A Maryland-based auction house has called off a controversial auction where several 19th century military items were to be sold- including the skull of a Civil War soldier.
The skull was found on privately-owned land near the site of a Confederate field hospital in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1949, Reuters reported. An anonymous person intended to sell the skull at the Estate Auction Company, where it was expected to go for up to $250,000.
But the company announced on Monday that it was canceling the auction after being slammed by critics that wanted the skull buried with other unknown soldiers in the Soldiers National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Reuters reported.
"I can't think of anything more grotesque or disrespectful than auctioning off the remains of a soldier who may have been one of those, as [President] Lincoln put it, who gave their lives that the nation might live," author Harold Holzer, an expert on President Abraham Lincoln, told The Washington Post. "The skull belongs in the Gettysburg Soldiers Cemetery, not on the auction block. I have nothing against passionate collecting. But this is desecration."
The skull was found by someone tending to a garden on Benner's Farm, located nearly two miles north of a field hospital that was set up to tend wounded soldiers during the Battle of Gettysburg. Nearly a dozen other artifacts were found at the site, including a breastplate from a unit of the Confederate Army based in Louisiana, Reuters reported.
The auction was scheduled for Tuesday at the Grand Venice Hotel in Hagerstown, Maryland. Thomas Taylor, an auctioneer from the company, said the skull is to be donated to the National Park Service at the Gettysburg National Military Park, Reuters reported.
Nearly 45,000 soldiers either died or went missing after the landmark Civil War Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. The U.S. National Park Service believes the battleground still holds the remains of missing soldiers, Reuters reported.