Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 29, 1993 TAG: 9308290026
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFFREY FLEISHMAN KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: PHILIPPI, W.VA. LENGTH: Medium
"Now," she says, collecting one dollar from each guest. "These are West Virginia mummies, not Egyptian mummies."
The door opens. In the tiny old restroom, the legacies of Graham H. Hamrick peer up through the Plexiglas with gaping eyes, frozen mouths, knotty hands and with skin the burnt-brown color of rotten grapefruit.
The room is hot and the Renuzit air freshener stands horribly defeated.
The Mummies of Philippi are back with a vengeance.
They have brought shrieks and chortles to this town for more than 100 years. Now, in their new coffins with the white-satin cushions, they seem oddly at home in the Philippi Museum.
Philippi has come to accept that there's no escaping these mummies, who lie rigid and shriveled, their pelvises draped with cloth diapers. So, people here figure why not put them to work as part of the town's not-yet-blossoming tourism industry? The town's other noteworthy claims are the covered bridge and the (sometimes disputed) fact that Philippi was the site of "the first land battle" of the Civil War.
Not many American towns can boast of a matching set of mummies.
Outside the Inca Empire and the ancient Egyptian civilization, mummy-making has not exactly been mainstream.
Philippi's mummies are the handiwork of Hamrick, a scientific eccentric who in 1888 took his horse-drawn cart a few miles up the road to the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane. Without much paperwork, Hamrick was given what were only described as "two female cadavers" who had no kin to claim them.
Being an industrious sort, Hamrick brought them back to his barn, slit an incision below their navels and began the mysterious procedure that would make him - or at least the two dead women - immortal as shoe leather. He mummified them just the way he had done in earlier experiments with vegetables, snakes and the head of a "Negro man" he kept in a jar.
Such maverick feats are always met with skepticism. But Hamrick, who eventually won a U.S. patent for an embalming potion that included saltpeter and sulfur, quieted non-believers each year by hauling the mummies to the Philippi Street Fair.
Since then the mummies have floated - sometimes literally - in and out of Philippi life. They were taken to Europe by P.T. Barnum. They traveled all over West Virginia. They were lost and rediscovered in a barn. Then they disappeared again for 15 years until the great Philippi flood of 1985 made them public once more - their waterlogged bodies were laid to dry in the sun on the grass of the old Post Office.
Some here hope the mummies can draw visitors who will spend money on Main Street. Philippi is the county seat of Barbour County, which has an official unemployment rate of 20 percent and is the third-poorest county in the state.
Herbert Holbert and many of the town's older residents remember seeing the rawhide skin of the naked mummies, their mouths open and black. "A lot of people said it affected their minds for several days. It's a fascination for me to think that somebody could do that in those times. It was just a simple recipe."
It was a recipe Hamrick kept a secret. To this day many in this town of 3,000 still believe Hamrick's potion remains a mystery. Even the headline in the local paper at the time of Hamrick's death screamed: "The Man Who Can Embalm as the Ancient Egyptians is Dying and Refuses to Reveal the Secret."
But Hamrick's secret lies in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington. Among other things it includes 4 ounces of saltpeter, boiling water and a box 28 inches deep.
The mummies, who still have toenails and barely perceptible threads of hair, have been used to raise money for the town library, a scholarship fund and sometimes have been wheeled out for Halloween. "These bodies have done more traveling since they've been dead than they ever did when they were alive," said one librarian.
Hamrick's deathbed wish on Feb. 11, 1899 was to be mummified. He left a jar of his potion, but as one account put it, his assistants were "too squeamish" to carry out the procedure.
So Hamrick, despite the timeless creepy charm he gave to two unknown women, was put in a coffin and buried on a knoll not far from his red barn.
His epitaph has faded away and his gray headstone stands unadorned in Mary's Chapel Cemetery in the quiet shadow of a coal tipple.
by CNB