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Seeking secrets of the dead
Local historians uncover new truths from region's long-buried grave sites
Friday, Sept. 25, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by EMILY BARNES
Bob Jewett and Joyce Clerico, both volunteers with the cemetery committee of the Charles County Genealogical Society, talk about which areas of the cemetery will be assigned to each volunteer to document at St. Ignatius Chapel Point Church.
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As the crisp fall air begins to bite at noses and the leaves transform cool green trees into fireballs, the spooky images inspired by the autumn season are never far behind.
Now is the time for shadowy cemeteries, home to gravestones leaning helter-skelter, dark corners and whispering winds.
But for many Southern Maryland historians, graveyards aren't just a place where brave youngsters go to make dares or the final resting place for a life's journey. As two history buffs and a group of volunteers will tell you, cemeteries are where many stories begin.
Pieces to a puzzle
Scott Lawrence's passion to reconstruct headstones ignited with a chance discovery of a few pieces of tombstone. The then-11-year-old Lawrence had been wandering the fields near his childhood home in St. Mary's County when he happened upon the shards.
"Something just snapped inside me," Lawrence remembered.
"I've been fascinated with cemeteries ever since.
"In this state you have old gorgeous mansions but the cemeteries get neglected. It's a shame some people just think they are creepy or just something else to maintain."
A defense contractor from 9 to 5, Lawrence has turned his interest in cemeteries into an alternative source of income — Grave Concerns. More importantly, he offers a second chance to gravestones that otherwise would remain broken, buried or worse, forgotten.
Among Lawrence's projects, the most broad and time-consuming effort thus far is his mission to restore the headstones from St. Nicholas Church at Patuxent River Naval Air Station.
Since 2003, Lawrence has been making regular visits to the site, where he resurrects, repairs and resets headstones buried there decades ago.
Built at the end of the 18th century, the Catholic church served as a place of worship and burial until World War II, when the Navy took over the surrounding area to include in the new Navy base.
"Family members were allowed to move those [ancestors]," said Kyle Rambo, conservation director at the base. "The headstones were all laid down and the Navy put topsoil on them."
Knowledge about the cemetery was lost to Lawrence until his grandfather told him that not only was there a graveyard there at one time, but some of the family's ancestors were buried there.
His interest piqued, Lawrence wrote to the station's commanding officer in 2002, requesting permission to put shovel to dirt.
He was promptly denied.
Not only was there concern for "more pain than gain," Lawrence said, he was also informed that his perception of work and effort needed for the project was woefully underestimated.
"The graves and headstones are in the care and custody of the Navy," Rambo said. "We went through hoops to make sure [Lawrence] was qualified."
Rambo said there was also the concern for maintenance of the graveyard once the stones were raised, since it was going to be more expensive for landscapers to maneuver around the pieces rather than a blanket mowing of the lawn, and the Navy did not care for any added expense to taxpayers.
Undaunted, Lawrence stuck with his plan, and within the year he had the permission and permits to start work on the forgotten cemetery; among them a permit required by the Archaeological Resources Protection Act and the aid of a qualified archaeologist — James Gibb of Gibb Archaeological Consulting.
"As a rule, if I get a reasonable request, and if I have the time, I'll usually help," Gibb said of his decision to guide Lawrence.
Lawrence said he compiled a list of area archaeologists to help direct the project, and Gibb was the only one who responded to his proposal.
"Over the years I've gotten several requests, and in most cases my judgment has been that the person couldn't bring [the idea] to fruition," Gibb said. "Scott had the motivation and inclination to make it happen."
Lawrence also worked out an agreement with the local Knights of Columbus to manage the trimming around the re-erected headstones.
Going through red tape and coaxing a weed whacker around a stone proved to be the least of Lawrence's worries. He soon realized that not only were some heavy gravestones buried deep, many of the ones exposed — with the help of volunteers — were in pieces.
Lawrence began bringing the pieces to his work shed in the backyard of his St. Mary's house. Today, stones already cleaned and finished lean against the exterior of the shed waiting for the return trip. Inside the clean work area, other headstones lay on the bench like patients awaiting surgery.
"I try to minimize the number of intrusions. I don't want to modify more than is necessary," Lawrence said. "The stone is an artifact. I want to create as much of a permanent repair as possible."
Using a drill, Lawrence gently bores holes in the stone for joints that will be used to support the broken pieces when they are glued back together.
"It's a rock, but it's still somewhat soft," Lawrence said.
A simple repair can take up to four hours of combined time, but depending on how many pieces the stones is in, it could take much longer. Lawrence is still looking for the center piece of a tombstone that sits unfinished but for its middle.
Most of the stones he's found are made of marble, but roughly a dozen are granite. Just recently, Lawrence unearthed two metal crosses which he was able to scrub down with a wire brush and erect quickly.
Since the first stone was taken from the ground in 2003, Lawrence has documented 210 marked graves and replaced about 170 of them. With the help of neighboring parishes, Lawrence learned there were at least 700 people buried in the graveyard who could be named and dated. There were also 13 veterans somewhere within the two-acre yard — Lawrence found all of those markers in the first phase of his project. He estimates there were 1,000 burials at the church cemetery, but many are unmarked.
The oldest grave he's uncovered is that of a Revolutionary War soldier who died in 1803. Lawrence expects there are older graves considering the age of the church.
"It looks great," Rambo said. "It's a neat reminder of how far [historically] we've progressed."
"I had no clue what I was going to find," Lawrence said. "I knew there were veterans buried out there. It was thrilling. Something about working on this dig for a long time; these people are gone but not forgotten."
A graveyard that keeps on giving
When it comes to the unexpected, it seems history knows no county bounds.
What started out as a typical archaeology study to fulfill Calvert County permitting requirements turned into a unique opportunity to apply modern-day theories to a 400-year-old story.
"Have you ever heard the phrase ‘You are what you eat?' You are what you eat, drink and smoke," said Julia King, an associate professor of anthropology at St. Mary's College of Maryland.
King's study "Alcohol, Tobacco, and Excessive Animal Protein: The Question of an Adequate Diet in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake," was published in Historical Archaeology five months ago. The journal has a high circulation among archaeologists and university libraries.
Within the proposal, King suggests that while our Colonial ancestors had access to meat and vegetables that could provide more than adequate nutrition, their health suffered severely from the effects of two present-day vices.
"We knew colonists were dying early from their environment and disease, but we now know cultural factors were part of health problems," King said.
How did the professor and her research team arrive at this conclusion? With the help of 19 skeletons.
Rick Bailey, his father and brother had big plans for a certain plot of residential land near Solomons in the mid-1980s. The long since forgotten farmland had been home to a 100-acre plantation and would soon be the site of new townhouses.
King signed on to help with the archaeological study, under the impression the usual artifacts would be found: Pipes, bottles, animal bones.
Then came a startling discovery.
"We found outlines of graves along the edge of the dig site; we were not really happy," King said. "Digging up graves is very complicated business. You have to keep in mind these are human remains that need to be treated with respect; these circumstances are beyond their control."
"I didn't have the slightest idea," Bailey said of the graves' existence. "But there was something sacred to that, no matter what. We were concerned over what do we need to do [there]."
The answer of course was to excavate. With the help of grant funds from the state through the Maryland Historical Trust, the work was done over the course of several months. By the time the last of the bones was exhumed, and with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the artifacts, King's crew was left with a provocative snapshot of Colonial Chesapeake history.
"The bodies were buried haphazardly, and normally cemeteries are not like that," King said. "There may have been two households; we don't know, but we can hypothesize."
Along with the theory of two households, King believes that at least one burial site is the final resting place for a middle-income family whose patriarch owned the plantation.
Postholes found in the dirt allowed the research team to estimate the size of the home — 20 feet by 40 feet — which was considered an ample dwelling for the 17th century.
Despite having money and social credibility, these colonists were most likely superstitious, King said.
A lone grave set far away from either burial sites held the remains of a woman estimated to be in her 30s, who died in childbirth or shortly afterward. Her fetus was interred with her, but unlike the traditional method of burial, this ill-fated mother was buried with her head facing west.
"I wonder if what we see here … is she is being denied because many people had folk fears," King said. "Women who just had children were considered vulnerable; some even could be bewitched."
Jinxes and spells aside, King's recent publication deals with the diet and health of the Chesapeake Colonists. King and bioanthropologist Doug Ubelaker also published a book about the cemetery in 1996.
King found that the men were suffering just as much from bone loss as their female counterparts; and both sexes were exhibiting osteoporosis much younger than today's sufferers.
These 17th-century farmers — including their children — showed evidence of focused bone loss, bow-legs and slight osteoporosis commonly seen in today's aging population of women.
"You have to ask yourself what is causing this bone loss," King said.
King instructed Thao Phung — a student assistant working on her senior project at the time — to look into the menu for these colonists, and what she found was that while these colonists had ample amounts of nutritious meats and vegetables at their disposal, their excessive consumption of alcohol and use of tobacco prevented their bodies from absorbing those nutrients.
Compared to today's standards, the alcohol consumption of Colonists — young and old — would put anyone under the table. Though drunkenness was frowned upon, alcohol was the preferred alternative to water and used for medicinal purposes, so it often made an appearance in the mugs of early settlers.
Smoking was just as common for adults and even children. King said some of the recovered skulls from the Patuxent Point site showed wear from the pipes frequently held between teeth.
"What our ancestors did was etched into their bones," King said.
Those bones, and the thousands of other artifacts recovered from the site, are now housed at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory at Jefferson Patterson Park & Museum.
"Although this collection was excavated almost 20 years ago, I think it's important to note that we are still learning new things about the 1600s from these materials," King wrote in a recent e-mail. "These collections now belong to the state, and by that, I mean the citizens of the state of Maryland. This is our collective archive about life in Colonial Maryland. It's very exciting."
Bailey said the discovery was the first and last of its kind he's dealt with in his continued career as a developer.
"I found it fascinating," Bailey said. "[The dig] cost us something, but it could have been worse. You do the right thing, and move on."
King meanwhile, is hoping to see her model on diet and culture withstand future discoveries. "If someone finds another cemetery with this kind of bone loss, I expect the model will hold up," King said. "If it doesn't, that just creates new questions."
