Who Really Owns a Mummy?
After Ithaca, the mummy went to the Franklin House in Buffalo for an unknown period of time in July as recorded in History of The City of Buffalo and Erie County; With Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers, (Syracuse, N.Y.: D. Mason & Company, 1884). The proprietor announced that “an opportunity of witnessing a mummy may not soon occur again,” and it probably didn’t.
Then it was off "across the border" to Vermont with a side trip to New Hampshire.
Advertisements were inserted in local newspapers and showed where and when the mummy was to be exhibited
The Rutland Herald of 1 January 1828 ran an illustration of the coffin and noted
"The ladies and gentlemen of Rutland and its vicinity are informed that an Egyptian mummy, together with its coffin, will be exhibited at the house of Mr. Abbott, in East Poultney, Vermont, on Tuesday, the 1st; at Mr. Greeno’s in Fairhaven Wednesday, the 2d; at Mr. Moulton’s in Castleton, on Thursday the 3d, and at Mr. Gould’s, in Rutland, on Friday, Saturday and Monday, the 4th, 5th, and 7th of January 1828. … Tickets 12 ½ cents—to be had at the bar. Hours of exhibition from 9 A.M. til 9 P.M."
Presumably the exhibition was not open on Sunday out of deference to the Sabbath. A similar advertisement was in the Vermont Republican and American Yeoman on 8 February 1828, and listed the following venues:
“Mr. Websters, in Hartland, on Monday the 11th—at Mr. Peite’s, In Windsor, on Tuesday and Wednesday, the 12th and 13th—at Mr. Stevens, in Claremont, on Thursday and Friday, the 14th and 15th—and at Mr. Hassma’s in Charleston, on Saturday and Monday, the 16th and 18th of February 1828.”
On 8 August 1828 the Saratoga Sentinel announced that the mummy would be on view at Bailey’s Congress Springs Hotel “for a few days only.” That was that last notice of the "Blockhead" mummy that has been located, except for some articles about its demise.
The fate of the mummy is described in law journal articles “The Law,” in The Ariel; a Semimonthly Literary and Miscellaneous Gazette (Oct. 17, 1829) and “Trover for a Mummy,” in American Jurist and Law Magazine 2 no. 4 (October 1829).
In 1828 it was exhibited at a public house in Rennselaerville, New York, where it met with a terrible fate. Eight young men, some of them medical students, out of a desire to prove that the mummy was genuine, determined to dissect the mummy. At about midnight they broke into the establishment, subdued the attendant “with no easy hand” and “hurried her mummyship down the stairs with more haste than the gravity of the situation could at all justify.”
After that escapade, the mummy disappeared, and not even fragments were recovered. In 1829, Messers. Curtis, Boughton and Thorn (who had replaced Holt) brought a suit of trover against the young gentlemen, to recover the monies which they would have earned had they been able to continue their exhibition of the mummy, which had been producing a net income of eight dollars a day. The courtroom battle devolved on whether or not the mummy was “property,” and if so, who owned it? The defense argued that the only person who could properly claim the mummy was its last, lineal descendant, and moreover, it was a human body and could not then be considered be property, and as such, it had no intrinsic value and was worth nothing.
The prosecution countered with letters from Peale, the original examining physicians, and others, advancing the argument that although the body was human, it was as much property as were any physicians’ anatomical specimens. The defense responded that if that were the case, then it would have to be proven that the mummy’s direct descendants had sold the body!
The prosecution crowned the argument by pointing out that as the Pasha of Egypt had become the administrator general of all the catacombs in Egypt, where the mummy had been buried and discovered, he was therefore quite legally within his rights to sell off the contents, which he had done in conveying the mummies to Henry Barclay.
Judge Duer and the jury returned a verdict for the plaintiffs, in the amount of twelve hundred dollars, the legal costs of the suit.