> 
> At least the US has space for cemeteries. Europe has long had rental of burial spaces followed by whatever after the time period is up 	

	A couple of local comments on this and related matters.

	One is on European rentals.   When W&M president Thomas Roderick Dew died in Paris in 1846 he was buried there.   A later president, John Stewart Bryant, almost a hundred years later, began to fret about Dew’s bones being tossed into an ossuary when his grave rental was up, and had Dew's remains disinterred and reburied in 1939 in a modern crypt beneath the College Chapel.  

	There was an elaborate academic ceremony duly attended by the DuPont family (I think Bryant was trying to reopen that money spigot—Dew was a collateral relation).  

	Dew is alone in the crypt, pretty much—all other human remains had long since looted, most recently in 1969 by four frat boys.   A couple of days after that last looting, a paper cup of bones was found on the Wren steps.   But when I came in 1970 the word on the street was that those were chicken bones.  Still, they had been duly interred.  

	So, in the College crypt now, Thomas Roderick Dew and an unknown chicken.

	Pictures of Dew's coffin and ceremony (though not so labelled) as well as, way down, the CWF memo on the 1969 looting:

			http://research.history.org/DigitalLibrary/View/index.cfm?doc=ResearchReports%5CRR0197.xml

	A second is an interesting social document about Williamsburg in antebellum days, with a special focus on local undertaking and burials.  I co-edited this some years ago:

			http://cf.swem.wm.edu/archives/collections/bucktrout/preface.cfm

	
			


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Terry L.. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg Virginia  23187              757-221-3932

		http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/tlmeye/   

		http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/_ecology.html
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       Have we got a college?  Have we got a football team?....Well, we can't afford both.   Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.
            															 --Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."

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