Children In Manhattan Got Scurvy And Rickets, 19th Century Skeletons Reveal

What skeletons does Trump SoHo have in its closet? Nearly two hundred actual human skeletons, from a cemetery directly underneath the hotel and its courtyard. The cemetery was part of Spring Street Presbyterian Church, a 19th century radical abolitionist church at the corner of Spring and Varick Streets in Manhattan. Recent construction work in the vicinity of the old church accidentally unearthed the human remains. Around 70 of these were children, whose skeletal remains were studied prior to reburial by archaeologists who wanted to know what life was like for these working class people in rapidly urbanizing New York.

The Spring Street Presbyterian Church opened in 1811, a time when the area around Manhattan was changing from farmland to a neighborhood with houses and businesses. In the first half of this century, the population tripled – twice – and New York grew to be one of the largest port hubs in the country. This new market economy brought together people of diverse backgrounds looking for jobs, especially the working class and the newly forming white-collar middle class. Children’s roles in 19th century society were also changing: upper class kids experienced different environments than did middle class, working class, and indentured servant children.

Bioarchaeologist Meredith Ellis has been working with skeletons from the church for several years as part of the Spring Street Archaeology Project, headed by Shannon Novak of Syracuse University.  Ellis was not surprised to find evidence of disease in the children’s skeletons. These early 19th century kids faced numerous illnesses prior to the modern era of antibiotics.  Their social and economic statuses – as offspring of immigrants, African Americans, and working class families – meant less access to doctors and health information than their elite peers.

Ellis discovered that more than one-third of the children in this burial ground suffered from rickets, a deficiency of vitamin D.  This vitamin is essential for the body to process calcium, which itself is important for strong bones.  When a child does not get enough vitamin D, their growing bones are weak and the pressure of walking can deform leg bones into a characteristic bow-legged walk.

We take for granted today that our milk and other foods are fortified with vitamin D, but this was not done across the U.S. until the 1930s. Children buried in this cemetery may have failed to get enough vitamin D from their food, but they also may have been engaging in behaviors that did not allow them to go outside, as the human body can make vitamin D when skin is exposed to sunlight. Ellis writes in her new article just published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology that “clothing, labor patterns, parenting strategies, and urban air quality are all potential causes of vitamin D deficiency in this population.”

Also affecting the children was scurvy. We may associate this deficiency of vitamin C with pirates who could not get fresh fruit on their sea voyages, but scurvy was a real problem in early 19th century Manhattan because of the difficulty getting fresh foods. Scurvy can be quite a painful condition, as it causes tissue to tear away from bone, particularly in areas of the body that are used frequently. So bioarchaeologists like Ellis tend to find evidence of scurvy on parts of the skull where chewing muscles attach. These bone changes were unlikely to have been seen while the children were alive, but other problems associated with scurvy, like gingivitis, tooth loss, and swelling of the legs, were probably noticed by parents and others.

Most of the children who seem to have been affected by scurvy in the Spring Street Presbyterian Church cemetery were 2 ½ years old or younger at the time of death. Ellis thinks that this age range makes sense because scurvy can be caused by “weaning timing and the mother’s diet.” In particular, the age at which mothers weaned their children is important because children can get vitamin C from breastmilk. Depending on social class, age at weaning varied.  Working class mothers were more likely to wean early so they could return to work, while middle and upper class mothers may have continued longer. If a child was weaned onto foods low in vitamin C, scurvy was a likely consequence. The probable presence of scurvy in these children, however, tells Ellis less about the diet and more about “the interaction of the children with their parents, the church, and the physical environment,” as those all “shape access to food resources."

Ken Nystrom, a bioarchaeologist at SUNY New Paltz who was not involved in this research, is excited about this study because the Spring Street Presbyterian Church skeletons "represent a cross-section of American society at the time."  Both New York City and the U.S. in general were undergoing fundamental changes in social structure and economics in the early 19th century, Nystrom notes, and he says that Ellis's bioarchaeological work "illustrates how these changes were experienced by the youngest members of the congregation and of the city of New York during a pivotal period in American history."

The Spring Street Presbyterian Church skeletons are letting Ellis and others find out about the variety of people who moved into New York City in the early 19th century and the variety of economic strategies that were evolving in a landscape that was fast becoming urban. Manhattan may have been only a tiny fraction of the populous borough it is today, but bioarchaeology is revealing just what urban living meant for the lower social classes whose work helped build and run what is now one of the largest cities in the world.

The skeletons from the Spring Street Presbyterian Church were reburied at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn following a memorial service in 2014. More information about the excavation and analysis of the bones can be found at The Spring Street Archaeology Project website.