The Last Man to Ever Let You Down
Secrets of a gravedigger.
CHICAGO READER / AUG 2007
The view from the second floor of the yellow brick house at the corner of Clark and Irving Park extends east and south across 14 and a half bucolic acres. The lot is filled with elms, cottonwoods, mulberries, flowering cherries, trees of heaven, and ranks of stone obelisks, like some miniature Egypt among the foliage. It’s a backyard that’s also a graveyard. Thirteen cemeteries in Chicago have caretaker’s residences on their grounds, but this 2,000-square-foot brick Victorian at Wunder’s Cemetery is perhaps the most conspicuous, sitting on prime real estate at a major intersection walking distance from Wrigley Field. Three bedrooms, two baths, hardwood floors, natural light–and the caretakers have always gotten it all rent free.
Established in 1859, Wunder’s is one of the oldest cemeteries still operating in Chicago. It’s about the same age as Graceland, its larger, more famous neighbor to the north, and the cluster of small Jewish cemeteries that lie directly to the south. It’s owned by First Saint Paul’s, the oldest Lutheran church in the city, and named for a former pastor. Roughly 15,000 people have been buried at Wunder’s, most between 1860 and 1960. The earliest recorded birth date for a person interred there is 1787.
Many of the early tombstones and monuments at Wunder’s–at all old Chicago graveyards, for that matter–were made of Lake Michigan sand and poor-grade concrete, a mixture that hasn’t stood the test of time. They look like they’re melting, and weather long ago erased the names. From time to time these aged monuments will topple and their stones will be removed to a pile at the rear of the cemetery, behind the garage. It’s possible (though less and less likely as generations pass) that the descendants of the people commemorated by these monuments might be interested in paying for a replacement, but most of them can’t be reached to ask: Valerie Stodden, a First Saint Paul’s parishioner who has a part-time job running the cemetery’s office, estimates that Wunder’s has fallen out of touch with more than two-thirds of the descendants of its dead.…