Bowls to Buckets: Part 2

           First looks can be deceiving. Another visit to the little site with the Model T and the stone foundation has called for some revisions.

           The foundation, it turns out, is a full set of eight stone piers. Whether a side was left open is hard to tell. The measurements of the building are still small, only 3x4 meters or roughly 10x13 feet. Tin roofing close by probably once covered it and, to judge by a shovel test dug alongside, it had glazed windows. The shovel test also included cut and unidentifiable nails or other iron and a large bottle fragment.

           The site is still a mystery as to purpose. To the Model T, the crosscut saw, and enamelware, I can now add a plow blade and an unidentified bottle (I first guessed Karo Syrup, but no matches have been forthcoming).

Any ideas? It is a quart-size, straight-sided bottle, originally with a paper label covering the lower half (this based on the strong horizontal line). The glass has a fair number of bubbles.

                       Oh, and this is the sort of thing that punched the holes in the Model T:

           So, got a chance to refine the layout a bit but haven't learned much more about the place. The relationship of the building to the well/privy/hole feature is interesting. The latter is slightly uphill and in line with one side of the structure while a long ditch aligns with the opposite end.

           Other than the brief return to Ford country, the survey area has produced nothing of note. This Sprite can was about it as far as non-shrapnel finds:

Sprite's 1961 American debut was Coca-Cola's answer to 7-Up. While 7-Up was born in St. Louis in 1929, Sprite originated in Germany as Clear Lemon Fanta (for 'Fantasie') in 1941. Coca-Cola's German branch had been forced to come up with a new drink as access to Coke syrup was restricted by the wartime trade embargo and then cut off entirely. 

           Basically very little to report. Still, all in all, fine weather, cold and clear and always something to investigate. Here are a few more general shots from the woods:

Fallen oak. This pancake root structure made a lot of the surrounding area a pain to dig.

 

SOURCES:

Sprite/Fanta:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanta

Back in the Woods: Bowls to Buckets

     Laying in survey lines today brought us to a new site along yet another old road in the woods.

          Here and there, enamel bowls poke out among the leaves. These bowls always manage to survive, generally with a few rusty holes, but otherwise recognizable. This, when nothing remains of a home but a few bricks and old iron. Known as graniteware, speckled ware, or agateware, the popular kitchen and bath goods came in dozens of colors. Patented over 150 years ago, their popularity peaked in the late 1800s through the 1930s when lightweight aluminum took their place (we still encounter a few examples today, often in the form of camping dishes and cups). Designs in the heyday included speckling, marbleizing, and solids, sometimes with prints. Many of the examples we come across on surveys are common blues, grays, whites, and greens.

          The bowls are not the only above-ground remains here,  a three-sided fieldstone box marks the footprint of a small building. It seems quite small for a house and the open west side suggests a shed of some kind. Behind it, ferns encircle a 5-foot, leaf-filled depression. An iron framework from a piece of machinery with two ratcheting gears, similar to a small manure spreader, pokes out of the leaf mold in between.

Mystery depression- perhaps a well or privy

Remains of a piece of equipment

Small frame structure- may have been an open shed, judging by the stones on which it sat. Some of the stones, like that on the right, were more regularly cut.

          Scraps of roofing, crushed tin cans and other debris lay around the site. What at first seemed to be an iron strap buried in leaves turned out to be a crosscut saw. This particular example is a felling saw, used for cutting down trees as opposed to cutting up logs into sections. The tooth pattern is known as 'perforated lance', used for mixed woods including hardwoods. The lance teeth, looking like sections of picket fence, are sharpened on alternate tips and do all the cutting. The 'Y' shaped raker teeth in between serve to clear sawdust out of the cut so the felling can proceed.

          One more small item lay down slope from the foundations, a 6 oz. graduated medicine bottle with a black bakelite screw cap. The late 1920s-1930s art deco style bottle bears on its base the script 'Rexall'.

          Rexall (rex from the 'rx' abbreviation of 'prescription) was the first nationally licensed drugstore chain. Spanning 1902 to 1977, it peaked in the 1920s-1950s with only slightly fewer independent Rexall drugstores than there are McDonald's restaurants today.

Look for the orange and blue sign and stop in to see your neighborhood Rexall Druggist. Good Health to all, From Rexall!

          Saving the best for last, one more surprise lay down the slope on the edge of a small ravine. We have found a number of cars on base- some abandoned when farm communities were dispersed as the fort expanded, others brought in as targets for the firing ranges and obstacles for training courses. We've seen a couple of prewar examples, including a truck so blasted that only the dashboard remained standing. Today's find was thus a treat!

          Although most of the small parts and engine are gone, it appears all the fenders, doors, and hood are there among the leaves. This car, for one, seems to have managed to find a place on base to rest in peace (yes..a few bullet holes, but still!).

And what is it? Well, Ford folks can correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks to be about a 1925-27 Model T roadster pickup.

 The roadster body (aka T-bucket to the hot rod crowd) with the open frame in the back and this arrangement of holes in the rear corners probably make this a pickup.

Ford made roadsters in a variety of different configurations. 137,344 pickups were built between 1925 and 1927 and cost between $281 and $381 (akin to $3500-5000 today).

Ford Model T Roadster Pickup. Image: gomotors.net

          Of course, there are other things lying around in the woods. It isn't every day you come across a crashed helicopter. But that's another story...

Sources:
Cross-cut Saws
http://northernwoodlands.org/articles/article/using_a_crosscut_saw

Rexall:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexall

Model T:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/1923-1927-ford-model-t5.htm
http://gomotors.net/Ford/Ford-Model-T-Roadster-Pickup/photos.html?pic=4

Back On The Farm

Finally back in the woods, shovel and screen in tow.

This time, the yellow-flagged lines march over hills and across small ravines. The dominant trees here are pines while more open spaces support dense colonies of sweetgums. Many of the pines bear witness to recent fires, their papery bark still soft charcoal to the touch. The sweetgums, most too young to bear the little spiked gumballs, have flourished in the wake of destruction. Logging has been the major disturbance over the past 50 years, though bomb craters do occur here and there. Now and again, a shovel test produces a bit of shrapnel, a machine gun bullet, a lead fuse. A few foundations from prewar days survive, guarded over by massive old hardwoods. One site is somehow entangled with an earthwork and associated trenches yet retains an old cast iron kettle, metal roofing, and what seems to be the iron frame for the bodywork of a small buggy. Another is limited to an open foundation of three rough stone walls atop a hill.

Today's subject is the fallen chimney of a small cabin in the crook of a forgotten road. Only one shovel test has been dug near it so far. Though handmade bricks stud the ground, the hole yielded little besides a pair of 3" wire nails and two bits of old glass lamp mantle. Nothing clearly pre-dating the 20th century. It may prove older, though. An olive bottle fragment was found some distance away, perhaps spread on a former field mixed in a load of manure.

By 1 o'clock, snow began to fall and it continued off and on..just enough to filter down through the trees, until it was time to leave. So, not much to report at the moment, but here is the chimney site, with a quick guess at how it looked.

Old homesite, lost to the woods. The chimney remains, as do stones marking the footprint of the structure.

Many creatures have settled into winter quarters, these gem-like beetles nest underground and occasionally turn up in the screen as we dig.

Chimney with a characteristic fireplace formed of large stone uprights and a lintel (partly visible at left). At least one other nearby site shares this feature, possibly the work of the same builder. The outer wall is parged with cement.

Roads in the Woods

Archaeology and Displaced Communities: Farmsteads

          Work this week finds us once again deep in the woods of eastern Virginia, picking through the remains of an old farmstead. Tumble-down chimneys and leaf-blanketed cellars of these lost farms dot neighboring ridges. Steps without churches adjoin abandoned cemeteries and graves are reduced to clustered depressions, their occupants disinterred seventy years hence.

There are many famous examples of people whose homes and communities have been suddenly erased in the name of progress: the reservoir towns of the TVA and the "hollows" of what became Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the African American community of Seneca Village enveloped by New York's Central Park and, as here, the hundreds of communities that vanished with the growth of American military bases.

Farmhouse site with cellar at upper center.

          Today's site is typical, a small farm built atop a ridge in the late 1800s. To reach it, we drive a tangle of gravel roads through fields and woods. The route is punctuated with firing ranges and mock battlefields strewn with forlorn target vehicles. This landscape of brutal utility alternates with one of broad fields and rolling tracts of woodland. True, forest and meadow alike are pocked by craters, blasts fired in preparation for Normandy and Hue, Desert Storm and Baghdad; but this tortured earth also explodes with beauty. A hundred species of wildflower rush to colonize the fresh soil. Animals abound as well amid this continual regeneration and deer and squirrel, groundhog, beaver, fox, turtle and many others make regular appearances. It is a strange environment and one far removed from that of the farming communities that existed here a few generations ago.

          Our farmstead lies along an old road hemmed in by sweet gum, oak, and poplar. The footprint of the house survives as a shallow, square cellar in a long rectangle of stone piers. A rocky mound to the east is all that remains of a fallen chimney. Behind the house, a square footing of field stone marks an outbuilding, perhaps a kitchen.  A cement-parged foundation to the east, probably a garage or shed, opens two bays toward the house.  Southwest across the road, a gaping hole marks a vanished ice house, once 15 feet square and as deep or more. The walls slump in now, making it seem twice the size, while a thick, soft bottom of leaf litter lends mysterious depth.  A few more rectangular depressions and the twisted wreckage of old, standing-seam metal roof are scattered nearby.

Here and there, the debris of daily life peaks up amid a lush growth of oak seedlings and fruiting paw paws: an enamel chamberpot, a brown and white gallon jug, a bottle, a scrap of shoe leather studded with copper tacks. This land was all in fields the last time the vanished door closed. It has grown up and been logged at least once since, judging by the trees and the ragged ravines eroded into the surrounding slopes. The house, on its rough stone piers, was of frame construction with wooden siding and tin roof. Lengths of semi-circular gutter, with twisted wire hangers and narrow downspouts still intact, crunch beneath the leaves around the ice-house and home.

          We parked our van in a little turnaround beside the road, just in front of the home site with its gnarled oak.  Massive of limb, it stood surly as the apple trees in The Wizard of Oz, as a coworker observed. We soon set about pulling a measuring tape trough the trees and brush, threading it along a path formed with the aid of machetes and compass. These baselines form the axes of a grid encompassing the site. Between these axes, we pace off fifteen-meter intervals. At each interval we mark the spot for a shovel test pit with a length of yellow tape. A 'shovel test' is more-or-less what it sounds like, a hole dug into the ground the width of the spade and as deep as needed to reach subsoil. 'Sub' is the sterile, geological level that predates Native and European presence. We shovel the soil from each into a shaker screen, and shake and sift with hands to reveal bits of everyday life. The screen is a simple wooden frame, 3 1/2 by 2 feet and four inches deep, with two handles at one end and a U-shaped leg of bent steel conduit that pivots on bolts at the other. Across the bottom, a piece of 1/4" wire mesh is stretched taught and anchored with batting or steel strips and screws.

          Our shovel tests here require two forms- one in detail for 'positives' and a very schematic one for 'negatives'. It has been the general rule on these base projects that several of the latter will fill up before one of the former feels the scratch of a pencil. The parcels we survey are large- in the hundreds of acres- and the likely human occupation sites, whether of 10,000 years ago or only 50, are comparatively scarce. Of course, we do recover military artifacts daily, sometimes by the pound, but as most do not meet the 50-year cut-off, they are generally noted and discarded. So, equipped with screen and shovel, a tarp to catch the dirt, and a bag of tools, we set off along the grid transects, plugging away at the landscape and hoping to sift out a sample of what came before.

Fragments of a 19th-century washstand pitcher with Rockingham glaze found just east of the house. 

          The shovel test pits (STPs) around the house prove, predictably, positive. They are not, however, as artifact-rich as might have expected. The innumerable flakes and scraps of rusted tin roof are accompanied by square cut nails and glinting window glass. The nails are mostly arrow straight, suggesting the wood around them burned away. Also, they are not as corroded as they often are, and may thus have been tempered in a fire. Someone finds a horseshoe, another turns up the base of a thick ironstone chamberpot. Traces of the farmer and family jostle into view amid bouncing clumps of dirt: a sherd of stoneware- made in the mid- to late-1800s, maybe in Richmond, maybe in West Virginia; a pair of scissors, their handles missing and blades locked in rust but still sharp; a horseshoe from a horse who habitually dragged its feet. While we extract these bits and pieces, our company historian is back in Williamsburg or in the state library library in Richmond, piecing together the paper trail of this property or one from a similar project- another family and another forgotten story.

          Each of the positive shovel tests is recorded in the form of a soil column, a cross-section sketch of the layers encountered. These layers, or "strata" are labeled by texture- generally some combination of loam, silt, sand, and or clay and a color according to a standard system- the Munsell book. This book, with its earthy hues like 7.5YR 4/3 Strong Brown or 10YR 6/6 Brownish Yellow, is a constant companion on surveys. It is our best hope of standardizing how multiple pairs of eyes see the ground. Each space also provides for a list of artifacts and any comments such as 'remains of fencepost 1m. to east' or 'look out- poison ivy!'.  While the diggers advance from hole to hole, the crew chief traverses the entire project parcel, mapping natural and man-made features, above-ground remains, and any other pertinent information using the numbered and lettered grid. Together, the shovel tests and the map help interpret how the land was used and how that use changed over time. And so, our farmstead, little more that a few piles of stone and a scatter of depressions to the first time observer, begins to come into focus.

A preliminary interpretation of the farmhouse footprint on the forest floor.

          The site is relatively late and it has been affected by logging and erosion, with considerable areas of soil lost. Features and artifacts may have been hopelessly blended or washed away by man and nature. This site may see limited 'evaluation'- generally a series of 1-meter square test units dug down in levels to barren clay sub in search of soil features and artifacts in chronological and spatial context. Farmsteads, many archaeologists will say, are a dime a dozen. Archaeological surveys, performing work in compliance with the Archaeological and Historical Preservation Act of 1974 are, of necessity, a science of sampling and statistical value. What we are unable to learn from one site, we may be able to from another. The larger a sample we manage to study before it is lost, however, the richer and more meaningful the final picture. One particular farm may not be the best preserved or the most informative, but it is the record of a real, individual family, someone's ancestors, and it can be used to parse out their, and by extension, our story.

We share the woods with both squirrels and squirrel hunters, so bright orange vests are the order of the day.

A Cecropia or giant silk moth caterpillar. The blue dots will grow into sharp spines and the red and yellow tubercles develop into dotted spheres resembling murano glass beads. Caterpillars have become an unexpected threat to our crew. Several coworkers have now been stung by the 'saddleback' variety whose bee-like sting lasts for a day or more.  Lucky so far!

The green, mango-shaped fruit of the paw paw (Asimina triloba) will soon ripen to a deep yellow/brown and taste like tangy, sweet custard.