East Marshall Street Well Project, Virginia Commonwealth University

The institution’s own account of what its predecessor did, published on its own domain, in the present tense.

On how the bodies were obtained, verbatim: the medical department faculty “consorted with members of the underworld and occasionally engaged in grave robbing themselves to obtain cadavers for students to dissect. Richmond’s African American burial grounds were prime targets for this illegal activity.”

On what was done afterward, verbatim: “When the cadavers and specimens were no longer useful for educational purposes, they were callously and disrespectfully discarded as refuse in nearby wells.”

The discovery: in April 1994, construction workers preparing to build the Hermes A. Kontos Medical Sciences Building found a well containing human skeletal remains twenty-five feet below East Marshall Street.

Who was in it. VCU’s page says the anatomists “identified among the remains 53 individuals, including nine children.” DO NOT CITE THAT NUMBER TO THE ANATOMISTS. They never wrote it. Owsley and Bruwelheide wrote “a minimum of 44 adults… and 9 children.” Fifty-three is this webpage’s arithmetic, with the word minimum deleted. See owsley-bruwelheide-2012-emsw-remains. Correct usage is “at least fifty-three,” and more remain under the Kontos Building.

What VCU concedes about itself: the university “acknowledged its insensitivity during the 1994 excavation.”

How the Council was formed. VCU’s page says the planning committee “helped the African American community form” the Council. The Council’s own report is more precise, and the difference matters: members were “selected by the Planning Committee from a pool of individuals nominated during public engagement forums,” and “VCU engaged with community members to establish the FRC.” Nobody volunteered. Do not write that they did.

The Family Representative Council exists “to symbolically personify the descendants of the unnamed individuals from the East Marshall Street Well.” The remains were welcomed back to Richmond on November 25, 2019.

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CORRECTED 2026-07-14. READ THIS.

An earlier version of this record carried the following note:

“the Family Representative Council’s final report (December 13, 2018) returned HTTP 403 to every retrieval attempt. Do not quote its body.”

That was false. The report returns HTTP 200. It is 34 pages. It is linked from this very page. It was retrieved on the first attempt with a browser user-agent, and it is now filed as emsw-family-representative-council-report-2018.

The instruction “do not quote its body” propagated into a draft essay, which then told its readers that “the descendants’ own words are absent from this record.” We declared the descendants unreachable and then spoke on their behalf.

And their words, once read, refute what the essay was saying for them. The Council writes that “at least some of the EMSW Ancestors may never have been deliberately buried,” and that “we may never know with certainty” whether any given person was robbed from a grave or died in a medical school infirmary.

An unverified 403 is not a fetch failure. It is an excuse, and it will be read as one. Retry with a browser user-agent. Print a completion sentinel. Never record a negative result from a request you cannot prove completed.

Note on names: there are none. The individuals in the well are unidentified, and WR does not supply names the record does not carry. The Council calls them the EMSW Ancestors. Use that.