Four metallic caskets potentially dating back to the mid 1800s were discovered in unmarked graves during a funeral service held earlier this month at Friendship Cemetery.

Mayor Keith Gaskin said when preparing the grave for burial, funeral workers discovered “unusual looking” coffins in the unmarked area. As they began preparing another spot in the family’s plot, they discovered another.

“They kept checking areas, and there were more of them there,” Gaskin said. “… If you look at them – I mean some people refer to them as mummies, obviously they’re not mummies – but it is a style of casket that was popular during that time. We’re not sure how all of that happened.”

Local historian Rufus Ward said the caskets found at Friendship Cemetery appear to be Fisk coffins, a type that dates back to the 1850s. Ward believes the gravesites are likely located in the original five acres from the cemetery’s founding in 1849.

Soon after Friendship opened, graves were moved there from several other cemeteries, which accounts for graves going back to 1823 appearing there, according to the Library of Congress website.

The city acquired the cemetery in 1957, according to the Lowndes Funeral Home website, and it is now 70 acres.

Gaskin said there were no markers in the area to indicate that the burial plot was occupied. He added that the particular plot of land was located in a “very historic area” of the cemetery, and the city is attempting to track that history through records.

“We are working with folks who have more expertise in this area than we do and are trying to make sure that we are identifying from the records that we have, if we can find out who they are, when they were buried there,” Gaskin said. “We don’t know if they were there prior to the time that became Friendship and people were not aware of it.”

City Attorney Jeff Turnage, who is working alongside Gaskin and director of Friendship Cemetery Rogena Bonner to uncover records for the gravesites, assured The Dispatch the city found an unoccupied plot to lay the recently deceased person to rest. Meanwhile, the older caskets remain in their original locations, Gaskin said, while the city sorts out what comes next.

Historical coffins in Columbus

Fisk coffins were invented in 1844, after the death of William Fisk, as a way to move his body from Oxford, Mississippi, back to upstate New York before the invention of refrigeration or embalming. The coffins were designed to be airtight and form-fitting, to help with preservation through the elements, according to a 2018 column published by PBS. The coffins also provided a safe way to quarantine victims of contagious diseases, while still allowing for a traditional funeral and viewing.

Ward said these coffins, also called metallic burial cases, were advertised in the Columbus Primitive Republican newspaper from 1851 to 1853 and were sold in a furniture store on Main Street.

State law requires cemeteries to maintain continuous and up-to-date records of those buried in the cemetery. But these older burials could have slipped through the cracks for a variety of reasons, Ward said.

“If that square is in the original part of the cemetery, it could be a lost record,” Ward told The Dispatch.

Ward said he had heard of similar situations happening in the past “from people associated with the cemetery and funeral homes.”

“It’s rare, but it has happened on occasion where someone is buried in the wrong square,” Ward said. “It’s interesting, but not surprising, with how old the cemetery is.”

Reporter Emma McRae contributed to this report.

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