When developers announced plans in 1998 to build a mall on a 75-acre soybean field at U.S. 12 and Long Grove Road, local residents tried to block the plan. Old-timers remembered that there had once been a small cemetery on the old Deer Park farmstead, although the gravestones had been removed decades before and the land plowed under.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The cemetery was marked on the old plats, says M. Catherine Bird, research coordinator at Midwest Archaeological Research Services in Harvard, the company that was retained by the developers to ensure the project squared with the provisions of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. After walking the property with a team of researchers, “We found some isolated prehistoric pieces but nothing out of the ordinary,” says Bird. “There have been other instances where cemeteries show up on maps and there aren’t any actual graves there. So what we did after that was bring in a backhoe and scrape off the plow zone”–about a foot and a half of topsoil. “We wanted to look under it and see if there were any rectangular-shaped soil discolorations,” she says. There were, and Bird and her researchers eventually found ten grave shafts.
“Then the church burned down,” says Bird. Its own records were lost, and the property was transferred to the control of the Northern Illinois Conference of the Methodist Church. But because the records were gone, the larger organization didn’t realize they were responsible for the cemetery.
Wein is bitter that the family wasn’t given any say in the matter. “Legally they should have stayed where they were but they went ahead and moved them anyway. There have been instances, like at the Kraft Foods factory [in Northbrook], where there was a family cemetery on the grounds and it went to court and Kraft was required to contact all of the descendants before they disturbed anyone. There were about 5,000 of them. So they built around it.
