Mass Graves of Memphis: A Hidden History

Scott: 00:00:10

The air hung heavy with summer heat and an unseen menace.

In: 1878

Panic gripped the city as hundreds fell ill each day. The streets once teeming with life grew eerily quiet. Those who could afford to flee did so, leaving behind a ghost town of the sick and the poor.

No one understood where the disease came from or how it spread. Some blamed the river, others the immigrants, while others saw it as divine punishment.

Doctors and nurses worked tirelessly, but their efforts seemed futile against the relentless march of the fever. The dead piled up faster than they could be buried.

Elmwood Cemetery became a grim testament to the epidemic's toll, with mass graves dug to accommodate the overwhelming number of victims. By the time the epidemic subsided with the arrival of frost, over 5,000 Memphians had perished. The city, once a jewel of the south, lay in ruins.

revoked the City's charter in: 1879

It would take years for Memphis to recover, both in population and spiritual. Welcome to Talk with History. I am your host, Scott, here with my wife and historian, Jen.

Jenn: 00:02:03

Hello.

Scott: 00:02:04

On this podcast, we give you insights to our history Inspired World Travels YouTube channel Journey and examine history through deeper conversations with the curious, the explorers, and the history lovers out there. And Jen, we're just going to get right into it. So this, this is kind of an interesting one because we visited some.

We made a whole video about the numerous mass graves that we found at Elmwood Cemetery here in our new hometown of Memphis.

Jenn: 00:02:35

Yeah, so just one cemetery and the mass graves at that cemetery. So Elmwood is one of these old active cemeteries in Memphis, and it was featured in the movie the Firm.

So if you remember watching the Firm with Tom Cruise and they go to the funeral of the lawyer from his firm, it's that cemetery. Remember the pillars? And that's when she's kind of looking at Gene Hackman and stuff.

Scott: 00:02:59

He's. He's saying some kind of things to her that you're.

Jenn: 00:03:02

You're kind of like, yeah, yeah, it's kind of like it's the first time that eyebrows are starting to get raised about what kind of firm is this? And that's the cemetery. And Elmwood is a beautiful cemetery. It's. It's what they call one of these rural garden cemeteries.

If you go there, there's a lot of. It's a. It's a arborist sanctuary. So a lot of trees.

And Elmwood, the name was selected by a group of people who had put in the money to fund the cemetery. They had put in a hat the names that they wanted. And Elmwood was selected. And ironically, they had just bought all these elm trees for the cemetery.

So it kind of worked out well. But if you go there today, it's a bird sanctuary. You can see a lot of birds there. There's also a lot of trees and the fauna and flora.

But they garden inside the graves, which I find very interesting. They have what they call cradles there.

Scott: 00:03:59

Is that something that's unique to the South?

Jenn: 00:04:01

I think it's unique to the south because of how long things can grow and be fresh in the ground. And you'll see people put in whole gardens on a grave.

Scott: 00:04:12

I think we saw someone there that was like maintaining one.

Jenn: 00:04:15

Yeah. When we were seeing one of our.

We do another podcast on notable burials there, while we were hitting one of the most notable name there, someone was right beside us fixing their. Probably their family members or someone close to them's grave. So they. They have these circular cement monuments.

They go over the grave kind of about the size of what the coffin would have looked like. They call them cradles. And it's interesting because you can also see like children cradles or baby cradles. They're smaller in size.

And people will plant inside those cradles. They'll put in flowers or they'll put in color. So as you drive around, there's all this beautiful plant life inside the cradles of these graves.

Scott: 00:05:00

Yeah. It's funny that you mention it because while we were there, obviously I was kind of very, very focused on the filming.

And I hadn't really thought of that. But that was something that kind of. I think subconsciously I kind of was like.

Because I'm looking through the camera and trying to get B roll and stuff like that. But it is relatively unique because now that I think about it, I don't know if I've really seen that as much in other cemeteries.

There was just tons of graves that were. That had that style of ornamentation here at Elmwood.

Jenn: 00:05:29

And what's interesting about Elmwood too, is it's all different types of monuments. You fix on one that's a very interesting one of a young boy that was.

That died and their parents kind of made an angel sweeping the boy up into heaven. I mean, it's a huge monument.

Scott: 00:05:43

That's a cool one. It's beautiful.

Jenn: 00:05:44

And then they have a lot of classical. They have the neo gothic style pillars, and they have it's. And I think it adheres to no real aesthetic.

It's just whatever the person has bought and wants to do. So I find that very interesting as well.

Scott: 00:06:00

Well, and to be honest, it kind of fits in with our topic today, because even though the topic is notionally the mass graves here at Elmwood, they're all very different events. It's not like these are common things. So that the first one is something kind of rooted in Memphis history.

Jenn: 00:06:14

d Cemetery was established in: 1852

Yellow fever is not unique to Memphis. Yellow fever happens fairly common in anywhere that has water. And at the time, people are not realizing that yellow fever is carried by the mosquito.

st one, the worst outbreak is: 1878

They'll flee the city because they're afraid of what's happening and people dying.

And the other half that stays, 90% will succumb to yellow fever, and so much so that, like we talk about, bodies are just being piled up and they bury them in a mass grave there in Elmwood and other cemeteries, other places throughout Memphis as well. Elmwood is just one of the active cemeteries at the time. And there's 2,500 Memphis victims of the yellow fever there.

no Man's land, there's about: 1500

Scott: 00:07:38

That's so crazy to me, because if you to kind of try to contextualize and help the listener visualize it, you can obviously go watch the video. The link is in our show notes.

ut the yellow fever epidemic.: 1500

ut those numbers, think about: 1500

Someone else had commented on the actual video. And they said something similar happened in Savannah.

Jenn: 00:08:26

Yes.

Scott: 00:08:27

And they said they were just, they were running out of coffins. They had to do something similar.

Jenn: 00:08:30

Yeah, it happens. And like I said, any place that has water, any place that has a big shipping industry, standing water.

You will see yellow fever epidemics throughout history and it will basically massacre an area of people because they don't understand how it's spread and they don't know how to stop it. And in this instance, these, these pits of people are coming from all different walks of life, which in the south is very.

It's one of those things that it's very unique and prominent. And you're going to have priests and nuns and doctors buried beside sex workers and travelers and people in poverty.

They kind of allude to that a little bit in Gone with the Wind when the prostitute is giving money for the war effort, but the women of the south don't want to publicly take it from her. There's so much decorum in the South. Right. And so for people to be buried like this, your last moments, it's a big deal for the South.

So if you can imagine, like you said, this small area, they're not digging individual graves and putting people in, they're digging big pits and they're putting people in close together, on top of each other forever in life.

Scott: 00:09:50

They didn't have choice.

Jenn: 00:09:51

Yeah, no choice. So this is how these people memorialize forever. And so yellow fever in this epit, in this instance for Memphis, Memphis loses its charter.

So what does that mean? It loses its status as a city.

Usually cities have to have so many people in a per square mile that constitutes a city, it gets different funding from the state, etc. So so many people had died that Memphis had lost its charter as a city. And it, I think it falls under like a jurisdiction of Nashville for a while.

Scott: 00:10:23

Oh, wow.

Jenn: 00:10:24

this yellow fever epidemic of: 1878

Jude and they just uncovered a hundred year old body.

Scott: 00:10:45

Yeah, you just said that last night.

Jenn: 00:10:46

I just found the article.

So it's something that when you're in the south and really anywhere that had early settlers and you're digging or you're making something new or construction, you always have to be Larry of where people were buried. So.

Scott: 00:11:02

Yeah, that was an interesting one. Right. A Little bit more kind of a topic for us to cover. But the next one is an interesting and kind of a darker period of.

Of Tennessee, darker spot of Tennessee history as well. When we start talking about the Tennessee Children's Home Society. Did I say that right?

Jenn: 00:11:20

Yeah, it's the Tennessee Children's Home Society.

Scott: 00:11:22

Home society. So this was an interesting one because I hadn't really heard of it. Now that's not surprising because I am not the history nerd that you are.

And of course you go, I say, oh, nobody is interested in this. You're like, no, no, no, this is a big deal. So I started reading up on it and it was, I mean, it was a very big thing for a while.

And then when you started talking about the names of modern day still alive celebrities that were affected by this, it was really interesting.

Jenn: 00:11:51

Yeah. So the Tennessee Children's Home Society is basically you, you said it best. Human trafficking of children. And it happened.

It started in Tennessee,: 1924

So families who were poor and having children and not maybe able to afford another child, she would take them from them and tell them that she's going to give them a better life. She's going to find a family that really wants a child that will give. Give them a better life, not knowing that she's selling these children.

Scott: 00:12:31

And under the guise of adoption.

Jenn: 00:12:33

Under the guise of adoption. So basically the only people who are getting these children are very well off people who can afford to pay the highest amount for a child.

And like I said, Joan Crawford gets two of her children this way. So she's a big movie star, lots of money.

It's a very unorthodox and unethical way to get children because in this instance, Tan would destroy all documentation of the actual child's name, parents name, where they were born, date they were born, so they could have nothing to trace back their lives and make everything up. So even when a child is bought or adopted, they use the word adopted, but it's bought, sold.

They would, she would just make up everything, make up who their parents were, make up when the child was born, everything. A birthday, just made up everything. So unfortunately. And this went on for years?

Scott: 00:13:24

hink she got caught till like: 1950

Jenn: 00:13:29

Yes. And over 3,000 children replaced. And not all of them survived. They were young, some of them got sick.

And so this marker at Elmwood represents 19 children. And it's so Sad. They. They have, like, names. Baby Maude, I think.

Scott: 00:13:47

And it was largely because these kids just wouldn't get good medical care.

Jenn: 00:13:51

Exactly. I mean, they. That's not. That wasn't her priority.

Scott: 00:13:54

Yeah.

Jenn: 00:13:54

Her priority was selling the babies as quick as possible. But. So if the baby was sickly or needed anything, she really wouldn't do anything for it and just basically let the child die.

The first burial happens in: 1923

She's probably starting this idea that's when the first baby dies. And of the 19 that are buried there at the marker that we're at Elmwood.

But they say hundreds of children died, and her preferred way was to cremate the child. And she said because it left less of a mark.

Scott: 00:14:33

It was just like. This was one of those parts where it's, like, hard for me to kind of do the research and make that part of the video because I just. It's.

It's hard to think about that topic. But one of the other interesting names that may bring a smile to some people's face was, you said the wrestler Ric Flair.

Jenn: 00:14:49

Ric Flair.

Scott: 00:14:50

He was a child that was adopted, sold whatever out of this home, probably. I would. I'm going to guess, right around the time that it was ending.

Jenn: 00:14:57

Yeah. So he's. He's a product of this.

Scott: 00:14:59

Yeah.

Jenn: 00:14:59

And there are people you will meet in Tennessee now, a lot of these children, she charged a premium for out of state.

Scott: 00:15:05

Yeah.

Jenn: 00:15:05

So 80% of these children went to New York, went to California. She charged. That's why Joan Crawford gets like. It's a premium.

Scott: 00:15:12

Yeah.

Jenn: 00:15:12

So in state, it was less expensive because she's not charging for airfare and things along that nature. But I have met people who were. Who are grandchildren of this and don't know anything about their backgrounds.

That's why 23andMe has kind of helped these people find some of their family. And I want to also stress that the parents who the babies were taken from had no idea this was happening either. So they were victim to this as well.

This woman is eventually brought to court. I mean, she had a judge that was helping her. It was a. It was a system.

Scott: 00:15:46

Oh, yeah. She. No, when I was reading up on it, she had cops that were. She was paying off. She had, you know, some allegations.

Like she's literally, like, napping some off the. Off the street sometimes.

Jenn: 00:15:56

Yes.

Scott: 00:15:56

It was crazy.

Jenn: 00:15:57

Well, people were wanting specific Children.

Scott: 00:16:00

Yeah, it's. That's.

Jenn: 00:16:02

It's very sad. She dies before she can ever be really brought up on charges. She had a partner who helped her with this. That person lives to an older age, but they.

They're never really truly charged. What it did do, though, I'm going to talk more about these children that are there. But what. What it did do is terrible. This is.

It changed a lot of law around adoption.

Scott: 00:16:24

Put a spotlight on it.

Jenn: 00:16:25

Put a spotlight on it. It also helped to reduce the stigma of adoption. Usually when people. Children were adopted, that was like a very shunned thing.

Scott: 00:16:36

Oh, interesting.

Jenn: 00:16:37

When this started to happen, adoption looked. Made it look like a very elite thing.

Scott: 00:16:42

You.

Jenn: 00:16:42

If you were adopted, wow. Your parents must have a lot of money.

Scott: 00:16:46

You, You.

Jenn: 00:16:47

You moved into a higher social status if people heard you were adopted. And so that changed the face of adoption. It never looked like that before.

Scott: 00:16:57

So at least there's. There's something good that kind of came out of. Yes, this strategy.

Jenn: 00:17:01

Yes. But now there's so much law around adoption and ethics, and this kind of brought this all about.

st burial, like I said, is in: 1923

That's less than a year before the agency was formally exposed and shut down. Eight other children have full names listed. The other ones are just listed as Baby Estelle, Baby Billy, Baby Herbert.

But people leave toys for these children. And so when we visited the marker, there's all these baby toys out there, and it's just so sad.

19 babies are there who never got a chance and will never really even know their true names, their real names, and what families they actually belong to. Thank God this woman was eventually exposed. But this is one of the very dark sides of Tennessee history.

And if you want to visit a grave, a mass grave associated with this, it is an Elmwood cemetery.

Scott: 00:18:06

Yeah, yeah. No, it was. It was. It was good to learn about it, and it's good to see sad stories like this often have something brighter on the other side.

And that's kind of what I. I try to.

To focus and appreciate is the good that came out of this, the spotlight put on it, the better laws that came out of it because of this, this tragedy. Now, the next.

The next one was kind of interesting one because we've talked about this event a couple times, and we were down in Vicksburg not too long ago, and if you've heard of the Sultana disaster, one of the largest maritime disasters in history, and I think the largest still to date, loaded up some bunch of prisoners onto. Onto the Sultana and they shipped them off to Memphis and then what happened from there?

Jenn: 00:18:48

So the Sultana is a riverboat and going up and down the Mississippi River. It's a huge one of those. Paddleboat.

Scott: 00:18:56

Yeah, steam steamboat.

Jenn: 00:18:57

rd,: 1865

And all these Union soldiers who were prisoners of war in these Confederate prisoners of war camps have been released with whatever clothing they can find. Barely skin and bones. But so thrilled to be getting back home, let their families know they're alive. Because most.

This is not like modern times where you can register as a prisoner of war and people know that you're at least alive. No, some families don't even know these men had made it. And so the Sultana docks in Vicksburg, Mississippi on April 23rd.

And for a ship that should hold about the legal limit is 375 people. It loads up with 2,300 people. And it's because. And they've traced this back.

If you watch, there's a very good History Detectives, a show I used to watch on PBS about this. The man who is running the boat is charging $7 a head, getting paid for by the US government.

So how many prisoners he can bring home, the US Government is going to pay him.

Scott: 00:20:10

ns of thousands of dollars in: 1865

Jenn: 00:20:14

So he's trying to loan on as many as possible. The men don't have to pay. The men have no idea that this is happening.

He knows if he can load these people on, he's going to get paid by the government. So he's loading all these men onto a steamer ship that's very top heavy we talk about, doesn't have a lot of drafts, right.

Because this is the Mississippi River. And so when you get a ship like this that gets so top heavy, it starts to rock. And what happens is it gets up to Memphis. So this is not far.

Vicksburg to Memphis on April 27th. What is that, four days later? And when the ship starts rocking from being so top heavy, the boilers will get very, very hot on one side.

And then when it rocks the other way and the water hits it, it explodes because of that quick temperature change. So at 2am this ship explodes in the Mississippi river right beside the city of Memphis.

ar men, go into the water and: 1800

Only 500 are saved. A lot of people got into the water and saved them. There's a very famous statue in Memphis of a boy reaching and saving men who were drowning.

But these men are so weak that they can't swim. Plus, it's 2am it's dark, and there's an explosion. So they again, they have all these bodies. They have to bury them quickly.

And so Elmwood has an area where they buried a lot of the Union soldiers there. Now eventually these Union soldiers will be moved to the national cemetery, but they still believe that there are men left there.

Where that marker is today in Elmwood, and that is originally where all those bodies were buried.

Scott: 00:22:13

That makes more sense because the marker itself is actually surrounded by a lot of smaller graves. It's now, it's next to another spot. We'll talk here about here in just a second. But there was.

There was something else that happened just after the Sultana disaster that kind of caused it to not get the national attention that it probably deserved.

Jenn: 00:22:31

die. Why don't we know about: 1800

Because a very, very famous person was killed that same weekend. John Wilkes Booth. And because the manhunt had taken so long and that was just eating up the papers at the time.

For them to finally catch him and kill him made such headline news that this disaster of the Sultana was just pushed back in the stories. And people don't remember it. They don't recall it.

because of its. The number of: 1800

That's cool, because it is a story that needs to be told. And a lot of these men, like I told you, their families didn't know they survived.

And then after this and the ship exploded, they still don't even know. They. They don't. They would never know that their ancestor was on the Sultana. Yeah, because they never got to say so.

These mass graves of these men are unknown. And it's. It's a sad part of American history.

Scott: 00:23:47

Yeah, but. But it was just such a fascinating one because again, we're kind of doing the, our.

Our radius of history here in the Memphis area in Vicksburg and then we kind of tied that right into where the Sultana ended up. Coming up to now, like I said, right to the marker for the Sultana kind of mass grave there in Elmwood is another one that I wasn't really expecting.

And it's not to any specific event or person or anything like that, but it's a large kind of Confederate soldier kind of mass grave area.

Jenn: 00:24:18

So this is Confederate soldiers Rest, they call it. It's over a thousand Confederate soldiers and veterans who are buried in one area of Elmore Cemetery.

This old, tattered Confederate flag flies over it. And what's interesting about that, it's not what we consider or what the mainstream media considers the Southern flag or the Confederate flag.

It's the actual Confederate flag that was.

Scott: 00:24:44

It's not the rebel one that everybody kind of knows that kind of draws a lot of ire nowadays. It's the one that was actually the.

Jenn: 00:24:50

e first burial will happen in: 1861

t veteran was buried there in: 1940

So someone who fought in the Confederacy wanted to be back with the soldiers he fought with. And for a long time, of these thousand men, a lot were unknown. They didn't know who they were.

But a notebook was found, and it contained the names of 945 of these men with the corresponding number. And so they were able to identify some of these men, but a lot are still unknown. And they're just buried in this huge mass grave area.

And so it's just something like when you're standing there among this huge mass grave area of a thousand men, and some have stones and some don't, and some actually do have unknown. Unknown on the stone written on it. Yeah, it's just a very interesting area and a part of Memphis history that can't be forgotten or avoided.

And it's a. It is a famous mass grave there at Elmwood Cemetery.

Scott: 00:26:02

Yeah, it was neat to see because it was one that I kind of wasn't expecting. But it's regardless of, kind of.

Obviously, you know, the war was won a certain way, and people have their own opinions oftentimes about how history portrays the north versus the South. But it was just neat to kind of see that along with all the other. It was a fun outing in a sense.

And it was, again, kind of a different one for us because these were like mass graves. So it's each topic, it tends to be kind of heavy and it's, it's.

Jenn: 00:26:32

An active cemetery still today. It's located at 824 S. Dudley St. So if you're looking for something to do in Memphis, it is a really great story of Memphis history.

As you walk around, they actually have a map that you can purchase. Audio tour an audio tour that you can walk around and it'll show you these locations because they're kind of tucked away and hard to find.

But the it's open from 8am to 4, 37 days a week, including holidays. So it really is. If you're coming to Memphis and you're wondering what can I do? It's a great place to go.

Walk around, be outside, immerse yourself in Memphis history, in Southern history and ultimately American history.

Scott: 00:27:13

Yeah.

And if you guys are listening and you want to hear a little bit more about some of the famous people that are known kind of throughout history, buried in Memphis. That episode's going to be coming out next week, so hit that follow button and we'll talk to you soon. History isn't always happy.

In fact, oftentimes history reminds us of tragedies and outsized mistakes that humankind can make, suffering through pandemic, horrible acts by seemingly well meaning adoption homes or even maritime disasters that could have been avoided. These are the lessons that history tries to teach us every day. The saying goes something like those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it.

We don't explore these cemeteries for the macabre or the sensationalism. Rather, we visit them to remember those before us and to learn that history so that we can help others not to make those same mistakes.

Jen and I encourage you to get out there and explore the history in your local area so that you too can learn and pass along those lessons and stories that paint the canvas of our common history. This has been a Walk with History production. Talk with History is created and hosted by me, Scott Benny. Episode researched by Jennifer Benny.

Check out the show notes for links and references mentioned in this episode. Talk with History is supported by our fans@thehistoryroadtrip.com our eternal thanks to those providing funding to help keep us going.

Thank you to Doug McLiverty, Larry Myers and Patrick Benny. Make sure you hit that follow button in your podcast player and we'll talk to you.

Jenn: 00:29:00

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