|
|
|
|
|
|
| Team hopes to solve riddle of Kinston graves
Va. woman presses search for governor's resting place
By KRISTIN COLLINS, News & Observer Staff Writer
The two women lay forgotten for decades beside one of Kinston's main roads, their graves hidden by Dumpsters and buried under a growth of bamboo.
They were people, like so many others left in unmarked or abandoned graves, whose stories had been lost to time.
Then, this week, a group of East Carolina University students unearthed their caskets, slid them into a pickup and gave them a rare chance at resurrection.
They took the corpses, nameless and discovered by accident, to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. There, scientists unbolted the lids and began studying the bones, trying to piece together the puzzle of who they were.
The women might soon rest again under marked headstones -- thanks to the persistence of a woman who thinks they are her ancestors.
"There's no record of who these people are, and that's just not right," said Susan Burgess Hoffman, who thinks the bodies lay in her family's long-forgotten cemetery. "They have a story. Now it's our job to find that story."
More than 150 years after their deaths, the story must be extracted from bones, buttons, gold fillings, hair pins, gallstones and the few other fragments that survived in water-logged graves.
Smithsonian anthropologist Doug Owsley said those clues will be enough to tell him when and how the women died, what they ate, where they lived, how tall they were, whether they had children, what their hobbies were -- all of which he hopes will lead Hoffman to their names.
He said examining the women's bodies will help him in his long-term study of ancient skeletons. But mostly, he said, he wants to help a family and a town solve a mystery.
"I get lots of requests like this, more than I could ever handle," Owsley said Friday. "But their request was very sincere."
Not governor's grave
It started in 1999, when a group of Kinston businessmen got together to offer a $1,000 reward to anyone who could lead them to the grave of North Carolina's first governor after the Revolutionary War, Richard Caswell.
Caswell lived and, most surmise, was buried in 1789 in this town 90 miles southeast of Raleigh. But the location of his grave has been the subject of speculation for decades.
Her memory sparked by the reward offer, a Kinston woman wrote a letter to the local paper, saying that she played in a thicket of bamboo beside Herritage Street as a child in the 1960s. Once, after a hurricane knocked over a giant oak, she saw a "brick tunnel" with a skeleton at the bottom, she wrote.
The letter made its way to Hoffman, who is a direct descendant of Caswell, and then to the dean of East Carolina University, who enlisted anthropology professor Charles Ewen to investigate. In late 2000, Ewen took a class of undergraduates to the lot, found the stump that the letter-writer mentioned, cleared a patch of bamboo and started digging.
They quickly found two brick crypts and two cast-iron coffins. The rare coffins, which cost $50 at a time when most people paid about $2 for wooden boxes, often keep bodies almost hermetically sealed.
After a brief investigation, Ewen discovered that the caskets dated to the mid-1800s, long after Caswell's death. He had them covered again and thought that was the end of the story.
Hoffman wasn't ready to quit. She grew up in Virginia but maintained strong ties to Kinston and her family's history.
She hadn't known about this old family cemetery, sandwiched between a medical clinic and a bed and breakfast. But after a bit of research, she discovered that the bamboo thicket was right next to the site of Caswell's old home. She said family records indicate that his grandparents were buried there.
Hoffman wanted to know who was inside those caskets. She enlisted the help of a genealogist and did enough research to guess that they might have been Caswell's grandson, Louis Caswell, a Civil War soldier, and his wife. She also called Owsley -- and kept calling for four years, until he finally assembled a team and found time to open the caskets.
"I don't care if cemeteries seem like they're abandoned, or they're out in the middle of a field or behind an abandoned building," said Hoffman, 46, of Williamsburg, Va. "These people deserve our respect."
Last week, Ewen took another group of students to the site. They dug up the caskets once more, ran ropes under them and, with great effort, hoisted them out.
One weighed 527 pounds, the other, 341 pounds. When they got them to Washington and did a computerized scan of their insides, they soon realized why: They were filled with water.
Owsley -- who specializes in the study of bodies preserved in these rare cast-iron coffins -- had expected to find mummified corpses with intact flesh and clothing. But when he unbolted the tops, the water had left only skeletons and other insoluble paraphernalia.
"They opened them up, and there was sort of a dark, sludgy water at the bottom with bones scattered around," Ewen said. "Everyone was a little disappointed."
Bodies of two women
Still, the bones were enough to tell Owsley that these weren't the bodies of a Civil War soldier and his 18-year-old bride. They were two women, probably in their 30s or 40s.
Scattered among the bones of one were two buttons, a gold wedding ring, bobby pins and a hair comb. The other had two gallstones in her coffin.
Both appeared to have borne children and had several gold fillings, indicating they were rich enough to get good dental care.
Over the next week or so, Owsley said, he will examine the bones for signs of infections, cancers or trauma that might have killed them. He will do chemical scans to determine what they ate and when they died. He will scour every mark and groove in their skeletons before sending them back to their graves in Kinston.
Then he will turn over his information to Hoffman, to see whether she can match them to any of the women in the Caswell family whose grave sites are unknown.
Even if they weren't relatives, Hoffman says, she is happy to give two long-forgotten women a chance to live on.
Staff writer Kristin Collins can be reached at 829-4881 or kcollins@newsobserver.com.
|
|
|
|
|
