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Crews have discovered more grave shafts than city officials initially expected during the excavation of a former burial ground as part of a bridge project, with more ground still to cover.
The Henry Street Bridge will connect the future site of Elanco Animal Health’s headquarters to downtown Indianapolis and includes an extension of the Cultural Trail. That project runs over a portion of the former Greenlawn Cemetery, where thousands of the city’s earliest residents were buried in the 1800s.
The Indianapolis Department of Public Works announced Tuesday that Stantec, the engineering firm leading excavation efforts, had identified 674 grave shafts as of May 2 in just a portion of the site. That exceeds the city’s initial estimate of 650 grave shafts for the entire site.
However, the lead archaeologist said that doesn’t mean the work will continue to yield large numbers as Stantec moves through the remainder of the plot.
“While more grave shafts have been identified than initially estimated for the right-of-way, this does not necessarily mean we will unearth a similar number of grave shafts in the areas still awaiting excavation,” Stantec’s Ryan Peterson said in a written statement.
Department of Public Works spokesperson Kyle Bloyd told IBJ that roughly one-third of the site has been excavated, although he could not give a firm timeline for when all the work is expected to be complete.
The land, located at 402 Kentucky Ave., is the site of at least four historic cemeteries collectively known as Greenlawn Cemetery. It’s also the former site of Diamond Chain Manufacturing Co., which is largely owned by local developer Keystone Group.
Keystone had planned a mixed-use development at the site anchored by a 20,000-seat stadium for the Indy Eleven soccer team. However, those plans fell through as the city announced its intent to pursue a Major League Soccer franchise instead of Keystone’s proposed stadium.
The city’s progress is limited to just the 1.4 acres it owns. In Keystone’s early efforts to excavate the site, the company announced it had discovered 87 burials on its portion of the 20-acre site. A representative for Keystone told IBJ in March that no additional burials had been discovered since 2024, but only 6 acres had been excavated.
Remains and grave shafts are not the same as bodies. The number of individual bodies cannot be determined without additional analysis.
The Henry Street Bridge project is expected to be completed in fall 2026, Department of Public Works spokesman Kyle Bloyd told IBJ in March. At that time, officials estimated the archaeological work for the entire site to be complete as soon as this summer.
Stantec, a Canadian engineering firm, began excavation work at the site in November 2024. Workers began by digging on the east bank of the White River—to avoid disrupting the timeline of the bridge project—and have continued excavating eastward along Kentucky Avenue.
City officials plan to host a public meeting about the excavation and construction progress in July. A date for that meeting has not yet been announced.
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Apparently our city fathers knew better than to build the original Henry Street over and through a cemetery. And apparently our current city leadership sold the fancy idea of a new street and expensive bridge without fully vetting the cemetery sites. 674 burial sites uncovered and still counting, with another 60+% of the site to be excavated. What an embarrassment for the city!
Most of the overrun costs for did the bridge are being covered by the Lilly Endowment.
Also, the City is voluntarily choosing to engage in this extensive of an excavation. While there are laws about relocating graves, etc. *nothing* requires this extensive of excavations, instead the CIty is trying to be sensitive to history and acknowledge prior past discrimination.
The graves were known to be there, and yet the site had been dug up multiple times before for both private and public work, so much for the “wisdom of our forefathers.” It was no mystery there would be extensive excavation done. It is only embarrassing if you think getting a new bridge is embarrassing. It is a done deal, and it is time to move on.
It was well-known there were
Apparently you don’t know the history of the site. Henry Street was not extended through the cemetery because of the river. our city fathers, which you seem to give a lot of credit to, did feel abandoning the cemetery, removing only some graves, allowing grave robbing and turning it over to industrial use was a good idea.
The Vandalia Railroad built Its maintenance shops over it, as did the Union Traction. Diamond Chain built its.factory over it as well, often finding graves as they expanded and retooled.
I’m not defending the current generation, but know that our forefathers were much worse when it came to Greenland Cemetery
You want poltergeists?!? This is how you get poltergeists.
How could Hogsett do this?