Archaeologists are back at work at Lancaster Airport, digging for the graves of an 18th-century settler family whose remains are headed for a church cemetery in Rothsville.
Crews resumed excavation Tuesday on a plot near the airport’s air traffic control tower, LNP | LancasterOnline reported. The airport, in Manheim Township just south of Lititz, was built on land once owned by Johannes Meister, who bought it around 1774 and died in 1815. His family was buried on the farm.
Whatever the dig turns up will be moved to the cemetery at Jerusalem Evangelical Lutheran Church in Rothsville, in Warwick Township, under a Lancaster County court ruling this summer.
What the crews are doing
Austin Beiler, the airport’s director of operations and development, told LNP that archaeologists from Terracon started where two bones were found last October and will work outward across an area roughly 110 by 150 feet. The edges have already been checked with ground-penetrating radar and nothing turned up there, but the airport wants to dig to be sure. Radar did find anomalies closer to the center.
The work is slow because there isn’t much left. The family was buried in wooden coffins that have long since broken down, Beiler said. Crews were using a backhoe and shovels and sifting soil through a screen to catch bone fragments or pieces of grave markers. The dig is expected to take several weeks, and Beiler said he hopes the reburial in Rothsville will be done by the end of the year.
Grave Concern Inc., a nonprofit that works to preserve Lancaster County’s old burial grounds, believes the remains of about 25 people may be found, mostly family members and in-laws, according to LNP.
How it got to court
The case started in 2017, when a Meister descendant researching the family tree contacted Grave Concern. That led to talks with the airport and, eventually, a petition to the court to allow the remains to be moved.
Judge Jeffrey Reich approved the relocation in August, WHP 580 reported at the time. Meister’s descendants and the Lancaster Airport Authority supported the move to the Rothsville church, about five miles away. Grave Concern initially opposed it but came to accept it as a practical answer, given Federal Aviation Administration restrictions on the site.
The ruling requires any more remains or artifacts found in the area to go to the church cemetery as well. The airport will put up a granite marker near the original site listing the names and birth and death dates of the people identified from the gravestones.
The authority is paying for the relocation, which WHP said was expected to top $100,000 including legal and consulting fees. The airport wants to build small hangars in the area to ease a shortage of hangar space.
A Warwick Township resting place
Rothsville is the village along Route 772 just east of Lititz. Once the reburial is finished, the Meister family will rest in an active church cemetery in Warwick Township, after more than two centuries on what became airport land.