A man called Fortune who spent his life as a slave on a Connecticut doctor's 75-acre farm, only to have his body desecrated after his drowning death, was finally laid to rest and honored by the state, 215 years later. Fortune was enslaved with his wife and four children by Dr. Preserved Porter. Mistreated even in death, Dr. Porter dissected and boiled Fortune's body to create a medical model from his skeleton. The bones were later obtained by a Connecticut history museum who displayed them until the 1970s and then put them in storage. Now due to the efforts of the African-American History Project Committee, Fortune was honored with a state funeral and proper burial. Fortune has no known descendents, but said Rev. Amy Welin who presided, "We are all his family … we are bound to one another by the unbreakable love of God."
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