About Philippi Mummies
The Barbour County Historical Museum contains two residents who arrived more than a century before most of its visitors. The Philippi Mummies are two human bodies preserved in 1888 by Graham Hamrick, a local man who experimented with embalming and mummification techniques.
Hamrick tested preservation methods on a variety of organic material before obtaining two unclaimed female bodies from the state hospital at Weston. His process worked well enough that the bodies remained recognizable and eventually became exhibition objects.
The mummies spent portions of their long afterlife traveling to fairs and displays before returning to Barbour County. They also survived the catastrophic 1985 flood, although they required treatment afterward. Today they rest in glass-topped wooden coffins inside the museum.
The museum occupies Philippi’s former B&O railroad station and includes many conventional local-history exhibits, but the mummies are difficult to compete with. Museums routinely preserve objects from the nineteenth century. Philippi preserves two nineteenth-century people who were themselves turned into historical objects.