In a Forgotten Cemetery, a Mystery Is Solved

Map It:  Columbia Heights 

BACK IN 2005, construction crews in the 1400 block of Columbia Road discovered a cast-iron casket while digging. They stashed it away in the building they were working on, but soon word spread through the neighborhood. One night, vandals damaged the generations-old relic, dating from an unknown time period.

The coffin was turned over to Smithsonian investigators, pictured at left, who have, as The Post's Michael E. Ruane reports today in an amazing detective story, been able to identify the teenage boy, William T. White of Accomack County, Va., who died in 1852.

So how did he end up in what is now Columbia Heights? That's where the precursor to today's George Washington University, Columbian College, was located. The boy was attending prep school there when he died of lobar pneumonia and was buried at the college's cemetery, which was later moved.

All this serves as a reminder that the dead are all around us, and in places you might not suspect. Bones have been found at Walter Pierce Park on the edge of Adams Morgan in recent years.

As we wrote in July of last year, the place was once the Colored Union Benevolent Association's cemetery and was the burial place for 7,000 African-Americans. Although the burial site was closed and the remains relocated, as with the Columbian College cemetery, not everything was moved.

Additionally, the city of Alexandria is in the process of excavating the African-American Freedman's Cemetery, pictured at right, which closed soon after the Civil War and was plowed over and replaced by a gas station in the 1950s. Now it's gone and the city is turning the area into a memorial park, while preserving the graves that are still on site.

» "After Years Lost, Identity Reclaimed" [WaPo]

EARLIER:
» "Civil War-Era Casket Vandalized in D.C." [WaPo]
» "Notes From Around Town: A Forgotten Cemetery" [Free Ride/Express]
» "Archaeology at the Freedmen's Cemetery Site" [Alexandria Archaeology Museum]

Top photo courtesy Randy Boyd; second photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post; last photo courtesy Alexandria Archaeology Museum