Dying for a piece of prime Lincoln Park real estate? ‘Twas much the same for city dwellers 150 years ago, when the grassy area north of today’s Chicago Historical Society served as the Chicago City Cemetery.
Some 20,000 people — including a rich innkeeper named Ira Couch — were interred there until 1870, when the cemetery closed to make way for Lincoln Park. Graves were moved to other locations, save for the massive mausoleum of Couch. And today it still stands, this hulking stone structure marked mysteriously by the name COUCH in capital letters.
Passing this brooding edifice on countless occasions, I’ve wondered who exactly this Couch fellow was, why his grave wasn’t moved — and why there’s not much mention of him in Chicago folklore..
First, the facts, straight from another musty vault, the Tribune archives: Ira Couch was big in every sense of the word. Standing 6 foot 4 — a giant by 19th Century standards — this New York native struck it rich in the Windy City. Soon after arriving here in 1836, he and his older brother James set up the Tremont House. The hotel burned down twice before the Couches built a 260-room brick structure, sometime after 1849, on the corner of Dearborn and Lake Streets.
Tremont House became a bustling center of activity in the young city, and it made Couch a very rich man — by some accounts, the third-richest in Chicago after former mayors William B. Ogden and “Long John” Wentworth. The Couches expanded into buying Loop real estate, but for poor Ira, there wasn’t much time to enjoy his newfound millionaire status.
On a trip to Havana, he contracted a fever and died in 1857. And there begins the tale of his grave, which has all the ingredients of a good Chicago mystery.
James Couch saw that his brother would go out with a bang. The mausoleum cost a fortune, $7,000, to build. One hundred tons of stone imported from upstate New York were hauled to the site. In 1858, Couch was buried there — but it remains unknown whether Couch is the mausoleum’s sole occupant.
Because city records were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1871, it’s not clear whether Couch is in there alone or with as many as a dozen other family members. Some legends even say that a unidentified Tremont regular and friend of the Couches is in there too. Because of health concerns, neighbors and a local physician, Dr. John Rauch, urged that City Cemetery be closed and declared a park. They argued that the bodies of cholera and typhoid victims buried there were poisoning the lake. (As it turned out, Chicagoans instead were poisoning the water by dumping raw sewage into it.)
As for why Couch’s mausoleum stayed when almost every other body left, no one seems to know for sure. One theory, perhaps the most plausible, is that the structure was simply too big to dismantle or move. Another has it that James used his muscle with city bigshots to keep his brother in Lincoln Park.
Even if James managed to put on the clout for Ira, it didn’t do much to hold back the ravages of time. Over the years, the Couch family fortune was lost. Couch’s descendents are as much in the dark about the mausoleum and its contents as your average jogger in Lincoln Park.
During the mid-20th Century, Couch’s crypt fell into disrepair; it was overgrown, surrounded by a shabby cyclone fence and covered by graffiti. But in the 1990s, it was restored–complete with a new wrought-iron fence modeled on the mausoleum’s original. Today, Ira Couch occupies one of a few graves left in the old cemetery. David Kennison, who claimed to be a Boston Tea Party survivor and died in 1852, is still in Lincoln Park as well.
Workers have found other remains in the area as recently as the 1998, during the excavations for the Historical Society’s two-story garage. But as for what the Couch grave might contain, we’ll probably never know.