People and incidents
A. Arthur Hutchinson (1872)
Sources compared and paraphrased
A Philadelphia family identified a man found dead in the pines as A. Arthur Hutchinson after recognizing details of his hat and teeth.
Identification
The period account describes Hutchinson as suffering recurring episodes of mental illness expressed through intense religious conviction. During these episodes he left money, jewelry, and better clothing at home and traveled on foot with few possessions. His family had previously located and returned him after absences lasting weeks.
He left home on March 30. A body was found in the pines on April 4 and buried at Whitesville. His father tracked him as far as Camden, then learned of the unidentified corpse through a newspaper illustration and went with a daughter to Bricksburg, the nearest village. They did not exhume the remains. Instead, the sister described an old hat with a white band over a black band and a small tear hidden beneath them; those details and her description of his teeth matched the body. The family accepted the identification and arranged to move the remains to Philadelphia.
Source
Unidentified 1872 illustrated newspaper clipping in the source record. The source uses stigmatizing nineteenth-century language about mental illness; this digest reports the observable history without retaining that language.