the 1970s and 1980s, when construction projects in the area of West 23rd Street and Pittsburgh Avenue unearthed many human remains where Erie County's almshouse, or poorhouse, and its cemetery once stood. Authorities collected the unearthed remains and reburied them at the county's Old Alms House Cemetery in Fairview Township.
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The difference is that the old Chautauqua County Alms House cemetery is still designated as a burial ground, on a plot owned by the county, and remains on the property in Dewittville, albeit overgrown and difficult to access.
Heather Woodis, whose family owns Country Ayre Farms and the old county poor farm property, said the family has started discussions on getting the cemetery cleaned up and properly maintained.
She said she would like to have the remains unearthed in late May reinterred in that cemetery.
"We love this farm and we're sorry we disturbed remains. We want to make sure they are at rest," Woodis said.
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The discovery
A contractor was using an excavator to dig a septic system on the north side of a winding lane off Meadows Road leading to the Country Ayre Farms cow barns, where the property owners plan to set a house, when the bones were unearthed on the afternoon of May 24.
Members of the Chautauqua County Sheriff's Office and the county's Forensic Investigation Team were sent to the scene, where they did a preliminary investigation and held the scene overnight, the sheriff's office reported.
The location of the remains was a few hundred yards away from a known cemetery on the property, the old burial ground for residents of the former Chautauqua County Alms House, Chautauqua County Undersheriff Richard Telford said. The alms house cemetery sits behind the Dewittville Cemetery, he said.
It's unknown why the remains were buried in that spot. Woodis noted that, in comparing a map of the property to a map of site when it was the alms house, they found that the old infirmary on the property was located close to where the remains were unearthed.
"It was a surprise, to say the least," Woodis said of the discovery, which she said was made a great distance from the alms house cemetery.
"We were not expecting to find anything in that spot," she said.
Members of Mercyhurst's applied forensic services department went to the property on May 25 and recovered bones from at least two sets of human remains. They determined the bones were "quite old," officials with the Chautauqua County Sheriff's Office wrote in a news release.
The office also reported that the property where the remains were found is the former location of the Chautauqua County Alms House, which operated for more than 100 years and where numerous people were buried on the property during that time.
"The history of this property along with some of the items located at the scene seem to indicate that these remains may have been part of an unmarked cemetery," officials wrote in the news release.
Woodis said the remnants of wooden caskets were found along with the remains.
Historic site
Beginning in the 1820s, New York required counties to build poor farms to care for its indigent, homeless and unwanted residents in an effort to standardize care, Chautauqua County Historian Michelle Henry said. The requirement was based on population, and by 1830 Chautauqua County was large enough to have a farm, she said.
Chautauqua County's board of supervisors purchased 90 acres in Dewittville for $900 and raised the money to construct a building to house 100 paupers. The facility opened in 1832, Henry said.
"It was always meant to be a working farm. People were expected to work in whatever capacity they were able to," she said. "They raised livestock and crops. The women baked and cooked. They grew all the food for the county jail."
The residents of the farm were there for a variety of reasons, Henry said. They included women who were abandoned by their husbands, children whose parents couldn't support them and people with physical and mental disabilities, she said.
The farm had a cemetery that was enlarged in 1864, with a marker placed in dedication to the 600 residents who had died and were buried on the property, according to Henry. Beginning with that expansion, the graves were marked with rectangular stones containing numbers on them, she said.
"Before 1864, I don't know how the graves were marked," Henry said.
There are burial records for several hundred residents of the farm in the Chautauqua County archives, but the records are sparse, Henry said. It was up to the farm's superintendents to keep the records, and some were better at record-keeping than others, she said.
The cemetery, which was placed at a corner of the farm property, is owned by the county, according to Henry.
The farm functioned through the 1920s, when Henry said other schools and facilities opened to serve many of the residents. In 1959, a new county home opened in Dunkirk, and the Dewittville facility closed and the property was sold, Henry said. Its attractive buildings remained standing, but fell into decay and were eventually condemned and torn down.
Neighbors of the site said inmates of the Chautauqua County Jail used to maintain the farm's cemetery, which is landlocked by private property, but that work has not been done for many years.
Woodis said her family acquired the former county farm property, which is part of the roughly 500-acre Country Ayre Farms, in September 2008. The previous owner farmed the property for about 13 years, and Woodis said it is her understanding that the property was vacant before that.
A similar situation
Nearly 700 residents of the old Erie County Alms House were buried at the facility's original cemetery on its property in the area of West 23rd Street and Pittsburgh Avenue, according to old records.
The cemetery was largely forgotten when, in the 1970s, a tip about the cemetery received as work was set to start on a construction project launched an investigation by then-Erie Morning News reporter Jeff Pinski into the cemetery's existence.
A search of the land led to the recovery of hundreds of buried bodies, which were reinterred at Erie County's Old Alms House Cemetery in Fairview Township.
More remains were found, and reinterred, during a construction project in the 1980s.
Erie County Coroner Lyell Cook said there really isn't any procedure to follow in dealing with human remains that are found and not suspected of being a recent death or the victim of foul play.
"We just try to do the best we can to identify the remains and give them proper disposition," Cook said.
Cook said every state handles things a little differently. In Erie County, if someone finds remains while digging a basement, for example, everything stops, and Mercyhurst's applied forensic services department is called in to collect the remains and make determinations on things such as the gender and age of the remains, he said.
"We're lucky to have Mercyhurst here," Cook said.
Although Cook said it's rare to come across remains, more often than not the ones that have been found in Erie County were determined to be Native American. He said he releases those remains to the Iroquois Nation in New York, and officials there come right over and collect them.
"Otherwise the remains are remanded to us," Cook said. "Ultimately, if no relatives are found, I would have the bones cremated and they would go out to the Old Alms House Cemetery."
Every two years, Erie County inters the remains of its unclaimed dead at special ceremony at the cemetery.
"Everyone deserves a decent burial," Cook said.
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A proper burial
The sheriff's office stated in its news release issued after the remains were found in Dewittville that, at this point, the incident did not appear to be suspicious. Because of that, and since the remains are not believed to be recent, the office stepped back and released the scene, and the property owner and the Chautauqua County Law Department have been in contact with each other, Telford said.
An official with the Law Department said days after the discovery that the office did not yet have a clear answer on the next course of action, noting that the remains were found on private property. The office will be evaluating the situation, the official said.
Mercyhurst University continues to examine the bones. Woodis said she hopes the examination will provide an answer to how old the remains are.
"We're fascinated," she said. "One of the things we love about this farm is the history of it. We'd really like to know the story."
No other remains were found before the excavation work on the septic system was finished. On Friday, the farm owners invited a minister to the property and held a small service at the site to honor those whose remains were found.
"We kind of feel it's important to honor what that site was supposed to be," Woodis said.
The farm owners have also started talking about cleaning up the cemetery on the property and ensuring that it stays maintained. Inmates from the Chautauqua County Jail used to come to the property and take care of the burial ground, and conversations have started about possibly making that happen again, Woodis said.
She said the family's ultimate goal is to have the recovered remains returned to them and buried in the cemetery.
Contact Tim Hahn at thahn@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ETNhahn.
This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Human remains: Discovery on Chautauqua farm drives plan to fix cemetery
