Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
The citizens of Hubbardton were furious, and with good reason. One of their own had been snatched from their midst. Certain who had done it, 300 men from town gathered at daybreak on Nov. 29, 1830, and marched behind the county sheriff on the five-mile trek south to Castleton.
There they surrounded the Castleton Medical School building and demanded to be let in. The men waited impatiently outside while the dean fumbled around for the key, which he said he’d misplaced. Once the door was finally opened, they swarmed into the building looking for the missing woman. They were about to give up, when one of the men noticed a loose nail in the wainscoting. (One version of the story says the nail was in the floor.) Prying open the wall (or the floor), they found the headless body of a woman.
This, they were sure, was the corpse of Mrs. Penfield Churchill. The Hubbardton men were outraged. They knew the Castleton students and faculty had nothing to do with her death, but they believed the medical school was harboring people nearly as loathsome as murderers, and far more common in those days, grave robbers.
The men demanded the body, and the missing head, be returned. After they agreed not to seek charges, the dean dispatched a medical student on a ghastly errand. While the Hubbardton men were searching the building, they hadn’t noticed when this same student had sauntered by with something hidden under his coat. Now he retraced his steps to the haymow in a nearby barn and returned with a bundle containing the woman’s head, which had been removed in an effort to disguise the corpse.
The grisly incident, known locally as the “Hubbardton Raid,” was not unprecedented in early Vermont. Towns near medical schools had reason to fear their graveyards would be plundered.
The physicians and students weren’t after riches, of course; they wanted cadavers to study. And the law made them into criminals. It was impossible at the time to donate one’s body to science. According to English law, which governed the Colonies and which became the basis of law in the new country, a dead body was not considered “property” as such and so could not be bequeathed as other items could.
The only legal way to obtain a cadaver was if a judge, in sentencing a criminal to death, ordered the body be given to a doctor for dissection. It was a way for judges to add insult to injury. Unfortunately for New England doctors, the region executed few criminals. They needed to make other arrangements.
During colonial times and for nearly two decades after the Revolution, New England states had no specific laws against grave robbing. The public was perhaps unaware how much of it was going on. That seems to have changed by the late 1790s.
When Dartmouth College announced in 1796 that it would open a medical school, the New Hampshire state legislature sprang into action. Within weeks it passed a law banning grave robbing within the state’s borders, which may have had the effect of persuading Dartmouth students to cross the river to Vermont when they needed a cadaver to study.
The University of Vermont started its own medical school in 1804. The Vermont Legislature outlawed grave robbing that same year. When doctors tried to start a medical college in Woodstock in 1827, the school only won its charter from the Legislature after the dean promised that the institution would not knowingly use cadavers that had been procured from anywhere in Vermont. That pledge provided cold comfort to people in nearby New Hampshire.
Much of what is known about grave robbing in Vermont comes from Frederick Waite, who taught embryology and histology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. After retiring to New England in the 1940s, Waite researched and wrote extensively about the subject. Waite estimated that based on the number of medical students in Vermont, the state’s medical schools (in Burlington, Castleton and Woodstock) would have required at least 400 cadavers between 1820 and 1840.
But Waite found that during that period authorities only issued seven indictments for grave robbing. They involved four separate disinterments. So, if you accept Waite’s estimates, nobody was charged in about 98% of the state’s grave robberies. In many cases, the robbers may have been so deft that their crime was never detected. As a result, unbeknownst to most Vermonters many graves in the state lie empty.
Not surprisingly, Waite found that most grave robberies occurred near medical schools. Remote cemeteries were the most often hit. A village cemetery was too close to prying eyes. Once someone at the school learned of a nearby funeral, a team of robbers would set to work. A scout, disguised as a hunter, would be sent in daylight to locate the grave. Since the robbers would be returning at night, they needed a precise location.
On the night of the robbery – usually the night of the funeral, since bodies were not then embalmed – a team of three men would travel by wagon to the cemetery. These “resurrection men” were usually laborers hired to do the job, Waite theorized, since most medical students wouldn’t have been up to the physically demanding job. Two of the men would hop out at the cemetery and carry their tools to the grave. If the cemetery was near a well-traveled road, the third man would drive off in the wagon, and return at a set time. A wagon sitting at night by a cemetery would have been a sure tip-off.
Though the men were in a hurry, they were careful. Working by the dim light of a shrouded lantern, they would study the surface of the freshly dug grave for any pattern of sticks or leaves that might have been left there by a friend of the deceased to detect grave robbing. They would map how any such items lay, so they could replace them later, and then set to work.
To speed the job, they would not excavate the entire grave. Instead, they would dig a roughly 3-foot-by-3-foot hole at the head of the grave. All the dirt would be placed on a tarp to keep it from falling onto the surrounding grass, another telltale sign of robbery. Once they reached the casket, which was usually down about 4 feet, they would drill a series of holes into it with an auger. An ax or saw would have been too noisy.
After part of the casket lid was removed, they would lower a hook connected to a chain and long metal bar into the grave and place it under the chin of the corpse. Then the two men would haul the body out and place it on a second tarp. They would remove any clothes from the body ― which would just have to be disposed of later, anyway ― and toss them into the open grave. Then they would carefully replace the dirt in the grave. Fearing they might leave a tool behind, they would count them as they placed them onto a tarp before lugging the tools and the corpse to the waiting wagon. A competent team could do the job in about an hour.
Businesses sprang up that sold cadavers. This was particularly true of Southern states, which shipped the bodies of enslaved African Americans to medical schools, often in the North. In addition to the moral repugnance of this practice, shipping bodies sometimes also had serious practical drawbacks. One UVM student remembered a body arriving, in this case from New York, packed in brine in a barrel labeled “onions.” The person, the students discovered to their chagrin, had died of smallpox. As a precaution, all the students were vaccinated the next day. UVM medical students who graduated in the late 1800s said the school was still obtaining cadavers from nearby cemeteries.
The Vermont Legislature eventually recognized the bind doctors and medical students faced if they wanted to become competent in anatomy. Lawmakers eased the situation by passing a so-called anatomical law that required overseers of the poor and superintendents of public institutions, such as hospitals, workhouses and sanatoriums, to donate unclaimed bodies to physicians. The 1884 law allowed exemptions for unknown persons, military veterans and people who did not wish to have their bodies donated to science, or whose families objected.
The new regulations helped keep doctors on the right side of the law, and the deceased in their graves.
