An eviction and an exhumation

Leather Man, New England, 19th c. (1st image, another image here)
A man of unknown identity and uncertain age was a well-known itinerant in Connecticut and New York for 50 years. Referred to as the "Leather Man" because he was clad in hide year-round, the vagabond traveled a never-changing 365-mile loop through at least 41 towns, but moved on as soon as anyone probed him about who exactly he was. He was not Jules Bourglay, as it reads on the headstone which had been placed in 1953 over his grave in Ossining's Sparta Cemetery. The Leather Man had received a pauper's burial in 1889, when his lifeless body was found in one of the caves in which he slept. In 2011, a team of historians, geneticists, archaeologists, and anthropologists will examine and investigate the remains of the Leather Man, which are being exhumed to move them to a more central location within the cemetery. Connecticut state archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni explains, “We’re trying to do right by this man; he deserves better than a stone with someone else’s name in the pauper’s area. We’re never going to solve all the mysteries of the Leather Man, but if he couldn’t speak, or chose not to, maybe his biology will have the chance to teach us about him — not through legend, but through actual scientific knowledge.” North Haven middle school teacher Don Johnson holds the opposite opinion, feeling that the best tribute to the man who kept so much to himself is to leave his secrets buried with him: “If anyone’s actions spoke louder than words, it was his....If there’s any place left where you can keep your secrets, with the Internet and everything out there, it should be your bones.” As the Leather Man may have wished, those bones had long disintegrated when his grave was opened last month.

David Burgess, England, 21st c. (2nd image, additional images here)
David Burgess, 63, has been squatting in a remote shack in Exmoor National Park in Somerset for the past 26 years. He shored it up with timber found on the adjacent beach, added a tarpaulin for a roof, and outfitted the interior with hammocks fashioned from salvaged fishing nets, furniture crafted from driftwood, and a floor of dried leaves. Unable to keep deer from eating the food he has tried to grow himself, Burgess works as a landscape gardener to afford the canned and dried food that he heats on a stone grill. Officials of the park want him out of the building, which he has damaged by altering it. The 17th c. bark-drying house is part of a complex of structures that includes a limekiln and the remains of two other buildings. In his defense, Burgess says, “We belong to the land, the land doesn’t belong to us....I am not doing any harm and I pick up rubbish.” The park responds, "[W]e would be happy to discuss with him some arrangement whereby he could continue to enjoy the area.”

Elephant exhumation

Next month, Welsh archaeologists will determine if the rumors are true. Is there really a Victorian circus elephant buried behind a pub in Tregaron? They will dig in the garden behind the Talbot Hotel in search of the bones of an elephant that died in the 19th c. while on tour with Batty's Travelling Menageries. "To have seen a live elephant in 1848 walking through Tregaron must have been astounding,” says Michael Freeman, curator of the county's Ceredigion Museum. Dr. Jemma Bezant of the University of Wales explains that the project is primarily about collecting the oral history of the community: "This project is about celebrating the story of the Tregaron Elephant and less about 'finding out the truth'." John Watkin, co-owner of the inn admits that the acidity of the soil may mean that the bones have dissolved. But Freeman holds out hope, commenting, "It would be fabulous if the story was confirmed as true - it is such a great local story."

Another circus elephant, the legendary Jumbo, died in St. Thomas, Ontario, giving that town an odd claim to fame (link to local brewer of Dead Elephant Ale). After he was born in the French Sudan in 1861, Jumbo was imported to Paris's Jardin des Plantes. At the age of 4, by which time he was more than 10' tall and weighed several tons, the elephant was transferred to London Zoo. Although he was the star attraction, Jumbo had become hard to control, so the zoo made the difficult P.R. decision to sell him to American showman P.T. Barnum in 1882. Less than 3 years later, while touring with the Barnum & Bailey Circus, Jumbo was walking on the track when he was hit and killed by an unscheduled express train. Storied American taxidermist Carl Akely (1864-1926), whose biography I quoted yesterday, was called upon to preserve and mount the skin, so that the elephant could continue to tour with "The Greatest Show on Earth." In 1889, Barnum donated Jumbo to Tufts University, where he became the school's official mascot. Although the mounted hide was destroyed by a fire in 1975, a statue of the famous elephant can still be seen on the Massachusetts campus (and in St. Thomas, Canada), and actual pieces and parts of Jumbo are still extant, including his skeleton, ashes, and tail.

Portrait sitter

The bust above isn't bad work, considering it was done not from life, but from death. Georges Danton (1759-1794) returned from a mission in Belgium to find that his wife, Antoinette Gabrielle, had died in childbirth a week earlier. Danton (2nd image) was grief-stricken and presumably filled with guilt. He engaged profoundly deaf French sculptor Claude-André Deseine (1740–1823) to help him exhume his wife and take a death mask to prepare a sculpture. The bronze-coated plaster bust is still on display at the Château de Vizille. Danton's biographer writes, "The only letter of Gabrielle's in existence reveals her to be uneasy, full of terrors, without him. She pined away. A premature confinement seems to have brought the end. Whether Danton's own conduct had been loose or not, the poor soul's death lay at his door. Thus the poor man's grief may well have been poisoned by remorse. He loved his wife still, with a fierce affection that the site of his desolate home transformed into a wild beast's fury. He had not seen her again: he was resolved to look upon her face once more. He had her grave opened, and her coffin too, he had her shroud taken off her, and when he had kissed her face, he made a sculptor friend of his...take a cast of the poor woman's features. The bust is still in existence: it was exhibited in the Salon of 1793, and thus described: 'Portrait of the Citoyenne Danton, exhumed, and the cast taken 7 days after her death. When all this was done, Danton laid his wife back in her grave." Danton, a major proponent of the French Revolution, fell to the guillotine himself a year after he dug up his dead wife.

Tycho Brahe

Yesterday, a team of archaeologists, doctors, chemists and medical anthropologists from Sweden, Denmark, and the Czech Republic raised the 400-year-old remains of observant and influential Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). Brahe (1st image) had been interred in a tin casket (3rd image) in the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn near Prague's Old Town Square. Team leader Jens Vellev, a professor of medieval archaeology at Aarhus University, oversaw the exhumation (2nd image) and will remove and test samples in an effort to answer the following questions:

• Does the condition of the skeletal remains match the physical description recorded in 1901, when the tomb was opened to mark the 300th anniversary of Brahe's death?
• Was his death correctly attributed to the rupture of his bladder due to obeying protocol and refusing to leave the table to use the bathroom during a royal banquet?
• Did kidney disease or kidney stones play a role in his death?
• Was Brahe in fact accidentally or deliberately poisoned, as suggested by unusually high levels of mercury detected in previously obtained samples of his mustache and hair?
• Or had he been prescribed mercury as a medical treatment for syphilis or ingested too much of it in the course of his experiments?
• Will enough shreds of Brahe's patterned silk burial suit remain to allow them to reconstruct the aristocratic outfit?
• Is there enough evidence on Brahe's skull to determine the material (possibly a silver-copper alloy) used to construct the missing prosthetic nose he wore after his was cut off during a duel with a fellow nobleman in 1566?

The scientific team must gather their samples by Friday, when Brahe is scheduled for reburial. "Perhaps, we will be able to come close to an answer, but I don't think we will get a final answer," said Vellez, adding that scientists might have to exhume Brahe's remains again in 200 to 300 years to complete his research.

Willie Lincoln

William Wallace (1850-1862) was his father's favorite. Abraham and Mary Lincoln had already lost one child, Edward Baker (1846-1850), by the time he was born. Willie and his father were often seen hand in hand, and the 2 took a trip to Chicago that the boy described in a letter to a friend (2nd image). Lincoln never had much time to bond with his oldest son Robert Todd (1843-1926), but felt that Willie had a mind like his own. The child was considered intelligent, mature, generous, and kind-hearted by those who knew him, although he and his younger brother Tad (Thomas Lincoln, 1853-1871) did have a mischievous streak, and were allowed to have the run of Lincoln's law office and the White House. The boys (pictured in the 2nd image with their uncle Lockwood Todd in 1861) were encouraged to talk, dance, and recite verse. Willie even penned his own poem upon the death of family friend Col. Edward D. Baker (1811-1861) that read in part:

His voice is silent in the hall,
Which oft his presence grac’d.
No more he’ll hear the loud acclaim
Which rang from place to place.

Soon, those words were true of Willie himself, who was eulogized on February 24, 1862:

"The beloved youth, whose death we now and here lament, was a child of bright intelligence and of peculiar promise. He possessed many excellent qualities of mind and heart, which greatly endeared him, not only to the family circle of which he was a member, but to his youthful companions, and to all his acquaintances and friends. His mind was active, inquisitive, and conscientious; his disposition was amiable and affectionate; his impulses were kind and generous; and his words and manners were gentle and attractive. It is easy to see how a child, thus endowed, would, in the course of eleven years, entwine himself around the hearts of those who knew him best."

Both parents were devastated when they lost Willie to typhoid fever at the age of 13. Mary was unable to attend his funeral and withdrew from the public for months. The president wept and often dreamed about his son. A notice of Willie's death in Harper's Weekly said simply that "Mr. Lincoln feels his loss very deeply." That was an understatement. While Willie's mother looked beyond the grave to spiritualism for comfort, his father had his embalmed body exhumed twice so he could look at and hold him again.

Martha's Vineyard

Seeing all the news reports yesterday of hurricane Earl's track toward the Outer Banks of North Carolina (where I used to vacation) and Cape Cod (where I lived for a summer) and the islands of Massachusetts, I wondered, "Who was Martha?" Suffice to say, the answer involves skeletons, disinterment, and facial reconstruction...

Martha's Vineyard was originally the name of a smaller island to the south that had been discovered by English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold (1572-1607) in 1602. The name - that of Gosnold's 2nd child, who died in infancy and is buried in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England - was soon transferred to the larger island. (Confusingly, it was also known in the 17th c. as Martin's Island, possibly after the name of Gosnold's ship, the John Martin.)

After his expedition to Cape Cod, which he also named, Gosnold sailed to Jamestown as one of the original settlers of the Virginia Colony. Unfortunately, he died after only 4 months. A little less than 400 years later, archaeologists found what were likely his remains (2nd image). Dr. William M. Kelso hoped the excavation would give Gosnold the recognition he deserved as a leader at Jamestown since, "He just died too early to go on to greater things and write his own memoirs." The occupant of the grave in question was a man of status, as indicated by his burial in a coffin with a decorative captain's leading staff ceremoniously placed along one edge of the lid (3rd image, Dr. Kelso with the skeleton and staff). To confirm Gosnold's likely identity, they attempted to match his DNA to that of his sister. Elizabeth Gosnold Tilney had been buried beneath the floor of a church in the Diocese of St. Edmundsbury and Ipswitch, which gave permission for the exhumation of her remains, but they were not conclusively identified. Meanwhile, the captain's skeleton was analyzed by forensic anthropologists, providing convincing evidence, and a digital facial reconstruction (5th image) was developed which bears a striking resemblance to the figurehead of Bartholomew Gosnold (1st and 4th images) from a New Bedford whaling vessel that was named after him in 1832.

Unknown soldiers

The numbers of unidentified casualties of wars around the world are represented by the remains of unknown soldiers entombed elaborately, guarded ceremonially, and honored regularly. Tombs of unknowns can be found in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Russia, Spain, Turkey, and dozens of other countries. There are 2 names to associate with these symbolic national monuments:

Reverend David Railton (2nd image)
Rev. Railton (1884-1955) was the British army chaplain who conceived the idea of remembering the anonymous war dead with one tomb containing the remains of a single unknown soldier. Years later, he remembered his inspiration on the Western Front of World War I: "I came back from the line at dusk. We had just laid to rest the mortal remains of a comrade. I went to a billet in front of Erkingham, near Armentieres. At the back of the billet was a small garden, and in the garden only six paces from the house, there was a grave. At the head of the grave there stood a rough cross of white wood. On the cross was written in deep black-pencilled letters, 'An Unknown British Soldier' and in brackets beneath, 'of the Black Watch.' It was dusk and no one was near, except some officers in the billet playing cards. I remember how still it was. Even the guns seemed to be resting. How that grave caused me to think....So I thought and thought and wrestled in thought. What can I do to ease the pain of father, mother, brother, sister, sweetheart, wife and friend? Quietly and gradually there came out of the mist of thought this answer clear and strong, 'Let this body - this symbol of him - be carried reverently over the sea to his native land.'" His proposal for a national monument was taken up by the king, embraced by the public, and emulated around the world. The U.K. and France unveiled their monuments, in Westminster Abbey and the Arc de Triomphe respectively, on Armistice Day 1920. That night, British monarch George V (1865-1936) noted in his diary, "A fine bright day, not cold, no wind. Today I unveiled the Cenotaph in memory of the 'Glorious Dead' in Whitehall & was Chief Mourner at the burial of the 'Unknown Warrior' in Westminster Abbey...At 11.0 I unveiled the Cenotaph & then followed two minutes silence throughout the Empire. The whole ceremony was most moving and impressive...The Service was beautiful & conducted by the Dean...Got home at 12.0 everything was most beautifully arranged & carried out." The American Tomb of the Unknowns was unveiled in 1921 containing the remains of an unidentified soldier who died in the 1st World War. To this were added the remains of unidentified soldiers from World War II and the wars in Korea and Vietnam.

First Lieutenant Michael Joseph Blassie (1st image)
The story of the originator of the tombs of unknown soldiers is bracketed by the tale of Lt. Blassie (1948-1972) of the U.S. Air Force, destined to be one of the last unidentified soldiers to be so honored. Unidentified for many years after his death, he was designated as the unknown service member from the Vietnam War in 1984. After lying in state at the U.S. Capitol, his remains were transported by caisson to Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day. There Blassie's remains rested until 1998, when they were exhumed and identified through mitochondrial DNA testing. The body was returned to his family and reinterred in a military cemetery in his native St. Louis, Missouri. At the time, U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen speculated, "It may be that forensic science has reached the point where there will be no other unknowns in any war." The Department of Defense had founded the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) in 1991, and the body of Lt. Blassie is one of at least 150 military personnel from Vietnam, Korea, and World War II who have been identified. DNA samples are now taken from everyone who joins the U.S. Armed Forces, so there may never be another American unknown soldier.

Cemetery scandal

A more pleasant post about cemeteries will follow tonight or tomorrow, but first I want to focus on the cemetery scandal near Chicago which is causing such anguish. Four people have been arrested and are in protective custody for the desecration of more than 300 graves at historic Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois.

Carolyn Towns, the manager of Burr Oak, was the ringleader of the scheme and is now under psychiatric evaluation. She targeted graves that were old and sometimes unmarked, removing the contents and reselling the plots, splitting the proceeds of $300,000 with 3 accomplices. The 3 workers broke up caskets, vaults, and grave markers. They dumped skeletal remains in a mass grave in the weedy northwest corner of the 150-acre cemetery - or in some cases "pounded them into the ground" so that the new occupants could be double-stacked on top of them.

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The conspirators have received death threats from distraught families. It was at first believed that first lady Michelle Obama's father Fraser Robinson III (1935-1991) had been buried at Burr Oak, but the White House confirms that he is interred at nearby Lincoln Cemetery. One family that has been affected is that of Emmett Till (1941-1955), an African-American boy whose murder in Mississippi motivated the Civil Rights Movement. After the 14-year-old had allegedly winked at a white woman, he was beaten, shot through the head, and dumped in a river. No one was held accountable and his mother insisted on an open casket at his public funeral to show the world the brutality of the crime. When the investigation was officially reopened in 2004, Till's body was exhumed, autopsied, and reburied in a new casket. The original casket (above) has been found in a shack on the grounds of Burr Oak. While she did not disturb Till's grave, Towns has been accused of looting a fund for an Emmett Till memorial.

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A team of 30-40 forensic anthropologists has been brought in to identify the mingled remains, which were dumped over a period of at least 4 years. The cemetery, owned by Perpetua, Inc., has been placed in receivership and day-to-day operations have been turned over to the Archdiocese of Chicago's Catholic Cemeteries.

Exhumation

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was an English painter and poet, and co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He married Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862), a model for many Pre-Raphaelite paintings, including his own "Beata Beatrix" and "Ophelia" by John Vincent Millais (1829-1896). (A photograph attributed to Rossetti is also shown for comparison.) When Siddal overdosed on laudanum, Rossetti was overcome with grief. When she was buried in London's Highgate Cemetery, he placed a small journal of poems in her red hair. He later regretted the decision - since he had kept no copies of the many poems - and applied to the Home Secretary for permission to exhume the coffin and retrieve them. This was done in the dead of night by his agent Charles Augustus Howell, who reported that Siddal was well-preserved - although some 8 years had passed since her death - and that her coppery hair had grown to fill the coffin. The poems from the journal were published, along with some new poems, and the volume was controversial, but well-received. Nevertheless, Rossetti was haunted by the exhumation for the rest of his life. Here is a stanza:

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Even so much life hath the poor tress of hair
Which, stor'd apart, is all love hath to show
For heart-beats and for fire-heats long ago;
Even so much life endures unknown, even where,
'Mid change the changeless night environeth,
Lies all that golden hair undimm'd in death.

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The idea that hair and fingernails continue to grow after death has been discredited, but the detail makes for a good story!

Belle Gunness

I was introduced to the story of Belle Gunness (1859-1908?) at the AFI Silverdocs 2006 film festival. Norwegian filmmaker Anne Berit Vestby grew up in the same small town as the subject of her documentary, Only Belle: A Serial Killer from Selbu, and tells the disturbing tale in a most engaging way. Click on the photos for more details, but Belle carried out an unknown number of insurance frauds by killing her husband and foster children, among others, and buried them in the backyard of her home in La Porte, Indiana. Vestby interviews the family who lives on the property now, revealing that the family dog sometimes finds human bones in the backyard and that the youngest son talks to ghosts. Belle's own death date is in question because she quite possibly faked her own death and lived on in anonymity. She now lives on in infamy as one of the most notorious - and probably the most prolific of - female serial killers.

Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday

Today, as you may have heard on the news, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. There have been celebrations of his life across the country - including the one in Springfield, Illinois, attended by President Barack Obama - so let me tell you a few things about his death...

The photo of Lincoln lying in an open coffin is the only one that exists. It was taken by photographer Jeremiah Gurney, Jr., on April 24, 1865, as the president's body lay in state in City Hall in New York. It was immediately confiscated by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (1814-1869) and was hidden away for 87 years until it was discovered in the Illinois State Historical Library in 1952, by then 15-year-old Ronald Rietveld, who was researching the papers of Lincoln's personal secretaries.

It was purported by some that President Lincoln's assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), survived being killed by federal agents in Garrett's barn. Booth lived on for years, it was said by showmen drawing crowds to see several versions of the "mummy of John Wilkes Booth" (like the one to the left), as they circulated in carnival sideshows.


When Lincoln's body was deposited in this temporary tomb in Springfield's Oak Ridge Cemetery during construction of a permanent monument, thieves were caught in the act of stealing it and holding it in exchange for the release of an imprisoned counterfeiter! The story is told in the book Stealing Lincoln's Body by Thomas J. Craughwell.

When Lincoln's Tomb was renovated in 1900, the president's coffined remains were encased in more than 4,000 lbs. of concrete upon orders of his son Robert. At that time, 23 people viewed Lincoln's face and found the features totally recognizable. In 1928, Mr. J.C. Thompson described the experience: "As I came up I saw that top-knot of Mr. Lincoln's - his hair was course and thick, 'like a horse's,' he used to say - and it stood up high in front. When I saw that, I knew that it was Mr. Lincoln. Anyone who had ever seen his pictures would have known it was him. His features had not decayed. He looked just like a statue of himself lying there."

The Museum of Funeral Customs in Springfield exhibited a reproduction of Abraham Lincoln's coffin, scale models of Lincoln's railroad coach, and a ceremonial funeral arch erected for Lincoln's Chicago funeral. Most unfortunately, the museum - which I have visited and blogged about - closed as of December 31, 2008.