Digging Up History

by Sheila Connolly

  “Depends on the size, and that’s hard to guess right now,” Harold told her. “Could be a thousand pounds or even more. Each. Do you have a plan for moving them?”

  “I think somebody said something about a winch. Let me check.” She strode across the street to confer with some of her team.

  “Harold, do you have any ideas?” I asked while she was gone.

  “About what happened here? I’ve got some guesses, but I wouldn’t put money on them. It’s great that the detective will give us access to them.”

  “Do you need a lab or something?” Dylan asked. “I could probably get permission to use one at the university, if you tell me what you need.”

  “Thanks, Dylan, but I need to get a general handle on what we’re looking at before I get into details.”

  “Do you think the bodies and the artillery are as old as they look?”

  “I won’t say no. They’re definitely not modern, and most likely not Civil War.”

  I looked up to see the missing Barney approaching—on crutches, one leg wrapped in a cast. “Hi, guys!” he called out. “Looks like I’ve been missing all the fun. The detective lady said you all were over here. What’s up?”

  “Barney, what happened to you? You just disappeared in the middle of the first time we were here, and we haven’t heard from you since. We were worried about you!”

  He grinned briefly. “Bet you thought I’d joined the dead guys across the street.” The smile left his face as he grimaced. “Damn, this hurts. I knew the crew wouldn’t be here because of the police investigation, but it never occurred to me to call you all. Sorry.”

  “Where’d you go?” I asked.

  “I’d arranged to meet a supplier that afternoon. I thought it would be a quick meeting and I’d be back, but he wanted to talk, I wanted a good price from him, so time got away from me. Plus we were in a pub, a couple of streets over, and we had a few beers, and maybe a few more. He finally left, and I figured you all would have gone home by then. So I was coming out of the pub and missed a step and landed funny, and it turns out I tore a ligament or something in my ankle. I thought I could walk it off, but it kept getting worse, so I took myself to the ER. I had to wait hours, since I wasn’t bleeding or having a heart attack, and it was real late by the time they patched me up. With some good pharmaceuticals, I might add, which knocked me out once I got home. I wish I’d stayed here with you all. You’ve found out something new?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Barney,” Marty interrupted, “let’s find a place to sit down and we’ll fill you in.”

  “Thanks, Marty. Who’s this?” He was looking at Harold.

  “He works for the new Revolution museum,” I told him. “You’ll see why he’s here when we’ve explained what we found.” Obviously there were no convenient benches along the street, but we found a piece of concrete wall that Barney could sit on while we filled him in.

  “You know by now that the police are involved, because you’ve got a lot of bodies here, and Detective Hrivnak has been running the show,” I began. “Marty and I have worked with her before, so we got lucky. Marty, Dylan and I have been doing some research at the Society, and since you were here we’ve figured out what church this cemetery belonged to, and we may even have a listing of who was buried here. But I haven’t shared it with the police yet, and I think they should hear it first. But the most interesting thing is that there were two bodies found under a house across the street from the rest. I’ll let Marty tell you about them.”

  “Great. Marty, I’m all ears.”

  Marty ran through what we already knew about her finding a body years ago, and our snooping after that, and then the research we’d managed to do since, up until this morning. Barney just kept saying “Wow!”

  Finally Marty ran out of steam. “Barney, you own the land that we now know was a cemetery, right?”

  “I’ve got an option on it, and I’ve put money down, but it’s not mine until the building goes up and I can sell the units.”

  Marty nodded. “And you told me you’d gotten all the permits and any other documents?”

  “Sure did,” he said. “I didn’t want to run into any problems. Time is money in this business. Guess that didn’t quite work out as planned. So what did you find on the east side of the street? Which I have no claim to, by the way.”

  “Those two bodies and a pile of cannons,” Harold said.

  It was almost comic to watch Barney’s chin drop in surprise, I thought. “Cannons? Here?” Barney said.

  Marty responded, “Yup. We haven’t counted them yet—the bodies were in front of them and we wanted to get them cleared out. They’re on their way to the ME’s office. When Hrivnak gets back she wants to go in after the cannons. She’s looking for some equipment to do it.”

  “Wow,” Barney said again, reverently. “How many you think there are?”

  “Hard to say right now, since it’s dark in there and we don’t know how far back they go. But more than just a couple.”

  “Man, am I glad that I came back in time to see this!”

  “Barney, you don’t happen to know who owns or used to own any of the properties on this side?” I asked.

  “I didn’t worry about them because I didn’t need them. Does it matter?”

  “We just wondered if anybody would have a claim to the cannons. Otherwise I’m pretty sure Harold here will snatch them up for his museum.”

  “I assume you museum people are looking into the ownership side?” Barney asked.

  “Of course,” I said quickly. “We’ve already started. In this case we know more than the police do.”

  “Well, I’m not going to worry about it. The only thing that bothers me is that there might be tenants who aren’t happy living over what was a cemetery, even if all the bodies are gone.”

  I smiled a bit grimly. “This is Philadelphia. It may take a while to sort out what to do with them. But we’re sharing everything we find, so I hope that helps.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Once the bodies had been dispatched, Detective Hrivnak returned. “So, you made it back, Mr. Taylor. How’s the leg?”

  “It’s okay, but I don’t think I’ll be doing much digging in the near future. Still, I couldn’t stay away from all this.” He waved his hand over the dirt plot, which to my eyes looked as though it had been invaded by giant gophers. “Or the extras on this side,” Barney added.

  The detective went on, “Just to be clear, you have no claim to the east side of the street? Your property ends with the cemetery plot?”

  “That’s what I understand. Believe me, I went through it all with the city and my lawyers back when I started planning this.”

  “Did they tell you who it did belong to?”

  “If they mentioned it, it didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t need that section. Still, it’s part of the history of this neighborhood, so I figured I’d better know as much as I could. Mind if I watch?”

  “Just keep out of the way. I think we’ve figured out how to move the cannons.”

  “How many people will it take?” I asked, merely out of curiosity.

  “Maybe three or four each? You might be able to tell me how they did it in the old days.”

  “Two-wheeled carriages,” Harold answered promptly. “I don’t suppose you have any horses to spare.”

  “Not likely,” the detective answered.

  “Well, all I ask is that you try not to bang them up too much. From what little I can see, the cannons look like they’ve never been used and they’re in great condition.”

  “I’ll let you tell me if that’s true, once we get them out in the open.”

  It took nearly half an hour to find the right equipment, and some ropes that would be strong enough to move around half a ton of metal, and a place to lay them that didn’t involve dragging them over rocky soil and chunks of paving and scratching them up. Harold kept hovering like a mother hen—he was really excited by our find. Some of the police workers insp
ected the shoring timbers of the space beneath the building, so that we could be sure that the roof or the rest of the building wouldn’t fall on anyone’s head—we didn’t need a fatality on the site now, and I was pretty sure the city didn’t need a lawsuit from us.

  And then the hauling of the cannons started, slowly. I hoped Dylan was getting pictures of it—I hadn’t noticed any reporters with cameras on the scene. It took the better part of thirty minutes to move each cannon, and as they emerged each appeared to be about six feet long. That was a lot of metal. The pile of them grew slowly until it was about a dozen cannons of the same size and configuration. And decoration, too, although I wasn’t standing close enough to decipher it.

  One officer was standing in front of the hole, shaking his head, as the twelfth cannon joined its mates. “You about done?” Hrivnak called out.

  “I don’t think so. Come take a look.”

  For some reason we all moved like a herd to look into the dark hole. Which didn’t look as dark anymore, and not because the sun was at our backs.

  “Is that a tunnel?” I asked incredulously.

  “Looks like it, except the far end fell in a while ago.”

  I had thought the Philadelphia tunnels were urban legends. Or abandoned subway tunnels. Or tourist attractions. “Does it go as far as the river?”

  Harold seemed to have perked up again now that he’d absorbed what he was seeing. “Might have, once upon a time. But there’s been so much construction between here and there that it might be hard to prove it.”

  “But think about it,” I told him. “Here we have a batch of big cannons, and each one had to be heavy. Who the heck was going to drag them through city streets without getting a lot of attention?”

  “You’re thinking they were brought in from the other end?” Harold asked thoughtfully.

  “It’s possible, isn’t it? It would have been a lot less obvious.”

  “True. But the dating is probably important. Before 1776, probably not possible. After? Slightly more likely. I can’t date them without examining them more closely because cannon design didn’t change very quickly, so the basic model could still have been used in the Civil War. And these are in good shape.”

  “Does that mean they weren’t used?” I asked.

  “Maybe. Or maybe somebody in 1957 made a Civil War movie here and didn’t want to store them afterward. Sorry—the bodies we found would argue against that.”

  “Hey, Detective?” one of the police called out. “You want us to haul the rest of these out?”

  Harold, Marty, Dylan and I looked at each other. “The rest?”

  We surged back to the entrance of what I really wanted to call a tunnel—I was already envisioning Society publications describing its intrepid president discovering unknown treasures of Philadelphia—and peered in again. “How many more are there?”

  “A coupla dozen, looks like. They go back for a ways.”

  Harold was now looking like a kid in front of a Christmas tree. “Detective, if you need someplace to store these, I’m sure we can find room at our museum.”

  She cocked an eyebrow at him. “You really think these are antiques?”

  “I think I can prove it. May I?” he asked, advancing on the nearest cannon.

  “Go for it,” she told him.

  With a respectful hand Harold brushed away damp dirt. The brass beneath gleamed dully, and it was easy to imagine what the whole thing would look like if it was cleaned up. It was a handsome piece of metalwork, whatever its age.

  “Do you see this here?” Harold asked the group as he gestured toward something on the top surface of the nearest cannon.

  “You mean the curly thing with the . . . the thing with the crown on top?” I asked.

  “Yes, and those are initials just beneath it. Which are . . .”

  It was a lightbulb moment for me when I realized what he was trying to tell us. “G. R. —King George, or George Rex. So you’re telling me these date to the Revolution, more or less? They’re not pretty reproductions?”

  “I’d have to do some more research, but it’s certainly possible.”

  “And the two dead men come from the same era?”

  “Maybe,” Harold said. “They were more or less on top of the nearer cannons, but they could have been dumped there at the same time, or a century later. Except for that button I found, which would favor the earlier dating.”

  “And nobody knows who these people were, or why they were here, and where the cannons came from, and how they ended up roughly in the same place and then were completely forgotten, just like the cemetery?”

  “I doubt that this was a proper burial. It may be that no one knew they were there. Or that someone knew but didn’t want one or the other—or the pair of them—found and so he never told anyone else. Clearly nobody’s taken care of this building. Isn’t it interesting how structures can simply be abandoned in a major city?”

  “There are quite a few examples in some parts of the city,” I informed him. “Marty’s looking into the details for this block.” Although Harold should know about them if he was a proper historian. “So, what do we do now?” I asked nobody in particular.

  After an awkward silence, Detective Hrivnak answered my question. “Uh, we don’t really know.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked her.

  “Well, the bodies in the onetime cemetery probably belong in some way to whatever church it was—you said you had information on that?” I nodded. “But who is responsible for them now is not clear. The medical examiner is hardly in a position to take them all on, and where does he put them? Is it legal to cremate all those hundreds of remains? Does the city need permission from someone? Is somebody else responsible for them, like a church organization, since the original church doesn’t seem to exist anymore? Who decides?”

  I smiled ruefully at her. “That is a question that does not usually arise at a library. I assume you’ll want to get them off this site as soon as possible?”

  “If the archeology types won’t make a fuss.”

  “If they do, I can understand why,” I told her. It was true: how often did you get the opportunity to explore this kind of find, a perfect slice of a century of Philadelphia’s dead? “So you don’t have enough storage, I’m guessing. Harold, what about your museum?”

  “Much as I’d love to help out, four hundred-plus bodies is a lot to accommodate, especially if they have to be treated carefully. The cannons are another thing altogether—those we would find room for.”

  I turned to Barney. “You know of any safe space big enough for all of this? Like an unused warehouse that can be locked?” I figured Barney would have a personal interest in clearing the property so that he could get his crew back to work. Assuming the place wasn’t overrun by eager archeologists.

  “Maybe,” he said dubiously. “Let me check around. Detective, you want it, like, yesterday?”

  “More or less,” Hrivnak said.

  Marty finally spoke. “I can get in touch with the academic community, see if there’s any group that would like to help clear these out. You can’t just stuff everything in garbage bags and toss them in the back of a truck.”

  “I’m pretty sure you’re right about that,” Hrivnak answered. “Sounds like we all have some phone calls to make ASAP. I’ve got to get back to HQ and get started. I’ll leave some officers to guard the place. You all are welcome to stay, as long as you don’t walk out with anything.”

  I had to smile at the image of any of us sauntering away from the site with a cannon tucked under one arm. You’d definitely need a truck to haul even one away.

  The detective turned and walked briskly uptown. Harold couldn’t take his eyes off the cannons; he was almost drooling. Barney looked . . . bewildered, frustrated, annoyed, excited, take your pick. Here he’d started a nice project in a good neighborhood, and the whole thing had blown up in his face. And a long delay would no doubt cost him money.

  I wanted to go back to the
Society and pick up where we’d left off, starting with writing a brief report about the original church and cemetery. I hoped it might prod loose some other details. “Have you all had enough for one day, or do you want to get back to researching all this?” I asked the small group.

  Dylan volunteered, “I’m still working on the genealogy side. Maybe I’m not the best person to be handling that, since I don’t have a lot of experience, but I can probably figure out who lived in this building or along the street, with Marty’s help, and maybe why the cannons were hidden here.”

  “You need to have a date first,” Harold pointed out quickly.

  “So which comes first?” Dylan replied. “We know the bodies are old, because of that button you pulled off one. Unless that guy was a fancy reenactor, which doesn’t seem likely. The two bodies were found sort of in front of and on top of the cannons, so it sounds like they went into the hole at the same time or after the cannons did. The cannons look old, but how do you tell? Harold, you’re the expert.”

  “A number of ways. The composition of the metal. Whether there are any comparable examples known, and how well they match, in terms of design and size. Whether those there were found around Philadelphia or somewhere else.”

  “Like in England somewhere?” Dylan seemed to be getting into the idea.

  “Maybe,” Harold said. “But we can’t just assume that the bodies and the cannons come from the same era. Or even that the two bodies match in time.”

  I was getting hungry again, and we’d spent the entire afternoon watching people haul possibly antique cannons through the dirt. “Look, people, for the moment we’re the only ones who know about all this and are researching it. I can’t imagine the police department will want this to drag on. We need to come up with some answers quickly—but not by taking shortcuts. I suggest that we all pursue our own paths, like we’ve been doing, and then we can get together and compare notes. How much time will it take?”

  Harold snorted. “As long as it takes. These artifacts may be well over two hundred years old, or they may be much less—it’s going to take time to narrow things down. Can we meet tomorrow?”