Exhuming the Dead. Warning: images may be disturbing to some people.

The exhumation of graves is never something done on a whim. The process, if done correctly, is a careful and meticulously documented endeavor. Not just the moving of stones...

This blog will walk you, the reader, through the exhumation process of an entire family that was conducted in Rochester, N.H.

The site of the original Legro Cemetery and exhumations.
Plastic was used to preserve the area. 

During the fall of 2009, an archaeologist on a state-sponsored excavation project for the NH Highway Department, exhumed the remains within the Legro and Leighton cemetery which was located in middle of the on/off ramp of Exit 15 off the Spaulding Turnpike in Rochester, NH. The removal of the cemetery was to make way for the new highway ramps.

Years before the exhumation project all of the headstones had been removed from the cemetery, for what was called "safe keeping" by a local cemetery enthusiast. This person made a hand written map, using tree locations as measurements to mark where the headstone once stood. This ultimately posed a huge challenge for the archeological team since some of the trees had been removed since the making of the map. The true size of the family cemetery and position that the markers had been in were now not properly documented. It would be a game of guess work to locate exact positioning for all of the remains. All this extra work for the team, due to the actions of a person who wanted to "help".

Carefully removing soil from the remains.

Elihu Legro's remains

The workers started their day at 7 am and worked through the day until 5 pm.



Most of the team's day was spent bent over on their knees in the dirt performing painstaking work. This made for very long days.  








At the end of their work day the workers would secure their tools, stretch plastic sheeting over the site and secure them with sandbags.


A tractor would then bring in large sheets of metal to be laid on top to keep anyone from tampering with the site. 




The team typically didn't work past 5 pm unless they found new remains, then they all concentrated their time on quickly and carefully exhuming and documenting the newest finds before it became too dark. 

A Leighton Child

Pieces of glass were found on top of some of the children's skulls, this would have allowed for a closed casket funeral where the child's face was visible. These coffins were known as a viewing coffins. The glass had the unintended consequence of creating a "microenvironment" that allowed for better preservation of some of the remains. The children's remains are from the 1840s or '50s, while the adults may have been buried as late as 1871.

One of the many great finds was the original headstone that belonged to Elihu which was thought to have been removed to make way for his Civil War Military stone. 

It was buried under 8 inches of soil and three feet from his resting place.

Mary Legro remains. Notice the hairpin used to hold her hair back is still present on the skull.

Researchers found elaborate buttons near the remains of Mary Legro. Also present was a hair pin and a frock button which would have been a part of her dress.

A collection of burial artifacts including buttons, nails and a coffin handle.

The whole process took approximately two weeks to complete.


The final archeological report showed the Legro Cemetery measured 25 rods and contained the remains of David and Joanna Legro, Elihu and Mary Legro, their son Elihu Jr., 2 of  Elihu’s siblings, as well as four children from the Leighton Family.


On May 8^th 2010 under rainy skies, Elihu Legro a Civil War veteran was reburied with full military honors at the Rochester Cemetery.
 

Small handmade pine caskets.

Prior to Elihu's burial, the rest of the family was reburied.

All were reburied in the same order they were found in. 

All were given new handmade caskets as seen in this photo to the right.

Pine caskets placed in eco-vaults.

As you can see, this was a massive undertaking.  Not just a quick shuffling of gravestones from one location to another. Officials from the governor's office to state and local government agencies were involved.

Daniel Meehan a Son's of Union Veteran's official and a Civil War reinactor with the 12th New Hampshire single-handedly orchestrated the entire funeral.

Final Footnote:

It was noticed that Elihu's and Mary's heads were tipped to the sides. The result was that each was  looking at the other.

Prior to being placed within their newly made coffins, straw was laid down and they were placed the same exact way, so they will continue to look at each other through the ages.

May they finally rest in peace.

This photo shows how they were found.

How the Civil War taught us to deal with the business of death.

The American Civil War was a brutal war but it brought on great awareness of how to handle and bury our war hero’s.

The government for both the North and South saw the coming conflict as a war that would not last much more then 90 days. A grave underestimate all around, they would soon would find out that the war would continue with unfathomable loss of life. Neither side was prepared for the numbers of dead that they would suffer.

There was absolutely no structure in place on how to identify or how to handle thousands of dead soldiers.

After word of a battle, whole communities went on a quest for information on who may have become a casualty. With no responsibility on either side for notifying the next of kin, newspapers from both north and south published long lists of the dead after every major engagement, taken from official military reports - which were not always accurate. So people went missing; people went buried unidentified or miss identified and the missing in action disappeared.

Zouave ambulance crews remove the wounded from a battlefield.

Imagine your loved one being 18 years old, he leaves for war, far from home. You later read your sons name in the newspaper as dead. Or maybe you receive a letter from one of his comrades explaining that your son has died and he was buried in a shallow grave or worse, a mass grave upon the battlefield...

 

Now it is up to you to either let him rest eternally there, to make the trip to yourself to locate his remains, or to possibly pay someone to locate the remains, retrieve them, and hope the that body is successfully shipped back home to you.

One of the major problems was trying to trying to identify the thousands of bodies after a battle since dog tags had not been issued yet. Many men were reported as missing presumed dead only later to be found wounded in a hospital or in a prison after being taken a prisoner of war. It was the responsibility of the  field commanders for identification and burial efforts. However, these efforts were not well organized or executed, and were often given low priority. 

A privately purchased Civil War ID tag

In order to help them go home if they became a casualty, men would soon start pinning their names inside their coats and some would buy a brass tag from a sutler with their name, regiment and state stamped onto it to. These were not government issued to soldiers. Modern forms of soldier identification, i.e. dog tags would not come about until WWI.

 If you could afford shipping the body home you then would be challenged on how to preserve the remains in order to hold a viewing. Bodies were sometimes packed in ice or just shipped in a pine coffins. Nurses would sometimes gather flowers to be placed within the coffin to mask the stench of the decaying remains. Occasionally the people who were hired to locate and ship the remains home would lie about finding the remains and have stones placed within the coffin. This would simulate the weight of a body and ensure a payment for their "efforts". It would be a terrible shock to the family if they decided to get one last look at their loved ones. 

Embalming, which was used to preserve for medical studies, would soon be used to preserve remains for shipping... for a price. Thomas Holmes who pitched himself as the father of embalming and was given the rank of captain in
the U.S. Army Medical Corps would charge $50 for an officer and $25 for an enlisted man. As the war continued and embalmers were in high demand, those figures rose to $80 and $30, respectively. Feeling he could make even more money if he worked in the private sector performing the same duties, Holmes resigned his commission and began to charge $100 per embalming.

As surgeons and pharmacists became aware of the profits to be made from embalming, they traded in their instruments for those of embalmers and followed the troops into war. After the battle, the embalmers would converge on the scene and quickly find dead officers to embalm, knowing that the family of an officer would be grateful and able to pay the fee. One embalming company went so far as to try to obtain a government contract to embalm all Federal dead. A bill was introduced to allow the creation of a corps of military undertakers for each division, but it was never passed.

To market embalming, a Washington embalmer showcased an embalmed soldier in a display window for days.

Richard Burr, a Union surgeon who served with the 72nd Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, became an embalming surgeon when he saw the profit to be made. Known for severely inflating the price of embalming services, he created and distributed handbills after the battle of Anita offering “Embalming for the Dead.” The handbills invited the curious to watch the procedure.

Some remains were sent to the wrong families who were shocked when they opened the wooden coffins to find out that it wasn't their loved ones inside...

One such story "The Stranger" comes from Gray, Maine:

Upon hearing of the death of their loved one the family of Lt. Charles H. Colley, Co. B., 10th Maine Vol. paid the government for embalming and transportation of the remains. When his body arrived they opened the casket in farewell. Instead of their son, they found a fully uniformed Confederate soldier. They were grief stricken but finally decided to bury the lad in a Gray Cemetery. That no ill will was borne the soldier was evidenced by the erection of a tombstone over his grave shortly after. Inscribed on the slab was, "Stranger-a soldier of the late war. Erected by the Ladies of Gray." No one knows for sure how the mistake was made. Lt. Colley's body arrived shortly after. He is buried about 100 feet southwesterly from the Stranger. Local historians guess that both Lt. Colley and the Confederate might have been wounded in the same battle, hospitalized together and both must have died about the same time. And there's always the possibility that the Confederate soldier may have been named Colley. Similarity in names could have accounted for the error.

With the awareness of the amount of bodies needing burial Congress approved the purchase of land in 1862, twelve military cemeteries located on or near major battlefields, Union camps and hospitals, and other military sites were authorized. Most of them, including Robert E. Lee's estate, which became Arlington Cemetery, were on Southern soil. In the midst of the war and in the immediate aftermath these cemeteries made profoundly political statements about Northern power, resources, and determination.

 The sheer numbers of those needing gravestones also altered the way in which we carved final memorials in general... but that, as they say, is the stuff for yet another blog.

Thank You to 
Daniel Meehan,

Civil War Historian 
and Reenactor,
for sharing his vast knowledge and expertise on this topic.

Thyme, the herb of Death

While walking through a very old garden cemetery, I happened to noticed for the first time, a very steep embankment that was covered in something that was clearly not grass. Little purple blossoms were peeking out here and there in bunches within the massive green carpet of the stuff. My friend who is an avid landscaper told me to pick a bit of the green ground cover and crush it between my fingers.

Instantly I recognized the pungent aroma from stews and stuffings that I have made countless times in my own kitchen. There was no doubt, it was Thyme. 

She told me that thyme was a common plant to be found growing unchecked in the oldest of cemeteries. THIS fact, I had never heard of. I was intrigued. She went on to tell me that this fragrant little herb was commonly planted in cemeteries of antiquity to mask.... well, odours.

I had to know more about this so I did a little research and was shocked at the many uses of thyme and it's long and close association with death.

Wild or creeping thyme or Thymus Serpyllum, a species of the mint family, has been used in death practices and various rituals all the way back to Ancient Egypt. The Egyptians used thyme in their embalming practices. The Greeks burnt thyme as an incense in their temples, believing it to be a source of courage. Roman soldiers, who may be away from home for long periods of time, slept on the herb to help them with melancholy.

The practice of sleeping on thyme can also be found in the Middle Ages when Europeans used sprigs of thyme under their pillows to ward off nightmares.







Teas made of thyme were promised to relieve ailments such as headaches and hangovers.

It was also encouraged to plant thyme for the bees as it was said to fortify them.

Patches of thyme were even set aside by gardeners who thought them to be inhabited by fairies.

 Due to it's fragrant aroma, thyme along with lavender, was sprinkled on the floors of churches to purify the air. For those of you who aren't aware... long ago, people were once buried under the floors of churches and well, with no Lysol around. You get the picture.

Thyme has been burnt as a purifying incense for as long as sage has.  It has also long been placed into coffins during funerals. This practice was thought to help insure the departed one's passage into the next life.

Members of the Fraternal Order of Odd fellows carry sprigs of thyme during their funeral rites. They ceremonially throw the herb into the open grave of their passed members.

 The practice of planting creeping thyme in cemeteries can be found beginning in Wales. This made sense to me since I realized that some of the earliest slate stones in New England were imported on ships from Wales. The Island of Wales has long been known for it's thriving slate industry. My mind made the instant connection, if settlers were bringing over stones the knew well for carving, maybe they were bringing other bits of cemetery tradition with them as well... fragrant, spreading thyme plants. 

Some British citizens hold to an age old death superstition dealing with thyme... 

 

It is thought that bringing thyme sprigs into a house will also bring death or illness to a family member within that house.

 Thyme is also said to be a phantom scent common with haunted locations.

Today, thyme may be a common herb found in the household spice rack but this noble herb has quite an interesting list of uncommon uses and a mystical, almost magical wealth of folklore attached to it.