CASKET CASE: A CENTURIES-OLD GHOST TOWN RAISES ITS DEAD

By the time George Washington was born, St. Mary's City had largely vanished.
Founded by Protestant settlers in 1634, just 14 years after the Mayflower landed
at Plymouth, Maryland's first city became a ghost town at the end of the
seventeenth century after political upheavals moved the seat of government from
St. Mary's to nearby Annapolis.

"It was a terrible thing for the city, but a blessing for archaeologists," says
Henry Miller, director of research at Historic St. Mary's City.

This fall Miller plans to meet some authentic residents of St. Mary's. These
residents are dead, of course.

Miller and field director Tim Riordan discovered them last fall when they used
ground-penetrating radar to probe the land where St. Mary's Great Brick Chapel
once stood. The find was outstanding because the bodies were housed in lead
coffins.

In 1799 some medical students found and unsealed lead coffins containing
Maryland's first royal governor, Lionel Copley, and his wife. "They opened
Governor Copley's coffin and found it was mostly bones and a little hair," says
Miller. "But then they opened his wife's coffin and found that she was
completely preserved. The students described details of her clothing,
hairstyle, even facial features. So that's the range we're looking at: At worst,
the coffins we've uncovered could contain only bones. At best, we could be
dealing with completely preserved people."

Just hours after Mrs. Copley's coffin had been pried open, however, moisture and
microbes went to work and the body began to quickly disintegrate. Miller wants
to avoid this pitfall, so he recruited a topflight team of experts in such
fields as pathology, nondestructive testing, and atmospheric science for their
advice and their expertise. "We're trying to figure the best way to proceed,"
says Miller. "When you have only one chance, you don't want to miss a critical
fact."

Right now the plan is to wait until fall, when cooler weather will pose less of
a threat to the interior of the coffins. Then the coffins will be removed from
their burial vault and placed in a sterile environment. Here they will be
subjected to a battery of high-tech imaging techniques such as isotopic sensing,
photo-acoustics, and tomography to ascertain, as closely as possible, what's
inside without actually opening the box.

Next, if all goes well, a small hole will be drilled into one or more of the
coffins, enabling the scientists to look around inside with fiberoptic probes
and perhaps extract samples of seventeenth-century air.

Miller also hopes to extract tissue samples from the coffins' occupants. "We
could potentially look at the dried fluids and extract things like antibodies,"
he says. "That would allow us for the first time to get a real look at the
diseases that were present in early America. The period literature notes things
like agues and the bloody flux. Who knows what that is?"

Another possibility is DNA analysis of mummified tissues within the coffins.
Few could afford to spend eternity entombed in lead, leading Miller to suspect
the coffins contain members of the Calvert family, who founded the colony of
Maryland. Researchers could conceivably track down their modern-day
descendants, offering unprecedented glimpses at how genetic data within a family
line are transformed over a period of centuries.

But no matter who is inside, Miller looks forward to hearing their silent
stories. "I'm very optimistic that we can open up a whole new chapter of
life-and death-in early America."