Greenwich Village

								

officials were firm. The public notice was relentlessly made, of the
purchase of ground "bounded on the road leading from the Bowerie Lane
at the two-mile stone to Greenwich."
When you next stroll through the little quiet park in the shadow of
the Arch and Turini's great statue of Garibaldi, watching the children
at play, the tramps and wayfarers resting, the tired horses drinking
from the fountain the S.P.C.A. has placed there for their service and
comfort, the old dreaming of the past, and the young dreaming of the
future,--see, if you please, if it is not rather a wistfully pleasant
thought to recall the poor and the old and the nameless and the humble
who were put to rest there a century and a quarter ago?
The Aceldama of the Priests of Jerusalem was "the potter's field to
bury strangers in," according to St. Matthew; and in the Syriac
version that meant literally "the field of sleep." It is true that
when they made use of Judas Iscariot's pieces of silver, they twisted
the syllables to mean the "field of blood," but it was a play upon
words only. The Field of Sleep was the Potter's Field, where the weary
"strangers" rested, at home at last.
There is nothing intrinsically repellent in the memories attached to a
Potter's Field,--save, possibly, in this case, a certain scandalous
old story of robbing it of its dead for the benefit of the medical
students of the town. That was a disgraceful business if you like! But
public feeling was so bitter and retributive that the practice was
speedily discontinued. So, again, there is nothing to make us recoil,
here among the green shadows of the square, from the recollection of
the Potter's Field. But there is always something fundamentally
shocking in any place of public punishment. And,--alas!--there is that
stain upon the fair history of this square of which we are writing.
For--there was a gallows in the old Potter's Field. Upon the very spot
where you may be watching the sparrows or the budding leaves,
offenders were hanged for the edification or intimidation of huge
crowds of people. Twenty highwaymen were despatched there, and at
least one historian insists that they were all executed at once, and
that Lafayette watched the performance. Certainly a score seems rather
a large number, even in the days of our stern forefathers; one cannot
help wondering if the event were presented to the great Frenchman as a
form of entertainment.
In 1795 came one of those constantly recurring epidemics of yellow
fever which used to devastate early Manhattan; and in 1797 came a
worse one. Many bodies were brought from other burying grounds, and
when the scourge of small-pox killed off two thousand persons in one
short space, six hundred and sixty-seven of them were laid in this
particular public cemetery. During one very bad time, the rich as well
as the poor were brought there, and there were nearly two thousand
bodies sleeping in the Potter's Field.