The Couch Tomb, The Grave Lincoln Park Couldn't Move

Off to your side, a squat limestone mausoleum sits alone on open grass behind the Chicago History Museum, the single marked grave left standing from a cemetery that once covered this entire stretch of park. Ira Couch made his money as one of the city's earliest hotel men, opening the Tremont House in the mid eighteen thirties, and when he died, his family built this tomb in what was then called City Cemetery, a burial ground that by the eighteen fifties held something like thirty five thousand people. In eighteen sixty four, the city council decided the lakefront needed a park more than a graveyard, and crews spent years digging up bodies and moving them to cemeteries farther out, clearing the ground for what became Lincoln Park.

The Couch tomb never moved. A plaque on it states that six Couch family members and one family friend rest inside, seven people in total, but that tidy number has never fully settled the matter. The Great Chicago Fire burned away most of the wooden grave markers that once dotted the old cemetery, so nobody could say for certain who had already been relocated and who had not, and as late as nineteen ninety eight, construction work elsewhere in the park turned up still more nineteenth century remains that the original removal crews had missed. So the honest answer, more than a century and a half later, is that the plaque's count is the official one, while the ground around this tomb has shown, more than once, that it may still be keeping its own secrets.