https://www.wral.com/erosion-unearthing-bones-on-new-york-s-island-of-the-dead/17526822/
As many as 1 million souls lie buried on Hart Island, purchased by the city in 1868 as land for a workhouse for wayward boys and a potter's field. Over the decades, it housed a Civil War prison, an asylum, a tuberculosis hospital, a jail and a missile base. All the while, New York continued ferrying bodies there that went unclaimed at the city morgue.
The island, managed by the city's Department of Correction for more than a century, has never been kept up like a traditional cemetery, with manicured lawns or even headstones.
Prisoners dig long trenches. Adults go into the ground in pine boxes, stacked on top of one another. Babies are placed in shoebox-size containers. Around 1,000 people are buried there each year.
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