Archaeologists are carefully working to recover Civil War remains from disturbed graves at Vicksburg National Cemetery/NPS file

Archaeologists are working carefully to recover the remains of a small number of Civil War soldiers whose burial grounds in Vicksburg National Cemetery were disturbed when heavy rains early this year caused soils to collapse and a hillside to erode.

"What essentially happened was the area directly beneath that section of the park tour road eroded away. It collapsed vertically down there. In addition to that, there was a fairly extensive mudslide that headed down the hill," Vicksburg National Military Park Superintendent Bill Justice said Wednesday. "We had a few remains surface as a result of the collapse and subsequent erosion from rain, but not many. So what we’re actually doing is exhuming what is there."

Once the remains are recovered, they will be identified -- not by name, but possibly by DNA testing to ensure all bones of an individual are gathered and not intermixed with those of another soldier -- and safely stored until they can be reburied in the cemetery, said the superintendent.

More than 17,000 soldiers have been buried in Vicksburg National Cemetery, which dates to 1866 and is the country's largest military burial ground. Most those soldiers fought during the Civil War, and most of their names have been lost to the winds of war.

The cemetery's 116 acres roll serenely across a Mississippi landscape set atop a thick layer of loess soils. Heavy rains in January and February saturated those soils, which then began to slump and slide along some steeply sloped areas.

"We had a lot of heavy rainstorms come through here. Three-plus inches," said Justice. "We had sections of the road that were being impacted by slides, we had erosion areas, particularly up at Grant Circle that just basically half the road is gone. Just the width of the road. ... The national cemetery collapse occurred in mid-February."

That collapse affected about 15 burial sites holding the remains of Union soldiers. Some of those sites were directly disturbed by the slides, while others are on the edge of the affected area. A small number of remains were brought to the surface by the slides, and at the time archaeologists recovered them and park staff, "set up a secure area, put some museum cabinets in it, and kept the remains together to the degree that we could," the superintendent explained.

“Those were the ones that we gathered. The archaeologists are now disinterring the remains of the soldiers and are going to be properly removing them, gathering them together, properly storing them” until they can be reburied, said Justice. 

The recovery work was somewhat complicated by the coronavirus pandemic. Under guidance from the Centers for Disease Control to prevent as much as possible the spread of Covid-19, each of the archaeologists from the National Park Service's Southeastern Archaeological Center volunteered for the assignment and self-quarantined for five days before starting their drive to Vicksburg from Tallahassee, Florida.

The Vicksburg National Cemetery actually was the second resting ground for the soldiers. 

"These soldiers were relocated from their original burial places, which was usually out by field hospitals throughout Mississippi and Louisiana," said Justice. "And they were relocated in the 1860s, in the late 1860s, into the national cemetery at that point. So they have been interred since 1867, 1868. So, what we’re going to find may or may not be intact coffins or things like that.

"That's one of the big reasons why we’re involving the archaeologists," he went on. "We don’t know what we’re actually going to find in each grave. And given the nature of the situation, we may find that some of the burials have been, for lack of a better term, jumbled. We may find that some of them are just kind of grouped together.

"So, it’s not just a matter of pulling the remains up. It’s a matter of doing that in a way that protects the integrity, not only of the body or the remains that comes up, but also the DNA. In order to make sure that we have the remains of the individual soldier when we re-inter them, there’s going to be some additional work that needs to be done."

Justice said it was important that the work be done with the respect the soldiers' deserve.

"There are over 17,000 Civil War burials in the national cemetery, and the vast majority are unknown," he said. "Just like all of these soldiers are. We will never know who they are, and where their home was.

"It’s our responsibility, to a greater degree especially with these soldiers, to assure that their remains are properly treated and we ultimately re-inter them in the national cemetery with appropriate honors.”