After 157 Years, Boy Who Was Left Behind Gets Memorial

They bade William Taylor White goodbye again last Saturday.

Under rainy skies in a country churchyard, descendants and well wishers gathered to recall the Eastern Shore teenager who died in Washington 157 years ago and was resurrected, in a sense, when a work crew unearthed his coffin in Columbia Heights in 2005.

Prayers and kind words were said in the graveyard of the Modest Town Baptist Church, in Accomack County, Va., beside a brand new tombstone bearing his name. It didn't matter that, in accordance with his family's wishes, the body of White, aged about 15, remained at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

The small ceremony was a chance for those he never knew, and those who never knew he existed, to say farewell.

White, who was probably a prep student at the old Columbian College, the precursor to George Washington University, in Columbia Heights, died there on Jan. 24, 1852.

A sickly boy, he was buried in an elegant white suit of clothes, placed in a state-of-the art iron coffin that had a window, and probably buried in what was then a school cemetery.

During the tumult of the ensuing decades the cemetery was moved. William's body was left behind. And the city spread over top of it. On April 1, 2005 construction workers digging beneath a gas line outside an 80-year-old apartment building at 1465 Columbia Rd. NW stumbled on the coffin.

For the next two years experts at the Smithsonian pored over the boy's body, clothes, coffin, and the public record, trying to determine who he was. They did so in September 2007. Last year descendants decided to leave the body with the museum for further scientific study.

But they also wanted a chance to say goodbye, once again. A tombstone was commissioned. The church was selected because other family members are buried there, and researchers believe he may have worshipped there.

The ceremony, attended by several dozen descendants, was low-key, but heart-felt, said the Smithsonian's Deborah Hull-Walski, who led much of the genealogical research into White and was also present.

On the back of the tombstone are etched the words from an obituary in a Richmond newspaper:

"Thus is cut off, in the morning of his days, one in whom many hopes were centered -- and who had the fairest prospects of happiness and usefulness in life."