The Plan for 7,000 Bodies Discovered Under a Mississippi Campus

As best as anyone can remember, the first bodies were discovered because the University of Mississippi Medical Center needed a new place to do laundry.

This was back in the early 1990s, when the construction of new laundry facilities necessitated new pipes, which necessitated digging, which unearthed the unmarked graves. Forty-four of them, coffins of pine wood, laid out neatly in rows. No names.  “At that point people were reminded, ‘Oh yeah, there’s a cemetery here,” says Ralph Didlake, the director of UMMC’s Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities.

The cemetery belonged to the , which operated from 1855 to 1935. There’s a reason no one thought about it much anymore: The bodies underground are the only thing left. The building was torn down long ago, and there’s no memorial or marker. When the graves were uncovered during construction in the 90s, the