While digging a trench on Water Street in Guilford to upgrade the power system, Zac Herrick and his crew came across human remains.
The unexpected find included skulls and bones of two people, which authorities say is part of an old grave site and not from foul play.
“One of our jobs is to dig graves for the town. We get paid to bury them and now we get paid to dig them back up,” said Herrick, who owns Herrick Construction Inc. of Abbot.
Herrick noted the old power system had been installed nearly only three feet from the graves.
Workers from Dover-Foxcroft-based B. Washburn Electric were also working on the project when the bones were first discovered earlier this month.
“Everybody was shaken up a little,” Piscataquis County Chief Deputy Todd Lyford said.
“We believe a cemetery had been moved due to road construction but these two graves weren’t moved,” Lyford said. “We didn’t find any records of a cemetery but it could have been an old family cemetery. Land swaps hands, families die off or move away.“
The medical examiner in Augusta with the help of a college Dr. Marcella Sorg say the two bodies belonged to middle-aged men and the cementery was moved in the late 1950s or 1960s, but the bodies were much older.
“Fairly frequently, towns need to move cemeteries and when they do, things can happen like this,” Sorg said. “The other thing that happens is there are a lot of unmarked family graves. As people’s usage of the land changes and houses and roads get built, you turn up these unmarked graves. There are no monuments [to mark them]. It is perfectly innocent.”
