The Potter's Field caper of 1903
by Jack Neely
It had been cold, that February, so cold that dozens of Knoxvillians were skating on the lake in Chilhowee Park. But then it got warmer, and kids started falling through the ice.
One drab Monday after the thaw, several men arrived at the County Cemetery, also known as Potter's Field, in East Knoxville. Three of them were members of an investigative committee. Five of them had shovels.
They picked marked graves and began to dig. The workers pulled up one box, then another, then another. They pried open the lids.
Most of the coffins were small—children's caskets—but inside each of them was evidence of a crime of astonishing proportions. The evidence was what they were looking for, but they weren't prepared for the particulars of what they saw inside.
In the coffins, packed in wood shavings, were lead pipes, bricks, lumber, stones, shoes, wagon springs, bottles, horseshoes, old tools, feather mats, "a corset or two," tin cans, and a few dead chickens.
The first 10 coffins were like that. The eleventh contained an actual dead body, which the men "hastily reinterred." Of the next 17 digs, they found only five real bodies. By the time it was getting dark, they had dug up 67 graves in Potter's Field and disclosed only seven real corpses.
It was, the Journal declared, evidence of "one of the most startling revelations of fraud and chicanery which has been recorded in this city's history."
The weird work went on for the next several days. In the end, of 339 graves, they found only 91 bodies.
There was obviously something amiss. They'd suspected as much in recent weeks when someone observed that gravedigger Jim Goans, a man of mixed race employed by undertaker W. Claiborne McCoy, had filled out his reports of impoverished dead at the courthouse. McCoy, who kept his mortuary on North Central, was known to do much of his business taking horse-drawn hearses out to Potter's Field, collecting the $3.25 fee for supplying the coffin and burying it. Usually, he'd just pick up the corpses himself.
The city passed a new law calling for the city health officer to inspect each reported body before burial. Apparently unaware of the new policy, Goans came in with an invoice from McCoy for another burial. "Where is the body?" asked City Health Officer James Kennedy. "I will have to see it before I can issue a permit."
Goans told Kennedy he didn't want him to "take the trouble" just for a still-born which was, after all, in a remote house "way out on the edge of town." When Kennedy insisted, Goans responded, "Well, Mr. McCoy told me to say that if he could not get a certificate without putting you to all the trouble, he would not take charge of the body." With that, he left, hoping that was the end of it.
Then the investigators showed up at Potter's Field, with shovels.
Goans was intoxicated when he was arrested in a Vine Avenue drugstore. He claimed that he was a patsy, and threatened to "peach" the kingpin. "They can't send me to the pen," he declared. "I was only doing what I was paid to do, even if coffins were buried which didn't have anything in them but old stuff. I didn't know it was wrong, and if the people who paid me my money for the work think I am going to take all the blame for it, and lay here in jail, why they are badly mistaken."
Police interviewed undertaker McCoy at his house on Fifth. "I do not know what to say," he said. "If empty coffins were found in graves which were dug by my employee, then the bodies have been removed."
Some of the graves disclosed no proper coffin, but wooden cracker crates, some with infants' bodies, some without. Gravediggers unearthed a box unlike the rest: a zinc-lined steamer trunk. Inside was the body of an adult man, "cut into several pieces." The rumor spread that it was a murder victim. Some believed it to be the visitor from St. Louis who had disappeared in Knoxville the previous summer. But Sexton Joshua Payne recalled that the grave had been dug earlier, on a rainy day in June, 1901, by three strangers with a burial permit. When examiners found a rubber tube protruding from the corpse's chest, they assumed it had been a medical cadaver from Tennessee Medical College in North Knoxville.
The Journal found it to be a spectacle with literary potential. "The scene at the county cemetery is an indescribable one, worthy of the pen of a Zola or an Edgar Allan Poe." Around the scores of yawning holes was a complete circle of empty coffins. As it happens, novelist George Washington Cable was in town that week, giving lectures at Staub's Theater. Whether he was among the estimated 2,000 spectators who came daily to find inspiration from this scene is unclear. A reporter counted 500 of those onlookers at once: "men, women, and children, black and white and of all degrees, hovering closely around the band of gravediggers."
The investigators determined that McCoy and Goans had defrauded the county out of $887.25: adjusted for inflation, close to $20,000. The report alleged that "each empty coffin [is] a silent yet potent witness to a false oath and a base fraud."
The county indicted both McCoy and Goans for "false pretenses," but treated them differently. Jim Goans was wrong; he got three years in the state pen. Whether because he was expected to repay the county for the defrauded money, or because he was white, Claiborne McCoy got off with a nolle prosequi. He moved to Chattanooga, but returned to Knoxville just before his own burial.
February 27, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 9
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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