Archaeologists Map Civil War-Era Graves at Old City Cemetery

Four archaeologists stood among a 45-foot by 10-foot trench within “Yankee Square” at Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg on Sunday afternoon.

       

Using brooms and shovels, they uncovered a patchwork of soil about 10 inches below the surface. To the common observer, the trench was just a mix of red and orange squares with splotches of brown; but to the archaeologists, it affirmed what they believed they would find in an area of unmarked land — Confederate soldiers’ graves.

                    

The goal of the project is to be able to identify the boundaries of Yankee Square so cemetery staff can map the graves and match them to a book that documents where soldiers were buried during the Civil War. Once the soldiers are identified, cemetery staff members hope to put markers in place so visitors can see who is buried where. The project will help people understand the cemetery’s history and offer closure for descendants of those buried there, said Ted Delaney, Old City Cemetery’s assistant director.

“It’s always been an unsatisfying answer for me to say, ‘We know your ancestor is here somewhere, but we don’t know exactly where,’” Delaney said.

Sunday’s work marked the second phase of what Delaney hopes to be a several-year-long project dedicated to identifying and maintaining Civil War soldiers’ graves. The project, which utilizes an annual $2,500 grant from the Virginia Department of Historic Records Work to document Yankee Square’s unknown inhabitants, began in April 2013.

During that phase, 50 graves were identified. About 35 graves were discovered this year between the two trenches dug, said Randy Lichtenberger, the director of cultural resources with Hurt and Proffitt — the Lynchburg-based company performing the archeological work

About 180 soldiers are buried throughout Yankee Square, which was started as a site for deceased Union soldiers. Within months of its creation, Confederate soldiers who died of diseases, usually small pox, also were added.

Work on this year’s phase began last Monday, but rain delayed the project. Sunday was the third workday. Archaeologists plan to spend another half day this week cleaning the site so the graves are easier to identify and record.

Based on the size and depth of the trenches, Delaney said the work doesn’t take long.

“You can cover a lot of area and learn a lot in just a few hours,” he said.

The red clay patches show either the head or the feet of soldiers buried there about 150 years ago, while the surrounding orange dirt shows an untouched area.

“We can see any time that a hole or disturbance is put in the ground because the soil’s not the same,” said Crystal Collins, one of the team members working on the project.

The holes often were filled with the soil in reverse, leaving the bottom layer on the top. In this case, the red clay at the base of the graves is now on top, she said.

The straight edges in the ground show the graves have not been excavated since the soldiers were buried, unlike the 18 graves the team discovered last Monday, where Union prisoners of war were buried during the war. Those soldiers were exhumed in 1866 so the bodies could be buried in a Petersburg cemetery, Lichtenberger said.

Before this phase of work began, Delaney said, the team wasn’t sure where they would find the exhumed Union graves.

“Now we can clearly know they’re outside the hedge, between the hedge and the road,” he said.

Since the graves are in columns and rows, the entire site doesn’t need to be excavated, just the perimeter to identify where the rows and columns start and end. The cemetery is uniform, consisting of the same size graves with the same spacing between them, Delaney said.

This year’s work brought the team a step closer to completing the map of graves, especially with the possible discovery of an untouched patch that corresponds with a spot in the records for six graves that weren’t made. If the spot is correct, then staff can begin numbering the graves to match the records, Lichtenberger said.

“We get a little further every time,” he said. “We find out more information every time, but it also raises questions every time because we find things we didn’t expect.”

One of the questions they now face is what a patch of discolored dirt represents. Archaeologists found a circular dark brown patch on top of some of the graves.

Lichtenberg doesn’t believe the spot is related to either a nearby tree or the soldiers’ graves. The patch could be the remnants of an old flowerbed or some other landscaping element, he said, but the team might never know its actual purpose.

“That’s a complete mystery,” he said.

Overall, Delaney and Lichtenberger said the discoveries are close to what they expected to find this year based on last year’s work.

“What we didn’t expect was finding the disease burials as far out as they are and crosscutting these,” Lichtenberger said, pointing to the marked graves surrounding the excavation site.

The biggest surprise has been finding some graves placed perpendicularly on top of other graves, they said.

The perpendicular graves often were noticeable as dark brown patches crossing the reds and oranges, showing a newer grave.

“To me, that’s the most interesting thing because it goes against everything you understand about the integrity of a grave,” Delaney said. He wondered how such grave placement could be approved but understood how the chaos of war could cause that to happen.

Lichtenberg also said the overlapping graves are interesting.

“The fact a good number are crosscutting, you don’t expect that,” he said.