Hi, This is interesting as it pertains to the War of 1812. Who would have thought that there would be a cemetary right in the city of Burlington, VT, Proper, underneath all our modern buildings? Jan Jordan Mark Bushnell's column on history is a regular feature of Vermont Sunday Magazine. "Digging deep to find long-forgotten soldiers September 26, 2004 Commuter buses rumble down North Street in Burlington, churning up dust from roadside construction and adding to the heat of this September day. The workers, clad in yellow hard hats and vests, keep their backs to the road, the dust and the noise, and focus on the trench they have excavated and are preparing to fill. When they get a break from their shovels and backhoes, they migrate to the far end of the channel to watch a different cluster of hard-hatted workers. This team, a group of archaeologists, is hunched over what the shovels have uncovered: a human skeleton. It lies with clasped hands within a layer of humus, which is all that's left of its coffin. The find is remarkable, yet entirely expected. It is further proof of what archaeologists and historians have long known – that the bustling North Street neighborhood is just the latest incarnation of this bit of land. Almost 200 years ago, the area was a wooded field flecked with white crosses that marked the graves of soldiers who died in the War of 1812. Then, instead of the grumbling of buses, a visitor may have heard the scrape of shovels biting into earth as soldiers dug a grave for a comrade. The route from the hospital to that grave must have become rutted, as wagons carrying the bodies made the round trip as many as 500 times during the war. The military dominated Burlington during the war years, 1812 to 1814. With the threat of a British invasion from Canada looming, the University of Vermont closed its doors. An embargo against trading with the British had choked Vermont businesses, but those that catered to the military thrived. Ships laden with pork, whiskey, uniforms – anything the military needed – pulled up to Burlington's docks. The military presence was most obvious just north of the docks. Perched on the bluff overlooking Burlington harbor, the Army placed a battery of guns (from which current-day Battery Park gets it name). Not far from the battery, the Army set up a tent camp for soldiers and a hospital. Few soldiers must have left Burlington with fond memories, judging by the size of the cemetery they left behind. The war cost an estimated 6,500 Americans their lives. As many as 500 of those Americans are buried here. Indeed, it is one of the war's largest cemeteries. We have few documents – diaries, letters and official reports – to tell us exactly what happened here. The best evidence the soldiers left was their bodies. Archaeologist Kate Kenny has been relying on written records to piece together an accurate picture of camp life. Now that more bodies are turning up during this construction project, she has more to go on. As leader of this dig by UVM's Consulting Archaeology Program, Kenny has pored over old muster rolls and other materials about the men who served in Burlington and those who died here. She wants to know who they were, how they lived and how they died. For the most part, the answer to that last question is from disease. During the war, a series of epidemics hit the state. In less than two months, as many as 200 soldiers died. The disease seems to have been some kind of virulent pneumonia, though soldiers also died from other ailments that were common in the general population, such as tuberculosis. Disease was the frequent way to go, but Kenny has also tracked a couple of unusual deaths. One soldier, she found, was killed by a Burlington resident while he and a gang of fellow soldiers attacked the man's house. Another soldier died after being accidentally shot by a friend who was visiting him in the hospital. Reading the records that document these men's lives and deaths is one thing; to see them, if not exactly in the flesh then in the bone, is another. "It makes them human," says Kenny. "You can really empathize with them." That's especially true when the bones say something about their lives, such as their age at the time of death and their stature, and offer hints about their general health, like whether they suffered from tuberculosis, arthritis or syphilis, or whether they had bad teeth. In some cases, archaeologists can even tell if someone was a habitual pipe smoker by the wear patterns on the teeth. "To get that intimate knowledge of the quality of their lives is really a special privilege," says Kenny. To gain this privilege, Kenny and her fellow archaeologists had a bit of luck. The Agency of Transportation had arranged to bury some utility lines that ordinarily are overhead. Those lines run along North Street, and North Street runs straight through one very large hidden cemetery. People in the neighborhood have known about the cemetery for years. In fact, every once in a while one of them would run into a skeleton while building an addition. Rumors have circulated that UVM medical students saw the cemetery as a prime source of cadavers shortly after the war. A document in UVM's Special Collections tells of a visiting lecturer who in 1828 found in the cemetery the body he needed for a class on autopsies. On this day, the crew of UVM archaeologists is digging under what has been the main walkway to a house for decades. About four or five feet down, they have found a decayed coffin with an intact skeleton inside. Two archaeologists gingerly sweep away dirt from the bones as Kenny climbs up to the lawn to take a few photographs. She interrupts her picture taking to ask one of the archaeologists which of the skeleton's interlaced hands is lying on top. She wants any details she can glean from each burial. And there are more to get to after this one. Just a few feet down the trench, Kenny's team has noticed a change in the strata of dirt, which suggests a burial. A few feet farther along is yet another probable site. The coffins seem to be lined up, with the bodies aligned east-west, as was the custom of the day. The Burlington burial ground is a rare opportunity for historians. Many cemeteries from the War of 1812 have been lost. People might know the general location of a cemetery, but not the specific location. Often, as in Burlington, buildings and streets were built over the graveyards just a few decades after the fighting stopped. The number of bodies being found also allows the archaeologists to see variations in the burials. Take clothing, for example. Some bodies have been unearthed with all of their clothing decayed except perhaps for a wooden button at the neck. These men were apparently buried clad simply in a long shirt. Another body dug up earlier this month appeared to be an officer who was buried in gaitered pants, a vest with pewter buttons and a leather military neckpiece. From the muster rolls, Kenny knows that the men came to Burlington from across the young nation, as far away as Virginia and the Carolinas. They came by foot and by boat to what must have been a lonely outpost, waiting for the large British army to fight its way south. The soldiers are headed next on a much longer voyage. Once UVM archaeologists finish their basic physical analysis – to assess age, gender, stature, general health – they will send the remains to the U.S. Military Identification Center in Hawaii for more detailed analysis. Among the tests that Kenny hopes they'll conduct is one to detach trace elements in the bones, which would offer clues into the period's medical practices. Once the military is finished with the bodies, they will presumably be returned to Vermont for burial, Kenny says. Despite her extensive work, we will probably never know the identity of any of the men and therefore their home state. A suitable resting spot might be Burlington's Lake View Cemetery, where other unknown soldiers from the War of 1812 have been buried. So far, Kenny can account for the bodies of no more than perhaps 100 of the soldiers who may have been buried in Burlington. Some may actually have been interred in a cemetery in South Burlington. Others may have been removed from their graves by relatives who lived nearby and reburied in their hometowns. Still others have been stumbled on over the years by homeowners building additions and kids digging in the back yard. That leaves as many as 400 bodies down there somewhere. The archaeologists were limited to what was uncovered in the course of burying the utility lines. It's possible the work will end here, because money for such projects is hard to come by, but archaeologists hold out hope. "It would be great if we could find funding, some private individuals who want to help us answer these questions," Kenny says."