Behind the doors of the mausoleum may lie the remains of Ira Couch and some of his family members, though no one knows for sure who exactly is interred there. The Couch family was known for building Tremont House, a noted local hotel, in 1850. They constructed this tomb in what was then Chicago's City Cemetery soon before or just after Ira Couch's death in Cuba in 1857. 

The Couch family was not alone in selecting this location for their family plot. Opened around 1840, City Cemetery was the city's main municipal cemetery and the site of burial for thousands of Chicagoans until its closure in the 1860s. City officials selected the cemetery's location because of its distance from the densest parts of the city's settlement and for its distance from the city's main water supply. City Cemetery replaced smaller burying grounds closer to the city center. Catholics and Jews also sought burial on the near North Side-- Catholics opened their own cemetery close to City Cemetery, and a Jewish Burial Society bought land within City Cemetery in 1846.

The cemetery remained in use until the mid-1860s, when the city decided to remove the bodies, reinter them elsewhere, and turn the land into a city park. The cemetery was renamed Lake Park in 1864 and then again to Lincoln Park in 1865 in honor of slain president Abraham Lincoln.

Reinternment efforts continued through the State of Illinois' creation of the Lincoln Park Commission in 1869 but then ended abruptly when the Great Chicago Fire destroyed the remaining grave markers, leaving thousands of people interred in the new park. As for the Couches, they refused the city's demands that they move their mausoleum and eventually won their case when it went to the Illinois Supreme Court. The Couch mausoleum remains today and is one of few visible reminders of what stood here before the cemetery's transition into Lincoln Park.