It seems that nearly every Chicagoan, and many a tourist for that matter, is aware that native businessman Ira Couch (1806-1857) is dead, though almost no one knows exactly who he was, what he did, or why, for heaven's sake, his tomb stands in the middle of Lincoln Park. For generations, drivers along the park's rich sweep of green have ogled the hotel keeper and realtor's somber tomb with a mixture of keen curiosity and frank unease, wondering at the explanation for this odd ornament affixed in the backyard of the Chicago Historical Society. The answer is disappointingly unmysterious.

Unknown to many natives and most tourists is the fact that the public playground that is today's Lincoln Park was once the civic cemetery. This aptly named Chicago City Cemetery stretched from Armitage Avenue south to the then city limits, providing temporary homes for 20,000 dearly departed prairie-dwellers. Most of these were later disinterred and relocated to various sites around the city upon the closing of City Cemetery around 1870. When this mass evacuation began, the Couch family rallied and appealed to officials to let Ira remain due to the cost of transporting the mausoleum to another site. In time, the city consented, and Ira Couch remains wherehe is for the simple reason that his tomb would have been too expensive to move.

Before the establishment of City Cemetery, Chicago had made some poor decisions concerning the question of burial. The area's first homesteaders had buried their kin in their backyards, leading to a few surprises later on when the downtown area was dug up to lay the foundations for skyscrapers and other developments. In addition, the Chicago River sometimes played tricks on the bereaved who might bid farewell to their loved ones only to watch them floating by on the waterway some time later, having been purged from their graves after a particularly heavy rain. Further, the two cemeteries that were finally established in 1835—a Protestant one at Chicago and Michigan avenues and a Catholic one near 23rd Street and Calumet Avenue—were both situated squarely on the lake shore, leading to the frequent unearthing of caskets. When population increases added to the inadequacy of the funerary system, the city selected an acreage at Clark Street and North Avenue on which to found Chicago City Cemetery. Simultaneously, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Chicago secured for its faithful a portion of property between Dearborn and State streets, south of North Avenue. Though none of this land was exactly towering above the water table, any of it was preferable to the shaky sepulchers of the beachfront burial grounds. The transfer of bodies to the new sites began at once.

Scarcely a decade after the opening of the new cemeteries, however, Chicagoans began to loudly complain about them. Besides the overcrowding resulting from both population growth and a string of cholera epidemics, echoes of earlier days could be heard in the fear that inadequate burials were leading to increased disease and contamination of the water. Fueling this near panic was the fact that the city morgue, as well as a holding building for epidemic victims, the so-called Pest House, were both located on the Chicago City Cemetery grounds. By the mid 1850s, concerned congregations and families were beginning to move their loved ones to "safer" sites, and by the early 1870s, City Cemetery was closed.

After all the unpleasant lessons had been learned, Chicago went about its business secure in the belief that Lincoln Park's posh property was virtually corpse-free, except for the tidy tomb of Mr. Couch and the unmarked grave of David Kennison (1736-1852), who claimed to be a 116-year-old Boston Tea Party survivor. In 1970, however, bones from City Cemetery were found during the building of an addition to the Chicago Historical Society, and in 1986, reality was once again given a blow by the uncovering of 15 bodies during construction at the Streeterville site of one of Chicago's two earliest lakefront cemeteries.