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The four Confederate soldiers were buried almost side by side. One still had the bullet that killed him embedded in his spine. Another was buried with his toothbrush and porcelain snuff bottle. And another was buried with two gold coins.

These were the latest discoveries to emerge from Colonial Williamsburg’s examination of a Civil War burial found last year at the historical site that served as the Virginia capital in the 1700s.

Archaeologists have been studying the exhumed skeletal remains of the four soldiers, as well as the bones of three legs amputated from other soldiers that were buried nearby.

And as they worked to identify the four men who fought with the Civil War’s rebel forces, they have compiled a list of 21 possible names — including four from a regiment organized in Lynchburg.

Kate McEnroe

Jack Gary, the head of archaeology at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, said earlier this month that a search of documents led them to conclude that the soldiers were Confederates who died after the Civil War’s Battle of Williamsburg on May 5, 1862. He said the researchers studied records from a church that served as a Confederate hospital, the sequence of events after the battle, the ledger of the local undertaker and later accounts.

The battle was fought amid rain and mud southeast of the town, decades before Williamsburg was turned into a tourist destination and emblem of the colonial era in the mid-1900s. Hundreds of men were killed and wounded.

The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/03/07/mass-grave-civil-war-williamsburg/" target=_blank>graves were found</a> during archaeological excavation around Colonial Williamsburg’s restored Powder Magazine in the historical district.

The four individuals appear to have been <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/05/04/civil-war-grave-soldiers-williamsburg/" target=_blank>buried respectfully</a>, with their hands folded over their stomachs, near a Baptist church, now gone, that served as a hospital after the battle.

One soldier was buried by himself with a bullet in the thoracic section of the spine, where the ribs join the spine, said Colonial Williamsburg Foundation staff archaeologist Ashley McCuistion, who excavated the skeleton.

Three others were buried together in an adjacent grave.

One of them had a bullet embedded in his hip. “But bone had started to grow over it, so it was not the cause of death,” Gary said in an interview. “It is something that he had been living with.”

“He had been shot at some other time,” Gary said, “whether an earlier battle of the Civil War or an even earlier conflict. It’s hard to tell. There’s more research that needs to be done.”

Also, the soldier had been buried with two $1 U.S. gold coins, which were probably secreted on his person, Gary said. The coins, minted in 1855, were found stacked together beside his pelvis, and “we feel very confident that they were sewn into the waistband of his pants.”

“If they had been in a pocket, they most likely would have been taken,” he said.

It was probably emergency money, for use if the soldier needed to get back home, or needed money in a pinch, Gary said: “Hard currency was rare. So you’re going to hold on to that.”

Encrusted with dirt, the coins have retained their golden luster after more than 160 years in the ground.

Christina Altland

Another soldier in that grave was buried with a bone-handled toothbrush and a snuff bottle. The toothbrush was missing its bristles, and the snuff bottle was empty.

The items were probably in a piece of clothing that was placed in the grave with the owner, Gary said. Elegant glass and copper alloy vest buttons were also found with him.

The third soldier in the grave was found with a small piece of shrapnel, about the size of a pencil eraser, around one shoulder, suggesting a wound from an artillery shell.

Found adjacent to the graves was the burial site of three amputated limbs.

One leg had been amputated below the knee. “It has a very severe ankle fracture,” McCuistion said. “We didn’t find any ammunition with him. So I don’t know if he fell off a horse, or tripped down the ravine … But it’s a significant fracture.”

The second leg was amputated above the knee. No injuries were seen, “so we’re not quite sure what the cause was,” she said. The third was amputated below the knee, and had a bullet lodged in the foot.

Amputation was a common remedy for serious limb injuries, and the removed parts were often buried near, or even with, slain soldiers.

The remains have been taken to the Institute for Historical Biology at William &amp; Mary to see what can be learned from study of the bones, such as age and height.

Those details will be matched up against what’s known about the list of soldiers the researchers think may include those in the graves.

The list includes soldiers from Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and Florida. Four of them were from Lynchburg’s 11th Virginia infantry regiment.

“A next step for us is to take their information … and then correlate it to this list,” Gary said. “And see if, ‘Okay, are there patterns in there that we can now [use to] narrow’” the names on the list still further.

But matching a soldier’s remains to a name is a long shot, he said: “A lot of people think, ‘Oh, well with DNA you can do anything. You can make all sorts of identifications.’ It is not that easy.”

Using DNA to make specific identifications of remains that are over 150 years old is very difficult, he said.

The aim is eventually to have the men reburied, perhaps in the Williamsburg area, the archaeologists said.

“I’m really happy that we’re able to work toward getting these guys identified in some way so that there can be a respectful reburial [that they were] not afforded in death,” Gary said.

The Battle of Williamsburg occurred during the Union army’s failed attempt to seize the Confederate capital, Richmond, in the spring and summer of 1862. Confederate forces fought to slow the Union advance.

The battle was inconclusive. The Confederates retreated. But the fighting killed and wounded an estimated 3,800 from both sides, according to the American Battlefield Trust.

Part of the Washington Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022 for coverage of the January 6 riot. 

Part of the Washington Post team that won he Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. 

Finalist for the Ernie Pyle award in 1988 at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

With Sari Horwitz: Sniper: Inside the Hunt for the Killers Who Terrorized the Nation. 

Villanova University, BA and MA in history

Nieman fellow, Harvard University

Michael E. Ruane is a general assignment reporter who also covers Washington institutions and historical topics. He has been a general assignment reporter at the Philadelphia Bulletin, an urban affairs and state feature writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and a Pentagon correspondent at Knight Ridder newspapers.