BRECKENRIDGE—
New construction at an existing Breckenridge condominium hit an unexpected hurdle this week when a casket and full skeleton were found in the spot where workers were laying new water lines.It has been known, when The Corral condominium was built roughly a decade ago, that the property on the resort's south side of town, that the buildings were going atop an area that miners in the settlement's earliest days used to bury their dead.
"The property was known to be a burial area," said Breckenridge Police Det. Kevin McCarthy. "But it was never an actual graveyard, that was marked on a map."
At the time of original construction at The Corral, bones and remains found during excavation were moved to, buried once again, at the Valley Brook Cemetery in Breckenridge.
But more recently it was determined that the original foundation of The Corral was sinking, McCarthy said, and major construction was launched in order to shore up the lodgings' foundation.
In the past few weeks, he said, some additional human bones were found.
Then, "Monday of this week they found a full body inside of an old casket that had collapsed, approximately five and a half feet underground," said McCarthy. "The casket was completely collapsed. The wood was rotted out, covering the whole skeletal remains. We went down into the area where the body was.
"They widened the area for us for safety, and we excavated the body from underneath all the wood that had collapsed on top of it."
Beyond the nearly complete skeleton, the detective said, all that was discovered was a number of small buttons - no shoes, belt, or other clothing had survived the 100-plus years underground.
It is not yet known how long the recovered skeleton had been underground. Gold was first discovered in Breckenridge's Blue River in 1859, triggering a rapid influx of miners and other associated laborers. The town got its first post office in 1860, at which time its population was estimated at about 8,000. Its off-season population now is thought to be closer to 5,000.
The skeleton recovered Monday is now in the hands of the Summit County coroner. An anthropologist is expected to be coming up from Denver to investigate the remains, and subsequent to that, said McCarthy, it will likely be buried - along with other recently recovered bones - at the Valley Brook Cemetery.
As for construction work at The Corral, which is enclosed by locked, temporary fencing, said McCarthy, "The finding of these bones has set them back some time, here, but they have been extremely cooperative with us, and helpful on this project.
"It doesn't happen every day, that you unearth a body from the 1800s."
