Potter's field

In every town in America, there is what is called the Pottersfield, in which the bodies of strangers and the very poorest class of society are buried, and the supply for the dissecting rooms is obtained almost wholly from those pottersfields.

The health of this section of country is no less remarkable than its fertility, owing to its favorable climate, and the absence of those exciting causes of disease which have and must for many years render life miserable in the lowlands of the Far West, (Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri,) and which have rendered the majority of the towns on the lower Mississippi almost literally pottersfields.

But our nabobs are buried at public expense; their widows are supported in royal style at the public treasury; our tax[-]payers are buried in pottersfield, and we are traveling kingward.

“In a paper in the Forum of December, 1892, by Mr. Jacob Riis, on the special needs of the poor in New York, he says: ‘For many years it has been true of New York that one-tenth of all who die in this great and wealthy city are buried in the pottersfield. Of the 382, 530 interments recorded in the past decade, 37,966 were in the pottersfield,’ and Mr. Riis proceeds to hint at the fact known to all students of social conditions who personally investigate poverty in the great cities, that this pottersfield gauge, terribly significant though it be, is no adequate measure by which to estimate the poverty problem of a great city.