AKRON, Ohio — City officials and neighbors gathered on Wednesday, Oct. 28, to rededicate a West Akron park as Schneider Memorial Park, honoring the hundreds of people buried there in unmarked graves when the land belonged to the old Summit County Infirmary. The outdoor program at 370 Schneider Park Drive included several speakers and concluded with a laying of flowers, according to the City of Akron.
The city said in an Oct. 23 press release, quoted by the Akron Beacon Journal, that the park sits on land that once belonged to the infirmary, where hundreds of indigent residents were buried in unmarked graves. That history resurfaced in 2017, the city said, when archaeological work revealed the extent of the forgotten burial ground. Before the infirmary, Beacon Journal reporting on the ceremony explained, the site was a poor farm where people with no financial means could work the land and stay.
"Every single person here had a life, had a story and had inherent dignity," Akron Mayor Shammas Malik told the Akron Beacon Journal at the rededication, "and regardless of their own circumstances, or how much of their story survives." The infirmary itself was built in the mid-1860s and operated until 1919, according to the Beacon Journal.
The new name is the result of a campaign that lasted nearly a decade. Community members led by neighbor Jane Greenland, who lives across from the park, pushed for the site to be formally recognized, according to the city’s press release. Greenland worked for nine years to gain official recognition for the buried dead, the Beacon Journal reported, after first encountering University of Akron researchers mapping the graveyard in the park in 2017.
City government acted on that advocacy earlier this year. In March, Ward 4 Councilwoman Jan Davis introduced a resolution urging the administration to rename the park in honor of those buried there, and council approved it unanimously, according to the Beacon Journal. Davis told the Beacon Journal she hoped the park would forever stand as a place of peace, dignity and remembrance, and she credited former Ward 4 Councilman Russ Neal with aiding residents Carolyn Behrman and Jane Greenland at the start of their effort.
Behrman, a University of Akron anthropology professor emerita, was among those listed by the city as attending the ceremony, along with Davis, Wendy Duke and Greenland. Their work, and the research behind it, turned a neighborhood park that many residents simply used for recreation into a documented burial ground whose story is now part of the site’s official name.
The conversation continued beyond the morning ceremony. The Richfield Branch Library was also scheduled to host an Oct. 28 evening program, "What Remains: Untold Stories from Akron’s Schneider Park," from 6 to 7 p.m., according to the Akron Beacon Journal. For Akron residents, the rededication means the people buried beneath the grass — residents who died poor, unclaimed or far from family — are no longer anonymous in the city’s own telling of the place.