Field Days 15 and 16

I've probably written it here before, but I'll write it again because it's true: questions in archaeology always lead to more questions. Remember how on Field Day 14 I was convinced we had found the foundation of St. Mark's Church? It turns out I was wrong. But I'll return to that in a minute. On Sunday we had two of our youngest excavators yet. They were very smart and enthusiastic. That's one of the reasons why archaeology is so great. What other science just lets kids jump in and start making their own discoveries?


Carol was there, too, to give her assessment of Z-Rock and Groovy Rock and the like. Carol suggested that the rocks in STP 3 represented a collapsed wall. Her suggestion was to dig up to the limits of the wall in order to gain a profile view. This meant digging out the rest of STP 3A and removing any rocks that stood on a pedestal of dirt, along with the dirt underneath them. Any rocks that were stacked on other rocks would stay, as they could possibly be in their original positions.

Susan and Taylor excavated STP 3 yesterday (above), and John finished the work today (below), while Maya completed the crucial task of being a dog (the photo below is misleading because it was really John who was in the trench 99% of the time, but I wanted a picture with Archaeology Dog in it). He discovered that the wall goes deeper on the north side than on the south.


Here is the result: a beautiful wall from which we have excavated mortar, nails, glass, pottery, and one French gunflint. The artifacts seem to suggest a date in the eighteenth century, and the location is consistent with our current theories on St. George's Church (but check back tomorrow for a totally different interpretation, probably).


This part of the excavation witnessed the removal of Pointy Rock. I can't believe how big it turned out to be! This is what it looked like when we first discovered it in STP 3. It's kind of like an iceberg in that way.


Also discovered in STP 3: this piece of milk glass with some sort of design or insignia on it.


Meanwhile, excavation continued on what we had thought was the foundation wall of St. Mark's Church, but turned out to be ... this:


This is not a foundation wall, but what is it? You may recall the dozens of footstones, placed in the shape of a cross by workers in the 1960s, that we uncovered during our earlier restoration work on the cemetery. Well, there is more to that story than the footstones. Here is an excerpt from a letter written by Carl Swanson, former Chairman of the St. Mark's Building and Grounds Committee, to Oliver Knapp, the town historian, in 1984:

I know of your interest in things of historical value and was not sure if you were aware of what happened to the missing grave stones at the old St. Mark’s Cemetery ... I do not remember its exact year but we all remember the year the 4 women for [sic] killed in the accident at the south east corner of the cemetery.

You will remember the controversy of finding bones as they dug the corner of the cemetery in an effort to widen and round out the curve. Some of the dirt was thrown into the cemetery.

One of my projects as chairman of the building and grounds committee of St. Mark’s Church was to clean up the cemetery. I had a team of 10 men to clean up the cemetery and cut the grass. We had a serious problem: what whould be done with the old and odd grave markers and corner stones that were strewn everywhere.

I discussed this with your father and Mrs. Crane who approved of my project. To pick up all the out of place stones and markers after putting those back that we thought belonged there. The extras were placed in the rear of the cemetery.

After studying several pictures of the old church and its relation in the cemetery we set out an approx. location.

With the help of my fellow worker Dominic Orena [?] we cleaned and outlined the walk from the street to a point we estimated to be the front of the church. After laying out a possible outline of the church we moved the dirt that had been thrown on to the cemetery in the corner.

We placed the corner stones end to end to outline the church. We then made a level spot in the center of the outlined church square and placed the washed out grave markers in the shape of a cross. Any unused stones were placed in the rear of the cemetery.

Grass has now covered everything and I have gone back several times to check and everything is there about 1” below the grass.

It seemed clear based on the contents of this letter, as well as the drawing below that Mr. Swanson sent to the town historian, that the stones we had excavated had been placed there in the 1960s by Mr. Swanson and his team.

The question was, where did these stones come from? They weren't gravestones or footstones, nor were they part of the church building. When we had dug to the bottom of the stones, I developed a theory. I knew based on old photographs and maps that at one time there were many more fences in the cemetery than there are now. These fences marked out family plots and consisted of iron rods held between stone posts shaped like obelisks, such as shown in this photo. Since so many of these posts are now missing, I figured that they might have been used by Mr. Swanson and his crew to mark out what they thought was the position of the church.

When I told Laurie my theory, she dug into another one of these stones, and sure enough, she discovered the distinctive pointed top of one of these posts, as well as another embossed "S."



Now we realized that the little pieces of metal affixed to these stones were not anchors to hold the wooden part of the church building in place, but attachments for the iron rods or possibly for a gate into the family plots.



These stone posts are positioned in a 30' x 42' rectangle. Some of them are broken, and some have ends that are unshaped; presumably, these ends would have been under the ground.

This realization meant that we would have to take another approach in identifying the location of St. Mark's Church. Mr. Swanson and his team could have been right in their approximation, or they could have been wrong. We studied all of our photographs of St. Mark's again, but they didn't help us much.

And so work on STP 3 and Feature 1 continued, with the question hanging over everyone's head: were they part of the same building? Bill (in the red shirt and baseball cap) is sitting in Feature 1 in the background of the photo below, while John is stepping out of STP 3. They're close, but are they related?


Here's another shot showing John and Bill in their respective units, and Dog in between.


Here's a good portion of the team at work, from left to right: Susan, Bill, Dene, and Gretchen. In the background you can see some of the stone posts still in place, marking out a family plot.


And here's everyone gathered around to screen artifacts. Today we found more nails, glass, fancy glass, charcoal, coal, slate, slag, mortar, and pieces of pottery.


Meanwhile, Laurie and Susan uncovered this grave that had been nearly completely swallowed up by the earth. Catharine, wife of Thomas Craft, died on November 12, 1818, at the age of 76. This stone was lying near the graves of other Crafts. It is particularly important to our research because it was erected when St. George's Church was still standing. Unlike the eighteenth-century stones, however, it seems to have faced east. If the eighteenth-century stones were oriented west to face the church, then the orientation of this stone might suggest that although it was still standing, the church had gone out of use by that point (which we know by documentary evidence was the case).

Returning to Feature 1 - here's what it looked like at the end of the day. The unit is divided between the areas with no rocks, where we have reached 13 inches below the datum, and the areas with rocks, where we are unable to proceed.



Though I can't remember what we were talking about when this picture was taken, Dene, Gretchen, and I certainly look happy. Someone must have found something - maybe a nail. Laurie and Susan did some surface surveying during and after the day's excavation and found a number of artifacts.


One cluster of artifacts came from these rocks, which Susan discovered near the trees that mark the boundary between the Episcopal and Methodist Cemeteries. Note the quarry mark on the upper rock. We are going to excavate these rocks as Feature 3.


The artifacts found near the surface of Feature 3, wedged between those two rocks, included this piece of fancy glass. The paint is more worn away than the fancy glass we found in Feature 1, but you can still see that it was there.


Here are some more artifacts from Feature 3: glass, fancy glass, and some sort of coal or petrified wood. We also found a nail.


After everyone else left, Laurie, Susan, and I did some more surface surveying around the trees and along the southern wall of the Methodist section of the cemetery. Laurie made this amazing find: a piece of sandstone that appears to have formed the finial of a grave marker.

Later we compared this piece of stone to the finial on Jonathan Miller's stone. Laurie found a few more pieces of sandstone, as well as pieces of glass and pottery, scattered throughout these areas.