Uncovered coffin provides hands-on experience
April 17, 2007
Assistant professor Daniel Wescott and his team lift the lid off a metal coffin on April 12 in Swallow Hall. The dirt found on top of the skeleton had settled after years of water leaked into the coffin.
Assistant professor Daniel Wescott talks about what information he can infer about the skeleton on April 12 in Swallow Hall. The pelvic bones showed the skeleton was female and hair found under her skull showed she might have had red hair.
Assistant professor Daniel Wescott and his team removed the lid of a metal coffin found in Lexington, Mo., in November to reveal the skeleton of a woman. Wescott said the woman was about 20 years old.
Machpelah Sexton Don Coen and Don Barnes examine a piece of material found in the coffin on April 12. Barnes and his son got ‘suckered into’ helping carry the coffin to Swallow Hall. "I thought to myself, ‘Sure, we’ll go move a coffin. I’ve never done that before,'’’ Barnes said.
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Only six inches made a difference in a shocking and exciting discovery that brought to life something that had been dead since at least 1850.
A routine family funeral became mysteriously historic in November 2006 when gravediggers at Machpelah Cemetery in Lexington, Mo., struck a metal coffin just beneath the area reserved for a member of the Stewart family.
After contacting the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., Machpelah Sexton Don Coen said the museum suggested taking the coffin to the MU Department of Anthropology because the distance was too great to bring it to the Smithsonian.
Coen and Bob Stewart, whose aunt's funeral was interrupted by the discovery, brought the coffin to MU more than a month ago and opened it for the media on Thursday.
Making the discovery
Stewart's aunt died the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 2006, and when he arrived at the funeral home the day of the funeral, a concerned attendant greeted him. The attendant told him what had happened, and Stewart said he was interested in finding out more.
"I was excited because I do a lot in genealogy," Stewart said.
Coen said the cemetery takes preventative measures in digging graves so this situation typically doesn't happen. He said his cemetery conducts a four-foot probe underground that is usually dug at 5 1/2 feet. The unearthed coffin was buried at the traditional six-foot depth.
"If it had been buried six inches deeper, we would have never found it," Coen said. "Normally, if you're going to hit something, you hit it not as deep as this one."
Coen said the diggers struck something metal and broke part of the coffin.
"I had never seen anything like that," he said. "In other cemeteries, when they hit an old grave, it'll be a wooden box."
After the discovery was made, Coen said coffin was moved 18 inches over and the funeral was continued as planned.
Analyzing the coffin
For the past month, Daniel Wescott, an assistant professor of anthropology, has led an MU research team in analyzing and cleaning the coffin and the bones found inside. He will continue to do so in hope of discovering the identity of the skeleton.
"We'll start scraping the coffin and cleaning the soil," Wescott said. "But as far as the bones go, we want to keep everything intact. We will if we have to, but I'd prefer to leave as much in there as we can."
Wescott said he looked at minute details to help determine the skeleton's features. He said the head was raised, and he was able to find what looked like red hairs sitting behind the skull.
"It will decay, but it should last a while," Wescott said. "The way the body decays, hair tends to 'schluff' off."
The skeleton was 71 inches long, and the bone structure of the legs and skull led Wescott and his team to believe the skeleton is that of a female in her 20s. Wescott said he saw an identically sized casket at the Smithsonian in March that held that skeleton of a 12-year-old boy.
Wescott said the soil in the coffin and the placement of the head were clues as to how the research team could possibly build a case for an identity.
Students on the job
MU anthropology majors have gotten first-hand experience since the coffin was brought to MU and are working alongside Wescott to clean and analyze the coffin.
Senior Sharon Delgaudio helped at the beginning of the cleaning process and said she was excited when the coffin came in.
"It's gorgeous now," she said. "I've never seen anything like it."
Delgaudio said she suggested a chisel and hammer to clean the outside of the coffin after multiple attempts were made at scrubbing it with soap and water.
"It was taking forever," she said. "It was really dirty."
She said she hasn't had experience like this before in her major and was excited to help analyze the coffin.
"You can tell a lot from a skeleton," she said. "You can get nutrition, see a person's weight and find out what they ate."
Delgaudio said she could tell this person was "extremely wealthy" because after looking through coffin catalogs from that time period, caskets usually cost $3 or $4 but this one cost $75-100.
Junior Marc Olive was also contacted to help draw a detailed version of the coffin as it is and how it might have looked around 1850.
Olive will take a series of black-and-white photos in order to take an in-depth look at detail in the photos and then draw multiple angles of the coffin.
He said the broken faceplate and the flower at the foot of the coffin would require the most detail, and he would research the meanings of different emblems on the coffin.
"I'll probably end up taking at least 100 photos and drawing 40 to 50 rough sketches," Olive said.
Olive said he was asked to help draw sketches for the research after Wescott and his wife, who teaches Olive, were impressed with other sketches he had done for assignments.
"I've been excited with the work the students have done on this already," Coen said.
Cracking the case
While Wescott and his team continue to analyze the coffin, Stewart will look back through his family history in hope of determining the identity of the skeleton.
"There's a lot of doubts or questions on who might be inside," Stewart said. "There were never any markers or headstones."
Stewart said there were a few possible candidates that might fit the description of the skeleton.
His great-great-grandfather John Shotwell bought the plot in 1850, and he had a wife named Elizabeth Triplett who died in 1854. The second possibility is Elizabeth's sister, Mary, who also died in Lexington around that time.
Stewart said the third option is Shotwell's sister Charlotte. She was 20 in 1850, and Wescott determined that the person who died was about that age.
Stewart said one of the plots is labeled "Grandma Stewart and Daughter" which alludes to Charlotte.
"There has been talk about a DNA test, and I would definitely provide a sample," Stewart said. "But it seems like there it's not going to work because we need a woman's link back to them."
Coen said the cemetery would rebury the skeleton after research is completed.
Stewart said he hopes to figure out the identity as soon as possible.
"You want to start at what you know and work back," he said.
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