Project will exhume thousands of bodies buried on university medical center campus
By Gracyn Gordon
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JACKSON, Mississippi (WAPT) — Bodies will be exhumed this month in an area of the University of Mississippi Medical Center that was once the State Hospital for the Insane.
As part of the years-long Asylum Hill Project, a team of archeologists will begin the exhumation process on a 4-acre section of land on the UMMC campus. Trees were cut down and now the area has been cleared and a fence is going up.
“Excavating the graves is going to be very time-consuming, delicate process,” said lead bioarchaeologist Dr. Jennifer Mack. “The soils here are not conducive to preservation, so we have to be very careful.”
More than 10,000 people who were once residents of the State Hospital that operated for 80 years died while in the care of the facility. The ones that remained on the campus were never claimed.
“It’s really important to this project that all this excavation be done in the most respectful manner possible,” Mack said. “We have a lot of direct descendants that are engaged with our Asylum Hill research, and we have made promises to them that this entire process will be respectful.”
Mack said the rows of graves are orderly and neat.
“The markers were wooden. I think they were maybe about 2 feet tall, just with the names painted on them, so fairly plain looking, but there was definitely effort to keep track of who was buried where,” Mack said. “Wooden markers do not survive well, especially in Mississippi weather, so they deteriorated over time.”
The entire cemetery spans almost 12 acres across the UMMC campus. Road construction recovered the first grave in 2012. A list of asylum patients who were buried in the cemetery between 1912 and 1935 is available; but, without markers, no one knows exactly where each one lies.
Originally named the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, the institution served about 30,000 patients between 1855 and 1935. After the remains are unearthed, scientists will gather as many details as possible in hopes of identifying them. Mack said because of the degradation of the remains, DNA analysis is sometimes impossible.
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