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The identity of a 150-year-old body found buried in an iron coffin in an old derelict site of Queens, New York, was finally revealed.
Construction workers were shocked when they unearthed human remains during an excavation in an excavation in Elmhurst, Queens, in October 2011, the New York Post reported. The workers first thought they had hit a pipe, but their tools emerged from the ground to reveal a perfectly intact female body, wearing a long white dress and high socks.
The body was in such good shape that they called 911, thinking of considering a possible homicide.
"This has been recorded as a crime scene," Steve Warnasch, then a forensic pathologist at the New York City Chief Medical Examiner's office, told the newspaper. "A body buried on abandoned land seems pretty simple."
After a closer look, however, forensic scientists discover that the body is that of a young black woman born decades before the Civil War, who died of smallpox only a few years after New York had abolished the Slavery in 1827. It was then buried under a church founded by the first generation of emancipated blacks.
The young woman has since been identified as Martha Peterson, who worked for a white coffins manufacturer with abolitionist tendencies, the New York Post reported. According to an 1850 census of New York City, Peterson was working as a servant to William Raymond, half of the now extinct iron coffins company, Fisk & Raymond. The company would then manufacture Peterson's coffin after his death.
According to the New York Post, iron coffins were a nineteenth-century phenomenon that allowed corpses to be transported in a sanitary manner by trains and ships. Scientists say that Peterson's body was in such a state that smallpox lesions were still visible on his skin.
"The body was so well preserved that I would not have been shocked if the smallpox virus had survived," Warnasch said.
Scientists have confirmed that the deadly virus has been degraded to a non-threatening level, however. An autopsy also revealed that the virus had probably infected Peterson's brain, eventually causing it.
As the young woman's face was so damaged by construction workers who accidentally pulled her off the ground, Warnasch turned to Joe Mullins, a specialist in forensic imaging, to ask him to reconstruct the image of this one. what Peterson might look like. The scientists also looked at her hair and teeth, concluding that she had lived in the northeast for years and that she had a balanced diet.
"When I discovered who she was, I got goose bumps," Warnasch said.
Peterson's remains were buried by the faithful of St. Mark AME Church in Jackson Heights in 2016.
A PBS documentary about Peterson's discovery is scheduled for Wednesday at 10 pm
Look more in the clip below.
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