The weathered bronze statue in the middle of the lot seems distinctly out of place off Cicero Avenue near Interstate Highway 57. In the spring, patches of purple and white wildflowers dot both sides of a gravel road leading to the nondescript land.
Few are aware that the 15-acre tract at 164th Street in Oak Forest is a cemetery, opened in 1913 by the Franciscan fathers.
Please be respectful of the area and its history. You will need to bring something to write with.
Fewer know that what appears to be an undeveloped plot is the burial ground for 7,312 Catholics, most of whom were destitute or declared mentally ill and abandoned by their families to die in county homes early in the last century.
Although flowers are placed on graves at other cemeteries, none can be found at St. Gabriel`s. The last burial took place here in the late 1970’s.
No markers identify graves, and only the statue of St. Francis of Assisi looks over the land directly south of Cook County`s Oak Forest Hospital. The passing years have covered the gravesites with a shifting landscape that obscures any signs that the property is a cemetery.
An employee of Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Chicago said ``It was a potter`s field for Catholics who died in the old Oak Forest infirmary,`` .
Even though St. Gabriel`s probably will never again be used for burials, don`t expect to see condos or a new subdivision spring up there. This land is consecrated by the church; it will always remain a burial place.
To expedite burials, concrete vaults were set in rows in the ground and covered with dirt until needed. Several empty crypts still remain in the ground.
Despite the graves` lack of markers or gravestones, cemetery officials say they can pinpoint the plots of everyone buried here since it opened. Sadly no one has sought the remains of relatives since 1978. Contributions from relatives averaged about $9 a month during the early 1950s, but stopped over 50 years ago as families died off.
St. Gabriel`s was run by priests from nearby St. Roch`s friary for 40 years. They conducted simple funeral rites from the cemetery’s opening until 1953. The Chicago archdiocese, took over St. Gabriel`s in 1953 when the order couldn’t maintain it anymore.