Correction:
An earlier version of this story incorrectly spelled Jane Greenland's name.
For nearly a decade, Jane Greenland led an initiative to change the name of West Akron’s Schneider Park to memorialize the people buried there.
Greenland, who has lived across the street from the park for 32 years, told Akron City Council members she didn’t know the park was the resting place for hundreds of residents of the Summit County Infirmary, located near West Exchange Street and Storer Avenue (across the street from today’s Will Christy Park).
Then she saw University of Akron archaeology professor Tim Matney and a group of archaeology students working with their equipment in the park in 2017.
She went over to ask Matney what they were doing — he explained that there were bodies buried there.
“It became so important to me, I just couldn’t believe I lived across the street from a burial ground … and that nothing had been acknowledged,” Greenland said during the March 2 Akron City Council Parks & Recreation committee meeting.
Later that day, Akron City Council passed a resolution urging the city’s administration to rename the West Akron park Schneider Memorial Park. Akron Mayor Shammas Malik’s March 6 newsletter said the park would be renamed, although it’s not clear when the change will happen.
What’s the history of the Schneider Park site?
Schneider Park’s history was widely shared in a May 18, 2009, Akron Beacon Journal article written by Mark Price.
In 1849, Summit County commissioners purchased Joseph McCune’s 150-acre farm at the southwest corner of West Market Street and Portage Path. The existing farmhouse and barns were updated to become the Summit County Infirmary, where poor and destitute county residents could be sent to live when they were unable to care for themselves. Originally known as the county poorhouse, it had approximately 50 people in residence to start. Over the next decade, the county bought additional land and added more buildings.
In 1865, a new, $20,000 infirmary building was constructed using pauper-made bricks near the current site of Westminster Presbyterian Church between South Rose Boulevard and Mull Avenue. The new infirmary building opened the following year.
Just two years later, inspector A.G. Byers reported to the Ohio Board of State Charities that residents were living in squalid conditions. Some were kept outside in pens. Conditions seemingly improved, but controversy about the treatment of residents continued.
In 1887, the Ohio Board of State Charities investigated allegations that the infirmary’s physician, Dr. Alvin Fouser, was selling corpses to medical schools. Fouser was never convicted, according to Eric Olson’s essay on the history of the park in the 2025 book “What Remains: Infirmary Burials, Memory, and Community in the Rubber City.”
Additions were built in 1875, 1877 and 1880. The infirmary was self-sufficient, growing its own crops and slaughtering its own meat on the surrounding farm.
Who lived in Akron’s Summit County Infirmary?
County homes and infirmaries admitted patients and residents, meaning they could choose who was allowed to live there. Those who were admitted were called inmates. They were expected to work on the property if they were able to.
The infirmary’s population ranged from 40 to 215 people. This included widows, children, the elderly, immigrants, those deemed mentally insane by standards of the time, people suffering from alcoholism, social outcasts and others who lacked the resources to care for themselves.
When inmates died, they were buried in a potter’s field. Also known as pauper’s graves, these were unmarked graves commonly used for people who did not have the means for a private burial. The city also buried many people on the property who died within the city and were unidentified.
The potter’s field is located inside the boundaries of today’s Schneider Park. This portion of land is very wet and swampy compared to other parts of the former infirmary’s property, which made it unusable for farming and is why it was used as the cemetery.
Some of the grave outlines are still visible today in the park due to how grass grows differently on gravesites — they can be easily spotted when looking at an aerial photo.
It’s not clear the exact number of people who are buried at the park. Hundreds of people — primarily poor, disabled immigrants, unclaimed bodies of infants found in the canals and murder victims — were buried in unmarked graves between 1875 and 1919.
Death certificates for 308 people buried there were uncovered by retired Akron-Summit County Public Library special collections librarian Michael Elliot. Of the 308 records, only 138 were for inmates who died at the infirmary, according to the book “What Remains.” The remaining burials were for people who died in Akron and were unclaimed.
The original records were destroyed in a fire in 1981, but copies of some of the death records were recovered from the trash in 1982. It’s likely that there are even more burials that were not recorded, or that the records were lost. Other than some interviews with inmates in the Akron Evening Times in May 1919 as they prepared to move to the new Munroe Falls facility, very little information remains of these people in the historical record.
In 1915, Summit County residents voted to sell the infirmary and its land. Akron’s population was rapidly growing and more housing was needed, which prompted the sale of the property. A new Summit County Home was built in Munroe Falls, and operations moved to the new facility in 1919.
The West Akron land was then sold to Philip Schneider, who developed it into the Sunset View subdivision. The portion of land that is now Schneider Park was never developed because it was too swampy to build homes on. When Schneider died in 1935, he left the land to the city and the park was built and named in his honor.
Research and archaeology uncover hundreds of graves
“We know all of this from research, but the research has spawned — as it should — community engagement around memory and forgetting in the City of Akron,” Carolyn Behrman said during the March 2 committee meeting. Behrman is a retired University of Akron anthropology professor.
Several pieces of work have been produced from the discovery of the park’s history.
In 2017, Matney’s class at the University of Akron documented the location of more than 300 burial sites using drone photography and geophysical survey equipment. Rather than digging up graves, they surveyed the ground using electric pulses to map the softness of the ground below.
The Forgotten Dead, a 2020 documentary about the history of the park, was produced by Josh Gippin and UA students. The following year, The Center for Applied Drama and Autism created a play called Along the Graveyard Path: A History of Disability that explores the subject in Akron. In 2023, the Akron Parks and Recreation department hosted full moon walks at Schneider Park.
Most recently, the “What Remains” book was published last year. Edited by Behrman and Matney, the collection of essays explores the site’s history and what’s known about the burials.
Now that the city will change the name, Greenland and Behrman are looking for funds for an Ohio Historical Marker or an engraved stone to place in the park that explains the site’s history and acknowledges the people buried there.
