The Box in the Monument

The marble Pulaski Monument in Monterey Square, about 55 feet tall, stands over a grave whose occupant has been argued about since 1779. Casimir Pulaski, the Polish cavalry commander fighting for the American cause, was hit by grapeshot during a cavalry charge in the failed Franco-American assault on Savannah on 9 October 1779 and died two days later. One account has him dying aboard the brig Wasp and buried at sea. The Wasp's captain, Samuel Bulfinch, wrote on 15 October 1779 that he was buried at the Bowen family's Greenwich Plantation near Thunderbolt. In 1853 remains found on a bluff above Augustine Creek at Greenwich were taken to be his and placed in the new monument, whose cornerstone was relaid on 11 October 1853, the anniversary of his death.

During a restoration in 1996, workers found a rusted metal box in its base holding bones and a skull, with a silver plate bearing Pulaski's name. The skeleton fit his age and showed healed injuries typical of a lifelong horseman, but a DNA comparison with a grandniece exhumed in Poland in 1998 was inconclusive, and the study closed about eight years later without a verdict. The remains were reburied under the monument with full military honours in 2005.

A reanalysis funded by the Smithsonian Institution, shown in a Smithsonian Channel documentary on 8 April 2019, reported a mitochondrial DNA match with the grandniece and called the bones most likely Pulaski's. Because the pelvis and face are female in form, it proposed that Pulaski, who lived as a man, may have been intersex. That is unproven, and a 2022 article in The Polish Review by the historian James S. Pula disputed that the bones are Pulaski's at all.