Unmarked graves offer window into past

When construction workers discovered an unmarked cemetery in the Hawkseye community last fall, they may have unexpectedly uncovered a family plot of one of the Cape Region's most recognizable names.

Hired to identify and remove all graves on the site, archaeologist Edward Otter spent the last year learning just who was buried in a wooded area near the Junction and Breakwater Trail.

Otter is certain the skeletal remains belong to the Wolfe family of the late 18th century and early 19th century. Eleven graves were found, and 10 contained skeletal remains.

The biggest clue in positively identifying people buried in the cemetery came in the form of a lead coffin. Otter said lead coffins are typically used when a person dies overseas and the body must be transported back home.

“Even today if you die overseas they will put you in a sealed metallic coffin,” he said. “It keeps things in, like odor.”

Land records show the area of Gills Neck Road was owned by the Wolfe family for several generations. Following the death of William Wolfe in 1818, his widow Mary Futcher Wolfe moved to Philadelphia to live with her son, William B. Wolfe. When she died in 1854, she was buried in a Philadelphia cemetery. Otter thought that was a dead end – that is until he made an incredible discovery on ancestry.com – a receipt for the very lead coffin they had found in the cemetery.

“I almost fell out of my chair,” he said.

The receipt showed Wolfe's purchase of a coffin covered in lead, lined with flannel and padded. It further described the coffin as having molding on top and bottom with an engraved breast plate. Otter and his team found evidence of all those features.

If Otter needed any more confirmation, he found it two pages later: a permit from the Bureau of Health for the removal of Mary Wolfe and conveyance to a steamboat.

“I don't think he sent her on vacation,” Otter joked.

What Otter discovered is that the entire Philadelphia cemetery where Mary Wolfe was thought to be buried had been exhumed in the 1890s, and thousands of bodies were removed.

So with Mary Wolfe's grave all but confirmed, Otter moved on to the adjacent grave. During his many years working as an archaeologist in the area, he said, he had come across a wooden grave marker on display in the Zwaanendael Museum. The marker, belonging to William Wolfe, was given to the museum in 1946 by a man who said he had found it on the Bookhammer Farm. Familiar with the land records, Otter knew William Bookhammer owned the property that once belonged to the Wolfe family. And since William Wolfe was the husband of Mary Futcher Wolfe, he said, there is a very strong possibility that the marker came from the Hawkseye cemetery.

Of the eight other remains found, Otter said, he feels strongly two are William Wolfe's parents, Reece Wolfe and Mary White Wolfe, who died in 1797 and 1799, respectively. The others, he said, are likely a few of William Wolfe's 13 brothers and sisters, who died in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

The remains have been donated to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., where scientists are performing complete physical analyses. Otter said scientists may even go so far as to perform isotope studies, which can show dietary patterns. The remains will stay in the possession of the Smithsonian in perpetuity unless a Wolfe descendant comes forward. It is their right to have the remains reburied, Otter said.

Otter said it is not often archaeologists find so much information about those buried in an unmarked cemetery. He said it was a very interesting project.

“When you are in there, you kind of objectify the burials,” he said. “You don't really think of them as people at that point. But when you start doing research, the flesh comes back. It becomes a lot more interesting when you do the research and find out who these people were and what part they played in the society here in Lewes.”