A Philadelphia construction company working on the building of a new apartment building have discovered coffins within development grounds. Some have been estimated to be over 300 years old. The shock came when construction workers who were working in Philadelphia’s historic district had their backhoes come into contact with coffins. The coffins had fully intact human remains.
Forensic scientists and students from Rutgers University, Camden, are currently working to obtain as many of the historic remains as they can. The remains will be analyzed by the staff and students so as to know the identity of the individuals.
“We’re trying to help this forgotten group of individuals,” Ms. Kimberlee Moran said on Thursday. Ms. Moran is an associate professor and is the Director of Forensics at Rutgers University.
Historical documents have shown that the historic district area where the construction site is set up was supposedly a de-commissioned burial ground. The site, located near Betsy Ross House, previously belonged to the First Baptist Church. The church was established in 1707 and had its members buried on the grounds approximately 300 years ago. Around 1860, however, the church was moved to a larger location. As a result of the moving, all body remains were supposedly exhumed and re-buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery. The cemetery is in the North Philadelphia.
However, as construction workers discovered, the process of moving the bodies was never finished at the time. The workers are under PMC Properties who own the site and are planning to put up a 10-story, 116 unit apartment building.
This is not the first time workers are finding remains on the site. During the fall, they also found a large collection of bones in autumn. The first time they found human remains, they contacted archeologists to go through the site’s grounds.
Approximately two dozen coffins were found at the site on Thursday. Since February, an estimated 60 individuals have been uncovered on the grounds. The recent discovery has had to stop construction plans, which were to continue through the weekend.
Ms. Moran explained that the remains would be analyzed by researchers at a forensic – osteology lab in Rutgers- Camden. There, the researchers will gain information on the ethnicity, gender, and age at death of the individuals.
“We’ll try to find out anything that these bones can tell us about who these people were in life,” she said.
The team hopes the remains will be reburied at Mount Moriah Cemetery once the study has been completed.
“This is a rare opportunity to learn as much as we can about the earliest residents of Philadelphia. Ultimately, we want to reinter them at Mount Moriah Cemetery with the rest of the remains from this time period,” Ms. Morgan said. She also went on to say that the researchers would try to identify any living descendants linked to the remains.
PMC Property Group Executive Vice President Jonathan Stavin said that the company would pay for the costs of reinterring the remains at the cemetery.
The building’s construction is scheduled to be complete by April 2018.
