GRAVE INSULT: The Mysterious Case of the Traveling British Soldiers’ Skulls
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BY JAIMEE LEIGH JOROFF
Grab your shovel and a rope, we’re going to go dig up two bodies. It won’t take long; we just need their heads. We’ll start by making our way down the Battle Road from Concord Center towards the neighboring town of Lincoln, retracing the frantic footsteps of King George’s men as they fled back to Boston on April 19th, 1775. The unexpected battle at the North Bridge still ringing in their ears, the British troops and colonists were engaged in an 18-mile battle back to Boston, sometimes collectively referred to as “The Battle of Concord.” Along the road in Lincoln, near Hartwell’s Tavern, a 50
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colonist’s musket ball slammed into the head of a British solider. Legend says that, on impact, the soldier’s body levitated high into the air before crashing dead to the ground. Around him, four more British soldiers were struck down, blood seeping through their blood red jackets into the dirt of centuries now below our feet. For the rest of that fateful day and well into the next, these five soldiers, likely Brigadiers given their height and stature, lay on the road. Later in the day, Edmund Wheeler, a local farmer, dragged them onto a cart and pulled them to a nearby
graveyard in Lincoln. There, he dug a pit on the edge reserved for paupers and undesirables and buried them together. Years passed, and with them, changes in England and America’s identities. Yet both shared an increasing study of science and medicine, which included a need for human anatomy subjects for dissection and experiments. The bodies of the poor and criminals were freely turned over to medical schools, but this supply did not meet the demand. Additional bodies came from professional body snatchers, “resurrectionists” as they called themselves (hinting at the Bible’s reference to the dead rising upon the day of judgment). The legality and ethics fell in a gray area, but the money to be made was golden. In 1815, Massachusetts banned the possession of an unauthorized body, but the demand for them didn’t stop. To avoid detection, the body snatching had to be done quickly and experienced resurrectionists had it down to an art: begin at the head, dig a hole just large enough to break through the top of a coffin to expose the head and shoulders, then take a rope, feed it under the deceased’s arms to make a loop, and heave! The body would follow. Then, quick! Throw it over your shoulder or into a cart and make your way to the buyer before daylight. Buyers were usually discreet, but on occasion, such as in the case we are about to dig up, acquirers would publicly reach out with their requests. Sometime in the 1830s, Massachusetts resident Walton Felch, a former cotton mill superintendent and poet, was studying and promoting the relatively new pseudoscience of phrenology, the interpretation of boney bumps on the head. Started in 1790 by Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall, who thought peoples’ characters and innate intelligence could be determined by measuring the bumps on their heads, phrenology was becoming the craze with practitioners across Europe and America. Followers of phrenology included Walt
