Finding Faces in the Yellow Brick Road: The Elusive Lives and Deaths of St. Croix’s Residents with Leprosy

Summary

This is a poster submission presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

From the St. Croix Leper Hospital’s founding in 1888 to its dissolution in 1954, hundreds of individuals with leprosy passed through its facilities. The hospital residents constituted a social fringe that was disproportionately comprised of people of color and about which documentation was often biased. Using a combination of primary historical sources including newspapers, photographs, census records, and data from an archaeological survey of graves in the Christiansted Cemetery, the lives of several residents of the leper hospital are pieced together. Working backwards from their treatment in death, buried in simple conch-adorned graves rather than elaborate yellow brick crypts, to their names first appearing in census records, comprehensive, multimedia ‘portraits’ of real people come to light. These individual profiles can act as a gateway to grounding our understanding of the leper hospital as something personal, recent, and relevant.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 2022 SHA Poster Submissions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology