In a memorial service less than a week later for a homeless woman who died under suspicious circumstances, the Rev. John D. Manno reminded about 100 mourners of Michelle Noce’s humanity. Remember, “this was somebody’s daughter, somebody’s friend, somebody’s sister, somebody’s mother,” the Catholic priest said.
Coincidentally, the same day as Noce’s memorial service, the remains of 80 residents of the former Onondaga County Poorhouse were reburied at Loomis Hill Cemetery as a final step of a renovation project at Onondaga Community College. Like Wilkin and Noce, these people were likely down on their luck, poor or mentally ill. They, too, had dreams and disappointments, triumphs and tragedies. They, too, were somebody’s child, somebody’s parent, somebody’s friend.
The human remains were unearthed in winter 2010-2011 by archaeologists from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Archaeologists found no grave markers, no jewelry or personal possessions. Only three young siblings who died in 1832 have been identified so far.
The remains were discovered as OCC was beginning an ambitious process to renovate the former poorhouse hospital into John H. Mulroy Hall, housing the Regional Higher Education Center. To OCC’s credit, the project transforms the historic site of sadness and despair into one of hope and ambition.
When the poor, elderly or mentally ill residents died 150 years ago and no one claimed their remains, they were buried on the site, local historians say. Several mass graves are thought to hold victims of epidemics.
Workers have previously turned up human remains. In 1995, a cleanup crew found the remains of 77 people. In 1996, crews found 99 bodies. More than 200 sets of human remains from the 19th century have been found in unmarked graves.
Who were they? An 1877 record shows 362 “inmates.” The “causes of dependency” include terms like intemperance, vagrancy, indigency, lunacy, sickness, old age, debauchery, lameness.
Since Van Duyn donated a massive trove of poorhouse records to the Town of Onondaga Historical Society in 1992, town historian Jane Tracy and others have put together the stories of some of the people who lived and died at the poorhouse. They include Brainard Munn, “the hermit poet of Skaneateles,” who was admitted for vagrancy in 1901 and lived there until 1916. Joseph Allen Haskell was a portrait painter admitted in 1891 at age 81. He died at the poorhouse three years later. Nellie McQuade, a chorus girl during the Civil War, lived 10 years at the poorhouse before dying in 1938 at age 97.
The poorhouse residents were not nameless, invisible people. They were poets and painters and dancers. They were mothers and fathers and spouses and children and aunts and uncles. Somewhere, they have family that mourns their deaths and cherishes their lives. Imagine their stories. And remember them.