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"What Remains": Untold Stories from Akron's Schneider Park

Join the authors of "What Remains" to hear the untold stories of some of the Progressive Era’s most marginalized citizens lying underneath the soccer chalk and grass of Schneider Park in Akron.

Register online, in person, or by phone at 330.659.4343.

For more than a century, something authors Carolyn Behrman and Timothy Matney call “a whispering history” lay just beneath the surface of a public space filled with activity and ignorance. More recently, as the mystery of Schneider Park’s abandoned graves has entered the public lore, its questions have multiplied. This ground contains the remains of those least able to answer those questions—the infirm, the impoverished, the immigrants. And therefore, this book provides a vital community service, dignifying lost souls and allowing us a better understanding of who they were and, by extension, who we are. If a society is measured by how it regards its most vulnerable members, "What Remains" contributes importantly not just to Akron’s historical record, but its humanity. 

"What Remains: Infirmary Burials, Memory, and Community in the Rubber City" by Carolyn Behrman and Timothy Matney

"What Remains" presents a grassy field with a complicated and fraught history. What is now a suburban park where people play soccer and flag football in the City of Akron, Ohio, was once a Progressive-era county infirmary’s burial ground for people who were poor, infirm, troubled, immigrant, injured, alcoholic, elderly, or otherwise deemed “unemployable” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through community-engaged scholarship, this book uses legal, historical, archaeological, and anthropological lenses to consider what is above and below the grass. "What Remains" is about memories and stories; how at times we collectively remember, forget, or even invent new pasts through the process of tracing and uncovering our own histories. It is about what is worth remembering, what is better left forgotten, and who gets to decide.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.

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