The 1929 exhumation and reburial of Captain John Worthington (d. 1701) culminated a thirty-year series of removals of colonial gravestones in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, to St. Anne’s Churchyard in Annapolis. This reburial differed from its predecessors inasmuch as it was personally conducted by Worthington descendants; it capitalized on a wave of interest in eighteenth-century Maryland sparked by the Colonial Day celebration in Annapolis the previous year; and it was undertaken in part in response to perceived threats of development in the countryside north of the city. The 2008 proposal by St. Anne’s Church to move the Worthington memorial and other transplanted stones to a new site in the churchyard provoked a very different response from descendants: they fought successfully to prevent any change to the status quo. This paper will look at the entire phenomenon of exhumation and reburial in early twentieth-century Annapolis. It will particularly examine how these two episodes, nearly eighty years apart, suggest changing local attitudes towards human remains; a decline in the deference traditionally accorded the founding families of Annapolis; and ways in which the city has redefined itself over the course of the past century.
About the presenterMichael P. Parker
Michael P. Parker, a professor of English at the United States Naval Academy, has written several articles on death, mourning, and funerary practices in Annapolis.