TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -- Moses and Kelly Thompson weren't the first to find human bones buried in their Dunbar Spring neighborhood yard.

And they won't be the last, given that the 16 blocks making up their neighborhood once were the Court Street Cemetery before its closure in 1909.

But the Thompsons were the first to erect a shrine to honor the dead - perhaps as many as 6,000 - resting beneath the neighborhood.

"A part of me was feeling there might have been an injustice to the family," said Moses Thompson, who has lived in the neighborhood for 2 1/2 years.

The cemetery disappeared in 1915 - on the surface, at least - and homes started going up in 1916, one as early as 1914, according to city records.

The remains of 14 documented bodies have "surfaced" and have been reburied elsewhere or remain at the Arizona State Museum, the official administrator of the state's burial protection laws. An unknown number of bodies were removed in 1915, but archaeologist Homer Thiel believes up to 95 percent of the people buried at Court Street Cemetery from 1875 to 1909 still rest there.

"It's not a big deal unless you decide to build something or dig a utility trench," said Thiel, a research archaeologist at Desert Archaeology. "Then it becomes a big deal."

No archaeological work has been done at that corner, but Thiel thinks there could be fewer graves there because that corner is farthest from what was the cemetery's main entrance. Or there could be nearly 300 remains on that property because at least 4,638 people were interred in the Catholic half of the cemetery, Thiel said.

The city Urban Planning and Design Department has had preliminary talks with One West about the grave potentials on the development site, where One West owns two-thirds of the land that wraps around the city-owned land at the corner.

"You trench in a certain location," said Albert Elias, director of the urban planning department. "Based on what you find in testing, you have a mitigation phase. You don't know how much it will cost until you get through the testing phase."

Elias said the city and One West would likely share the cost of testing and removing any remains that may be found.

"The problem is the testing has not been done," Elias said. "They're going to have to do the right thing. We would need to sit down with them and discuss testing and cost sharing."

One may think it was culturally insensitive to build a neighborhood above a supposedly "abandoned" cemetery 100 years ago, but Arizona didn't really address burial protection until the 1990 laws. Before then, developers routinely bladed gravesites, primarily searching for pots, Thiel said.

The Court Street Cemetery was Tucson's third official cemetery, opened in 1875 a half-mile north of the railroad tracks, which were the northern and eastern boundaries of developed Tucson at that time.

Throughout its 40 years, Court Street Cemetery was largely raw desert dotted with tombstones, and at best, dry bladed desert.

May 1915, the city gave people 30 to 40 days to remove bodies from Court Street, and in March 1916 the "old and abandoned cemetery" was sold off to developers as 88 lots.

The most recent unearthing came in October after a rainstorm. It was then Moses Thompson noticed a 11/2-foot long, 6-inch-wide crack had opened up just outside his fence - where a sidewalk would be if his street had one.

He first came upon three brass handles, then a board, and then some tiny bones.

"I didn't know what they were," Thompson said. "My wife is a pediatrician and she thought maybe they were a small child. I had met Homer Thiel before. I called him."

Thiel said two coffins were stacked on that site - a small child, probably a girl, atop a man likely 20 to 25 years old who had a coin from 1886 in his pocket.

"They buried them very quickly," Thiel concluded. "They didn't bother going through the pants. There were three coins, a jackknife and a coin purse. The child had a bunch of clothes stuffed at the end of the casket."

When the Thompsons bought the house on Perry Avenue, they had no idea they were living atop a cemetery. But the neighborhood lore soon came their way.

"I wonder about what happened between the city of Tucson and a developer to have a neighborhood built on a cemetery," Thompson said. "Is it just a part of history where you just throw up your hands and say that's the way it was 100 years ago?"

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Information from: Tucson Citizen, http://www.tucsoncitizen.com

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