At the intersection of Dunks Ferry and Mechanicsville roads in the Far Northeast, just short of the Philadelphia County line, someone has spray-painted the word “POTTER’S” in big black letters on a weathered utility pole. It is the only obvious marker for what lies beyond a lonely soccer field with overgrown weeds and a single goal: Philadelphia’s last potter’s field, where hundreds of unclaimed people are buried.
Across the street, boys run baseball drills at Junod Playground. But on the cemetery side, past two concrete median barriers hidden behind a windbreak of trees, a mown field stretches 500 feet deep and 200 feet wide. A brass plaque reading “City Cemetery” once announced the site from Dunks Ferry Road. It was stolen long ago. Without it, and with the grave markers sunken into lumpy earth, the burial ground could be mistaken for just another field.
446 buried by 1975, then the space ran out
The city began using the Dunks Ferry Road site in 1956, after decades of burying unclaimed bodies at a cemetery on West Luzerne Street between North 2nd Street and Whitaker Avenue. Prior to the move, the coroner’s office buried an average of 100 unclaimed bodies every year, a figure that included victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic and a growing number of poor and unidentified people during the Depression.
In August 1957, just a year after the cemetery opened, investigators buried its most famous resident: a boy found in a cardboard box in Fox Chase who was never identified despite an investigation lasting decades. City detectives and other donors raised money for a headstone that read, “Heavenly Father, Bless This Unknown Boy, February 25, 1957.” In 1998, the boy’s body and headstone were moved to Ivy Hill Cemetery…