“It seems he was very contorted, with parts of him dismembered and put back into place.” “He’s a mess,” Jonathan Leader, spokesman for the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, said of the first skeleton found. “There are cut marks on the arms, like a saw or sharp object was used to cut the bone,” said volunteer digger Randy Burbage of the Confederate Heritage Trust, one of several reenactors who took part in the excavation. Proof that the remains were of Hunley sailors came from the fact that all four bodies were dismembered, with rough chop and hack gashes on the leg and arm bones. The four Hunley sailors were found in two unmarked pits–their coffins stacked on top of each other near the home bleachers’ C-gate entrance, parallel to the 20 yard-line. According to the note written by the city’s recording clerk, however, the council had approved the relocation of only the headstones. A 1947 vote by the city council gave Charleston’s stadium commission permission to move all the graves to nearby Magnolia Cemetery, where more than 1,100 soldiers from all over the Confederacy are buried. The disappearance of the cemetery was apparently the result of a clerical error. The skeletal remains were found among two dozen other graves in a long-lost Confederate cemetery paved over and forgotten when 21,000-seat Johnson Hagood Stadium was built in 1948. Hunley’s first crew buried beneath the Citadel’s football stadium in Charleston, South Carolina. Two of the South’s great loves–college football and the Confederacy–came together in July when archaeologists confirmed the discovery of four members of the submarine C.S.S. Hunley Crewmen Found - December 1999 Civil War Times Feature Close
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