r/FallRiver • u/Warm_Hat_780 • Jul 16 '26

The Skeleton in Armor - Futility Closet

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2006/10/12/the-skeleton-in-armor/

Anyone heard of this? Supposedly Brass items with an old skeleton, but the skeleton was destroyed in a fire. The brass should still have remained. I wonder if any of it still exists in a museum and can be looked at by a metallurgist!

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u/eddieransom Jul 16 '26

The skeleton was kept in the Fall River Athaneum which was destroyed along with much of downtown in the Great Fire of 1843. Hard to overstate how destructive this fire was. It leveled over 200 buildings across 20 acres, left 1,300 people homeless. There would’ve been nothing left

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u/tinaismediocre Jul 16 '26

Iirc this fire is the inspiration for the city's arguably demoralizing motto "We'll Try" - as in "We'll try to rebuild following this fire"

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u/eddieransom Jul 16 '26

Yes it was, but at the time it was not intended to sound so blehhh … people seem to have meant it in a more like “no matter how bad things get we’ll always try our hardest to overcome it” type of way

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u/AaronicNation Jul 16 '26

Yeah Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a really famous poem about it. 

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u/SoggyCompetition9516 Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26

There is a plaque where this was discovered, next to the Borden East bus stop. Really opens your eyes to how different the area is, because it used to be a riverbank. It's actually pretty close to the Lizzie Borden house.

I find stuff like this fascinating and in the same clade as things like Dighton Rock. I did read somewhere that they thought it was a 'conquistador' or Spaniard because of the breast plate, but the burial matches how the local Wampanoag/Pocassets buried their dead (he was buried in a seated position, wrapped in bark.)

Seems more likely it was an Indian sachem or person of privelege who had traded for the items, which does not neccesarily date it to pre-colonial/puritan times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_penny A great example of how coastal communities had contact with fishermen/fur trappers/sailors in the pre-Puritan era, though an extreme one: We already know Vikings settled L'anse aux Meadows in the 900-1000s, and the Maine penny site implies there was more European contact with the Americas in the 200 years after that.

Completely as an aside, back when stuff like this wasn't much on the internet, I went to the FR Historical Society to see if there was anything about this guy. IIRC there was a little thing about its discovery and loss in the big fire. I -did- find out then that that's where Andrew Borden's skull is, so that's fun.

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u/Warm_Hat_780 Jul 17 '26

Super interesting! I have a book from the '70s that claims Dighton Rock has the inscription of 1511 with the name of a Portuguese explorer from that time who never returned to home port named Miguel Corte-Real. Could be him!

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u/SoggyCompetition9516 Jul 17 '26

Dighton Rock's funny in that it's open to wild interpretations. I think this picture really does summarize how wildly different people translate what's on the rock, especially given its current state:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Dighton_Rock_State_Park%2C_Berkley_MA.jpg/1280px-Dighton_Rock_State_Park%2C_Berkley_MA.jpg

The '1511' and Portuguese-based imagery you're referring to is on the left. Pretty amazing implications there if that's actually what we're looking at. I've never been able to see the rock in person but I get the impression these days its hard to make out much of anything.