Robbing graves to learn

By David Maurer

Published: August 11, 2008

Second in a three-part series.

The University of Virginia Cemetery has become a tranquil place of beauty and dignified reflection.

But during its early years the reverence for the deceased was sometimes set aside for ghoulish matters. Like other medical schools during the 1800s, anatomy instructors at UVa faced a dilemma.

Laws at the time prohibited the dissection or possession of human cadavers. This limited the close examination of the interior of the human body to the operating room.

Crowding around an operating table during serious surgical procedures or looking on from a nearby gallery was hardly an ideal way to study the composition of the human form. But because a thorough knowledge of anatomy was viewed to be a vital part of a medical education, drastic measures sometimes were taken.

Nocturnal visits

Such measures occasionally included nocturnal visits to the UVa cemetery for the purpose of digging up recently interred corpses. The cadavers would then be spirited away so that they might be studied in detail by medical school students.

According to Col. C.C. Wertenbaker, son of UVa’s first librarian, William Wertenbaker, grave-robbing was not an uncommon practice at the school’s cemetery. Apparently, most of the sub rosa spade work was focused on the north side of the cemetery where servants were buried.

Grave robbing at the UVa cemetery became common enough that people started taking measures to defeat the perpetrators. A favorite ruse was to hold a mock burial during the day and bury a log or bundle of rocks wrapped in a shroud.

The real body would then be brought to the cemetery during the hours of darkness and buried in secret. Only after the body had sufficient time to decompose would a headstone be placed on the grave.

Nefarious industry

The nefarious practice of grave robbing became something of a cottage industry in order to fill the needs of medical schools. It ended for the most part after Virginia and other states passed laws making it legal for medical schools to obtain corpses for study and dissection.

For more than 30 years, the growth of the UVa cemetery was dictated by the normal passage of life. But starting in the summer of 1861, mounds of freshly turned red clay began to appear with growing regularity.

The ghastly grinding wheels of the Civil War had begun their deadly work, and the university became the place where much of the human wreckage was sent. Centrally located and with railroad tracks radiating out in all four

directions, Charlottesville and the university made an ideal hospital area.

So it was that the agonizing moans and death rattles brought on by war — not the thunder of guns and roar of battle — came to the small university town. In spurts and gushes like blood pumping from torn arteries the injured soldiers came in wagons and train cars.

The Battle of First Bull Run brought the initial casualties, but the red flow would not be stanched for four destructive years. Terrible clashes, such as those fought at Cross Keys, Port Republic and Cedar Mountain, added to the carnage and death.

By war’s end, 1,097 graves in the UVa cemetery held the remains of soldiers who had died in the conflict. While the war raged and the causalities continued to arrive, there had been little time to do much more than get the dead beneath the soil.

The military graves were dug as close together as possible, and few had any identifying markers. In 1866 a group of Charlottesville women, many of whom had cared for the sick and wounded soldiers during the war, started the Ladies Confederate Memorial Association with the goal of setting this right.

For several weeks the ladies pored over hospital registers and copied down the names, states, companies and regiments of all the soldiers buried in the cemetery. They then transferred the information onto individual wood markers that were placed at the head of each grave.

The women also raised $1,500 that was used to build a stone wall around what then became known as the Confederate Cemetery. Their goal accomplished, the women quietly went back to other important tasks such as caring for their families and helping Virginia get back on its feet.

Reconstruction took center stage, and things like cemetery maintenance was far down the list of civic projects. By 1890 this had become painfully apparent to those who had reason to visit the university’s cemetery.

The wooden markers that had been so painstakingly created were now rotten and broken upon the ground. Vines and brambles laced between headstones and hid others altogether.

The cemetery was in such a deplorable state that the Ladies Confederate Memorial Association again stepped forward to set things right. The women launched a three-year reclamation effort that involved both physical labor and fundraising.

Ground-grooming activities were conducted, during which all the wooden markers were removed. The names of the soldiers were rerecorded along with the location of their graves, and the entanglement was replaced by a lawn of grass.

To raise funds the women put on musical concerts and other events. One of their most creative was selling cream-covered strawberries to students who had just finished a law school exam.

The restoration project culminated on June 7, 1893, when an impressive statue of a Confederate soldier was unveiled at the cemetery as hundreds of people looked on. An inscription cut into the stone at the base of the statue reads, “Fate denied them victory but crowned them with glorious immortality.”

The soldiers who had done so much to sanctify the ground of the little cemetery also had motivated the living to give it a new rebirth. To ensure the cemetery would never suffer from neglect again, in 1905 the Society for the Continual Care of the Cemetery of the University of Virginia was established.

If there is such a thing as a golden age for a cemetery it could be said that the university’s started in 1905. Before then there hadn’t been any restrictions on who could be buried there.

But as school officials looked to the future at the beginning of the 20th century, they realized there was a finite area of land that could be dedicated to the cemetery. So in 1905 it was ruled that interment there would be restricted to members of families already using plots in the cemetery, students in attendance at the university and members of the families of the faculty and officers of the school.With that decree it became a most distinctive honor to be buried in what had become a lovely place of eternal repose.

Next: The cemetery moves into the modern age.