Human remains found in McCullouch Park during excavation of the General Electric campus will be relocated to Lindenwood Cemetery.
The bones were discovered as crews excavated a spot for construction of a temporary traffic signal and handed over to the Allen County Coroner’s office for further processing.
Michael Burris, chief investigator for the coroner’s office, says they reached out to the Indiana Department of Natural Resources for next steps. First, they needed to ensure that the remains were not Native American.
Burris says the bones were likely a part of the old Broadway cemetery, which became a city park in 1886, and is now the site of McCullouch Park on Broadway.
The bones would have been buried some time between 1838 and 1860. When the cemetery ceased operations, many of the remains were moved to Lindenwood cemetery, but some were left on the original site.
Burris says he suspects if they did more excavation on the site, they would find more remains like these, but they don’t intend to do so currently.
According to the Allen County Genealogical Society, Broadway Cemetery was laid out into 622 plots, with the potential for a capacity of more than 3,700 graves.
