After Years Lost, Identity Reclaimed

"It's more than a name," Hull-Walski said. "It's his whole story. It's his family's story. It's who he was, what he did. . . . It's everything."

The saga began April 1, 2005, when construction workers digging beneath a gas line outside an 80-year-old apartment building at 1465 Columbia Rd. NW stumbled on the elegant coffin.

The workers locked it in an empty building, where, on April 4, vandals broke in and smashed the coffin's oval glass faceplate and metal cover.

But the Fisk and Raymond "metallic burial case" was a big clue. Such coffins were expensive, often reserved for the well-to-do, and were popular between 1850 and 1860, Hull-Walski and Scott said in an interview Tuesday at the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center in Suitland. The cases also were airtight.

The museum, which Owsley said investigated the case as a public service and research opportunity, took custody of the coffin after the vandalism, and in August 2005, he and a team of pathologists unbolted the lid and examined the body and the clothing.

The boy was extremely well preserved and clad in white cotton clothing that included a pleated shirt and vest with cloth-covered buttons, flared trousers, darned socks and ankle-length underdrawers.

An autopsy indicated that the boy probably died of lobar pneumonia, and the clothing style hinted that he had probably died in the 1850s.

But why was he buried in the now-residential neighborhood of Columbia Heights?

The investigation revealed that Columbian College had once been there, and a page from a 1970 history of George Washington University stated that the old college had a cemetery. Further research showed that the original cemetery was moved in 1866 from the periphery of the college grounds to the main campus. And it was during this move that the iron coffin was probably left behind.

This might have been because the tombstone was absent or had been misplaced during the Civil War, when the college was the site of two sprawling military hospitals, the researchers said.

The team then began poring over lists of obituaries from the 1850s compiled from local newspapers and quickly hit what looked like pay dirt.

The May 27, 1852, edition of Washington's Daily National Intelligencer carried an obituary for Lemuel P. Bacon, 12, the son of Columbian's president, Joel Bacon.