VCU initiated DNA analysis last month on the human remains found in the East Marshall Street Well as part of the university’s efforts to memorialize individuals posthumously stolen by what is now the VCU School of Medicine.
The remains of at least 44 adults and nine children, primarily of African descent, were found in an underground well during the 1994 construction of the Hermes A. Kontos Medical Sciences Building on the MCV Campus, according to the East Marshall Street Well project’s website.
The bodies are believed to have been used at the time by the Medical Department of Hampden-Sydney College between 1848 and 1860. To obtain bodies, it was common for faculty to grave rob Richmond’s African American burial grounds…