What Remains: The East Marshall Street Oral History and Memorialization Well Project
Christine J. Cynn & Maggie Bertsche / Virginia Commonwealth University
*This article includes references to, and images of, the mistreatment of human remains.
In 1994, during construction on Virginia Commonwealth University’s (VCU) medical campus, workers unearthed a sealed well filled with the remains of more than fifty individuals (Figure 1). Archaeologists exhumed what they could in the few days granted by VCU administrators before, for reasons of financial expediency, construction resumed, and a second well (if not more) remains unexcavated under what is now the VCU Kontos Medical Sciences Building. This startling discovery exposed a buried legacy of nineteenth-century US medical education built on systemic racial exploitation. As later research revealed, the remains were mostly of people of African descent and included 44 adults and 9 children (under the age of 15). The bodies had been stolen in the mid-19th century from Black cemeteries, burial grounds, and almshouses to supply cadavers for anatomical dissection and research at the Medical College of Virginia, the institution that later became VCU Medical Center (Figure 2).
The stealing of bodies from the graves of enslaved and free Black people was a common practice dating to the 18th century in Virginia and in the US. Medical school faculty had selected Richmond, the second largest center of the slave trade in the United States as the ideal location for the 1838 construction of the Medical College of Virginia because “the peculiar institution” provided “materials for dissection in abundance” (Figure 3). To distinguish the Medical College of Virginia from other medical schools, faculty publicly advertised ready access to cadavers for dissection and instruction and worked with grave robbers, called resurrectionists, to arrange to illegally obtain cadavers from nearby Black burial grounds for their classes and to arrange to ship others to University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA (Figure 4).
The bones and artifacts in what was named the East Marshall Street Well (EMSW) had been disposed of after they had been used for classroom instruction and research. The excavated people’s remains were sent to the Smithsonian Institution for storage, a decision made without meaningful consultation with descendant communities and reflective of a long history of institutional disregard. Only after VCU African American Studies faculty member Shawn Utsey’s 2011 documentary Until the Well Runs Dry drew renewed attention to the EMSW, did VCU begin an institutional reckoning with the implications of the discovery of the well. In 2013, VCU convened the EMSW Planning Committee, which collaborated with Richmond’s African American community to form the Family Representative Council (FRC) to represent the “family” descendants since the names and the families of the people who were excavated could not be identified. In 2018, the FRC released recommendations that prioritise ethical research, memorialization, and reburial of the ancestors with dignity. Since the EMSW Project seeks to redress the racist and exploitative practices conducted in the name of research and teaching, the FRC centered the importance of accountability and transparency in future research on the EMSW. They recommended that such research be cross-institutional, interdisciplinary, diverse, and inclusive of people from traditionally underserved communities, engaging with and involving the community, and disseminated broadly. They further highlighted the importance of research that would advance understanding of the impacts of the history of the EMSW, especially the legacy of medical mistrust in Richmond’s African American communities.
Since the fall of 2023, the Health Humanities Lab at VCU’s Humanities Research Center has been supporting the enactment of the FRC Recommendations through the EMSW Oral History and Memorialization Project, with a particular focus on memorialization. Lab faculty and undergraduate and graduate student fellows have been recording, processing, and uploading oral histories about the EMSW onto a publicly available VCU Library repository. The Lab has further engaged in memorialization projects ranging from podcasts, a digital walking tour, a timeline of lab activities, the hosting of symposia and events, participation in conferences, and research into West African and African American ceremonies for the reburial of the remains, which after thirty years are still to be interred. The lab also emphasizes mentorship and professional development, and this essay (and the one that will follow in the spring) represents one example of such efforts. It is co-written by Chris Cynn, an associate professor in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, and director of the Health Humanities Lab, as well as the co-director (along with Michael Dickinson, VCU History Department) of the EMSW Oral History and Memorialization Project, and by Maggie Bertsche, a second-year PhD student in the Media, Art and Text (MATX) program.
The EMSW Project challenges the well’s prior status as a “sink” for disposal of “medical waste,” and as an inconvenience impeding construction and reframes it as a site of ethical obligation and public reckoning. Under the guidance of the FRC, descendant voices lead decisions about reburial, research, memorialization, and public interpretation. The project acknowledges that no process can fully recover all that was lost or achieve perfect justice. Responsibility is not a destination; it is a continual commitment. The EMSW Oral History and Memorialization Project likewise is not simply a “restorative” initiative, as if it can erase or undo the racist medical exploitation at the foundation of the VCU Medical Center. Instead, the project aims to draw attention to literally buried histories, even as it reconsiders extractive processes of knowledge production and research. The EMSW Project raises uncomfortable epistemological questions: what does it mean to understand this history of human anatomy and of medical practices more broadly when the same institution that educated generations through theft, desecration, and silencing is now attempting to create and disseminate new forms of knowledge? To what extent is the university able to redress the wrongs at its foundation as an institution? The FRC offers one suggestion where knowledge is not the property of the university but of the communities that have carried, protected, and mourned those denied consideration as fully human during their lives, yet who were vital to the foundation of understandings of human anatomy. As the FRC leadership reminds us, those denied full recognition of their humanity in life nevertheless shaped the literal foundations of the human, of anatomical science in death and honoring them now requires centering their descendants’ expertise, memory, and care in the ongoing work of research, education, and remembrance.
The East Marshall Street Well (EMSW) Project is both a methodological and ethical inquiry, as it is a historical reclamation. Its approach is intentionally dialogic, designed to activate conversations, circulate stories, and bring descendant communities into the center of institutional memory-making. Rather than treating the well as a static site or a dataset to be mined, the EMSW Oral History and Memorialization Project uses community forums, publicly displayed educational panels, archival research, conference and symposia presentions by students alongside FRC members, and digital storytelling as iterative practices that invite collaboration, unsettle past hierarchies of expertise, and reposition descendant knowledge at the center of institutional memory. Community activist and historian and African American Studies faculty member, Ana Edwards, the founding chair of the Defenders’ Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project serves as the interviewer for the recording of oral histories from people involved in the discovery of the EMSW and in the creation of the EMSW Project. These practices offer new possibilities: they expand what counts as authoritative evidence, while also creating new spaces where grieving, teaching, and meaning-making coexist.
We want to conclude by amplifying some of the FRC recommendations. As of 2025, many of the Family Representative Council’s (FRC) recommendations for the East Marshall Street Well (EMSW) Project remain only partially realized. The full list of institutional updates related to the FRC recommendations are publicly available through Virginia Commonwealth University’s EMSW website. While meaningful progress has been made toward ethical research, community engagement, and the return of the ancestral remains from the Smithsonian to VCU, significant portions of the FRC’s 2018 plan have not yet been fulfilled. Most significantly, the remains of the people discovered more than 3 decades ago have still not been interred.
Image Credits:
- Figure 1: Construction workers excavating the East Marshall Street Well site, 1994. Virginia Commonwealth University Special Collections and Archives. Reproduced in Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves (Simon & Schuster, 2020) and Richmond Magazine (2016). Courtesy of Virginia Commonwealth University, Special Collections and Archives.
- Figure 2: MCV Medical Class of 1910. VCU Tompkins-McCaw Library, Special Collections and Archives. 1910. Flickr, uploaded 12 May 2008. Courtesy of Virginia Commonwealth University, Special Collections and Archives.
- Figure 3: Cook, G. S. The Egyptian Building of the Medical College of Virginia. ca. 1870. Historic VCU: A VCU Images Special Collection, VCU Libraries, Tompkins-McCaw Library, Special Collections and Archives. Courtesy of The Valentine.
- Figure 4: “Medical College, in Richmond, Virginia.” Richmond Enquirer, 24 May 1839, p. 3, col. 5. Virginia Chronicle: Digital Newspaper Archive. Courtesy of Virginia Commonwealth University, Special Collections and Archives.
- Figure 5: The construction site photo of the Egyptian photo from the time of the 1994 excavation, Chicago: Special Collections and Archives, Tompkins-McCaw Library, Virginia Commonwealth University, quoted in “The Organ Thieves,” Chip Jones Books, accessed November 24, 2025, https://www.chipjonesbooks.com/the-organ-thieves.html.