Children playing
near a hillside gravel mine found the first graves. One ran home to tell his
mother, who was skeptical at first—until the boy produced a skull.
Because this was
Griswold, Connecticut, in 1990, police initially thought the burials might be
the work of a local serial killer named Michael Ross, and they taped off the
area as a crime scene. But the brown, decaying bones turned out to be more than
a century old. The Connecticut state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, soon
determined that the hillside contained a colonial-era farm cemetery. New
England is full of such unmarked family plots, and the 29 burials were typical
of the 1700s and early 1800s: The dead, many of them children, were laid to
rest in thrifty Yankee style, in simple wood coffins, without jewelry or even
much clothing, their arms resting by their sides or crossed over their chests.
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