Fort Plain Museum’s 2024 Conference in the Mohawk Valley, 14–16 June

The Fort Plain Museum’s Revolutionary War Conference 250 in the Mohawk Valley will take place this year on 14–16 June in Johnstown, New York. Registration is open.

The scheduled speakers are:

• James Kirby Martin and guest host Mark Edward Lender having a fireside chat about the American Revolutionary War, its Sestercentennial, and their legacies as historians
• Nancy Bradeen Spannaus, “Alexander Hamilton’s War for American Economic Independence Through Two Documents” (supported by the Alexander Hamilton Awareness Society)
• Gary Ecelbarger, “‘This Happy Opportunity’: George Washington and the Battle of Germantown”
• Shirley L. Green, “Revolutionary Blacks: Discovering the Frank Brothers, Freeborn Men of Color, Soldiers of Independence”
• Mark Edward Lender, “‘Liberty or Death!’: Some Revolutionary Statistics and Existential Warfare”
• Shawn David McGhee, “No Longer Subjects of the British King: The Political Transformation of Royal Subjects to Republican Citizens, 1774-1776”
• James Kirby Martin, “The Marquis de Lafayette Visits the Mohawk Valley, Again and Again”
• Kristofer Ray, “The Cherokees, the Six Nations and Indian Diplomacy circa 1763-1776”
• Matthew E. Reardon, “The Traitor’s Homecoming: Benedict Arnold’s Raid on New London, September 4-13, 1781”
• John L. Smith, “The Unexpected Abigail Adams: A Woman ‘Not Apt to Be Intimidated’” (supported by the Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation)
• Bruce M. Venter, “Albany and the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765”
• Glenn F. Williams, “No Other Motive Than the True Interest of This Country: Dunmore’s War 1774”
• Chris Leonard, Schenectady City Historian, “Storehouse Schenectady: Depot and Transportation Center for the Northern War”
• David Moyer, “Recent Archaeology Discoveries on the Site of Revolutionary War Fort Plain”

There will also be a bus tour of Revolutionary sites in the area with the theme of “1774: The Rising Tide.” In that year Schenectady saw a violent Liberty Pole riot while the British Indian agent Sir William Johnson passed away in July.

For more information, visit this page.

Two Online Archeology Events on 15 Feb.

Two online events about archeology are coming up next Thursday, 15 February.

The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum will host its third annual Virtual Archaeology Conference that afternoon from 1:00 to 4:00 P.M., with staff speaking about various work going on at and around the museum.

The scheduled presentations are:

• Patricia Reid, “Legacy Collection: Leege Collection Artifacts from Arnold’s Bay”
• Cherilyn Gilligan, “Arnold’s Bay Artifacts: Conservation and Context”
• Chris Sabick, “The Excavation and Documentation of the Revolutionary War Row Galley Congress”
• Paul Gates, “Site Formation Processes: Defining the Theoretical Process of Archaeology for the Revolutionary Warship Congress”

Those will be followed by a live question-and-answer session.

Go to this webpage for more details on the museum’s program and to register.

That same evening, starting at 7:00 P.M., the Shirley-Eustis House Association will host an online lecture by Boston City Archaeologist Joe Bagley on “Archaeology at Shirley Place.”

Bagley will share new information learned about the eighteenth-century enslaved inhabitants of the estate and new insights into the former location of the 1747 Shirley-Eustis House. The presentation will include artifact discussions and digital reconstructions of the historic property before it was developed in the nineteenth century.

Go to this page to register for the Shirley-Eustis House’s event.

Both of these online events are free, but donations to the hosting organizations are welcome.

Local Archeology for Local Historians in Charlestown and Medford

On Thursday, October 26, folks have a choice between two events on local archeology north of the Charles.

At 6:00 P.M., the City of Boston Archaeology Program, Boston’s Commemoration Commission, and the National Park Service will hold a “public listening event” at the Bunker Hill Museum, asking what people want to know about that battlefield and the destruction of Charlestown.

Co-sponsored by the Charlestown Historical Society and Charlestown Preservation Society, this session will feature Joe Bagley and the City Archaeology Program team, Genesis Pimentel of the Commemoration Commission, and Meg Watters Wilkes of the National Park Service. They will discuss previous archeological work around the battle and how new technology and methods might reveal more.

Folks can help the presenters prepare, or participate in the ongoing discussion, by filling out this form asking about interests in the battle.

At 7:00 P.M. the Medford Historical Commission will host “History Beneath Our Feet: The Archaeology of Thomas Brooks Park” at the Medford Public Library.

This event description says:

Located in West Medford, the wooded and grassy parcel is an important reminder of Native Americans, northern slavery and the Brooks family. The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. and the Commission will share artifacts which were excavated by volunteers from the recent archaeological dig and talk about how these tiny fragments provide greater insight into the people who inhabited the landscape.

Thomas Brooks owned that land in the mid-1700s, and he also owned a man named Pomp, who around 1765 built a decorative brick wall that’s preserved in the park. The area was recently restored, as described on the historical commission’s website, and part of that work was the new study.

(The photo above, courtesy of the Medford Historical Commission, shows one of the bricks from Pomp’s wall, preserving the impressions of the fingers of the person who made it.)

Open House at Boston Archaeology Program, 25 Oct.

On Wednesday, 25 October, the city of Boston’s Archaeology Program will open its new Mary C. Beaudry Community Archaeology Center to the public.

At this open house in West Roxbury, visitors can meet staff members, take a behind-the-scenes tour of the facility, and see the new exhibit on the archaeology of a Charlestown house dating from the 1630s.

The new facility features, behind glass walls:

• two processing laboratories
• an artifact-digitizing lab with 3D scanners, printers, and photography equipment
• a repository of over 1,000,000 artifacts from dozens of ancient and historical sites in Boston
• an extensive collection of historical ceramic and lithic raw material for comparisons
• a “specialized wet laboratory”
• a research library containing over 2,000 reference books and archaeological reports

The Archaeology Program still shares a building with the City of Boston Archival Center. Neighbors include archivists and collections librarians from the Boston Planning & Development Agency and the Boston Public Library.

This open house will start with a ribbon-cutting ceremony with special guests at 9:00 A.M. and last the whole workday at the City of Boston Archival Center, 201 Rivermoor Street. The first-floor exhibits will be available for viewing year-round during business hours.

For the curious, Mary C. Beaudry (1950–2020) was a historical archaeologist and professor at Boston University. In the latter part of her career she focused on the anthropology of food. Among many other sites she studied the Spencer-Pierce-Little Farm in Newbury.

Taking a Scrap of History

Earlier this month Independence National Historical Park shared the photo above on Facebook.

That posting stated:

This scrap of newspaper was excavated from a privy at the National Constitution Center site where it had likely been used as toilet paper. That's right - this piece of paper likely wiped a bottom in ye old outhouse sometime following November 5, 1790, the day it was published. Sometimes the most fascinating objects are those that capture the most private moments of the past.

The clipping might also have come from the 8 Nov and 12 Nov 1790 Pennsylvania Packet, and Daily Advertiser. Before and after those days, wine merchant Benjamin W. Morris’s advertisement differed slightly.

“The area is steeped in Revolutionary significance”

New York Magazine’s Curbed website just shared an extraordinary article by Reeves Wiedeman titled “The Battle of Fishkill.”

It details the long and ongoing conflict between a New York restaurateur and property developer named Domenic Broccoli and a group of local preservationists named the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot.

The land in question was part of a Continental Army logistics site. Archeologists have found bodies buried there, with ground-penetrating radar turning up signs of more. This has raised the question whether the land should be mostly set aside for study and commemoration, partially preserved, or developed as planned into a retail site called Continental Commons.

Wiedeman writes:

For more than a decade, the Friends [of the Fishkill Supply Depot] have argued — based on some evidence, but not as much as they would like — that there are more Revolutionary War soldiers buried on [Domenic] Broccoli’s land than anywhere else in the United States.

Broccoli argues that this is rubbish and accuses his foes — with some evidence, but not as much as he would like — of going so far as to plant human remains on his lot in their effort to make it seem more grave-stuffed than it actually is. . . .

The Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot are a group of history buffs and retiree volunteers, and yet Broccoli claimed he had found it necessary to spend more than a million dollars battling them with archaeologists, lawyers, and the private investigators he hired as “spies” to infiltrate the Friends. As it happened, one of his spies was at the Memorial Day protest holding up a STOP CONTINENTAL COMMONS sign while surreptitiously recording the group in case anything might help the RICO case Broccoli was building.

Broccoli insists that he’s not anti-history. He doesn’t dispute the fact that people are buried on his land or that the area is steeped in Revolutionary significance; his vision for the IHOP [in Continental Commons] involves a wait staff in tricorne hats and bonnets. But it was still a bit of a mystery exactly whose bones were buried on his property and who put them there.

And, besides, if there really were hundreds of soldiers beneath the ground, Broccoli believed it to be self-evident that he was the one pursuing the vision of life, liberty, and happiness that George Washington’s troops had fought and died for: the right to sell pancakes where they were buried.

In that last point, Broccoli’s not wrong. The Founding generation didn’t value landscape preservation. They put up small monuments in a few spots, like the hard-to-farm crest of Breed’s Hill in Charlestown, but plowed and built over most battlefields and other military sites. That’s why the only fortifications remaining from the lines around Boston are the small, late-built earthworks in Washington Park in Cambridge, preserved solely by the Dana family for generations.

Historical preservation became an American value in the late 1800s. By then, of course, the Revolutionary generation had died out. Fewer sites survived. What remained seemed all the more precious. With industrialization, it became easier to preserve (or restore) battlefields in rural areas, but urban sites got swallowed even faster.

The Fishkill Supply Depot didn’t make the cut for preservation then. The local culture barely remembered it, in fact. It was a logistical site, well away from the fighting. There was no ‘Battle of Fishkill’ to commemorate. Compared to other places (most, but not all, already preserved or commemorated in some way), its significance might fade.

Nonetheless, many Continental soldiers died at the site. Diseases spread naturally when eighteenth-century people gathered in large numbers. Andrew Wehrman, author of The Contagion of Liberty, has tweeted that Fishkill was also a site of mass inoculation against smallpox, which (given the use of the actual live virus at that time) meant a site of many smallpox deaths.

Our contemporary culture is more squeamish about dead bodies and graveyards than our ancestors were. Many of greater Boston’s hallowed burying-grounds have actually been excavated and relandscaped over time before arriving at what we now perceive to be their historic shape. We’d have a harder time stomaching that process now, even though there are probably fewer Revolutionary remains than ever.

As for the Fishkill Supply Depot, there doesn’t seem to be any resolution in sight. Though Sen. Charles Schumer supports the idea of making some of the land into a new national park, there are lots of details to be worked out and support to line up. This deadlock might end only when more people die out.

(The photograph above shows the Van Wyck Homestead, once the administrative center for the supply depot and now the only surviving structure from that large complex. It’s a New York state museum.)

“Slavery in Boston” Exhibit Now Open in Faneuil Hall

Today the city of Boston’s Department of Archaeology officially opens its new exhibit in Faneuil Hall, titled “Slavery in Boston.”

The display panels are already up, so I swung by to see them yesterday. The exhibit is in two parts, with an online component as well.

One part is on the ground floor of Faneuil Hall, among the shops selling books, souvenirs, and candy. This consists mostly of vertical panels set up around the building’s structural pillars. Some of the panels have basic introductory material, and some look at the legacy of race-based slavery in the area.

Most of the pillars, however, profile individual enslaved people, using all the sources available to show even a sense of their lives. That sees like a powerful way to communicate the experience of slavery on a one-to-one level to visitors who think they have just a minute or two to spare.

Those visitors who want to learn more (or use the restrooms) can go downstairs, where there’s a larger space and the rest of the exhibit. This area includes benches, a television monitor (now showing a video about abolitionist Lewis Hayden), and an activity table for kids.

Here the walls are lined with panels providing a more general introduction to the laws, economics, and demographics of slavery in Boston. Some of this repeats information upstairs, and sometimes it builds on that. One major message is that in the mid-1700s slavery affected all Bostonians’ daily lives and produced benefits for most free people, not just slaveowners.

At times, the presentation might even be too Boston-centered. One panel describes Charles Apthorp becoming the town’s richest merchant by trading with the Caribbean islands, Britain, and Africa. His business included buying and selling people. That panel could add that Apthorp’s ties to the slavery economy included marrying an heiress, Grizzell Eastwick, born on Jamaica.

A few of the “Slavery in Boston” panels display archeological finds related to households that included enslaved people, but most of the information behind this exhibit comes from documentary sources: legal and church records, newspapers, letters, and so on.

So why is this an Archaeology Department display? I suspect it’s because that’s the branch of local government most concerned with Boston’s past rather than its present and future.

Fort Ti American Revolution Seminar, 23–24 Sept.

Fort Ticonderoga has announced its 19th Annual Seminar on the American Revolution, to take place on the weekend of 23–24 September 2023. Unlike last year, this appears to be an in-person event only.

The seminar actually starts on the evening of Friday, 22 September, with a opening reception and Curator Matthew Keagle’s presentation of highlights from the Robert Nittolo Collection related to the War for American Independence.

The scheduled presentations on Saturday are:

• Justin B. Clement, “The Black Servants of Major-General Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette”
• Isabelle J. Courtney, “In the Wake of the British Retreat: Sir Guy Carleton’s Book of Negroes and the Enslaved Population of Rhode Island”
• Dr. Jen Janofsky and Wade P. Catts, “‘Naked and Torn by the Grapeshot’: Fort Mercer and the History, Archaeology, and Public Perceptions of a Mass Burial Space at Red Bank Battlefield Park
• Dr. Friederike Baer, “Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War”
• Dr. Armin Langer, “Alexander Zuntz in America: A Hessian Army Supplier Turned New York Jewish Community Leader and Businessman”
• Jack Weaver, “The Customs and Temper of Americans?: Germans and the Continental Coalition, 1775–1776”

And on Sunday morning:

• Dr. Timothy Leech, “Was There an Internal Patriot Coup in Massachusetts beginning April 20, 1775?”
• Dr. Stephen Brumwell, “Fighting Rebellion from America to Jamaica: The Experience of Alexander Lindsay, Lord Balcarres”
• Mark R. Anderson, “The Rise, Disgrace, and Recovery of Timothy Bedel”
• Don N. Hagist, “New Views of Fort Ticonderoga and Burgoyne’s Campaign”

In addition, for an additional cost on Friday there’s a bus tour of “Forts, Raids, Battles and Mayhem: The Schoharie Valley, 1775-1780,” led by Jeff O’Conner and Bruce Venter of America’s History L.L.C.

Basic registration is $150, but there are discounts for being a Fort Ti member, registering early, and registering online, so that if one checks all the boxes the cost goes down to $100. Registering early enough also signs one up for box lunches on both days and the informal group dinner on Saturday evening. Register starting here (but if you’re a Fort Ti member, sign into the website first).

Fort Ti War College of the Seven Years’ War, 19–21 May

Fort Ticonderoga is holding its Twenty-Seventh Annual War College of the Seven Years’ War on the weekend of 19–21 May.

This will be a hybrid conference, so fans of the conflict can attend in upstate New York or watch online.

The scheduled presentations reflect that war’s reputation as a global conflict, bringing scholars from multiple countries.

Friday, 19 May

• Matthew Keagle, Fort Ticonderoga Curator, “Highlights from the Robert Nittolo Collection”

Saturday, 20 May

• Ellen Fogel Walker, Public Affairs Coordinator at Culloden Battlefiel, “Anchors for Collective Identity: Culloden Militaria of the ’45, Artefacts and Memorabilia”
• Jay Donis, professor at Thiel College, “Building an American Identity on the Mid-Atlantic Frontier in the 1760s”
• James Kirby Martin, coauthor of Forgotten Allies, “The Six Nations Confronts the French and Indian War: Joseph Brant Versus Han Yerry”
• Ian McCulloch, former Director of the Canadian Forces’ Centre for National Security Studies, “John Bradstreet’s Raid 1758: A Revisionist Assessment”
• Djordje Djuric, professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, “Simeon Piscevic (Simeon Piščević), General and Diplomat of the Era of the Seven Years’ War”

Sunday, 21 May
This day’s presenters are all graduate students sharing their new research.

• Jenifer Ishee, Mississippi State University, “Captive Bodies: Examining the Material Culture of Captivity during the Seven Years’ War”
• Clément Monseigne, Bordeaux University, “Feeling Strangeness: the Sensory Experience of War in North America (1754-1760)”
• Daniel Bishop, Texas A&M University, “‘Lay’d up And Decay’d’: Examining the History and Archaeological Material of the King’s Shipyard at Fort Ticonderoga”
• Camden R. Elliott, Harvard University, “‘That Most Fatal disorder to the Virginians’: The Seven Years’ War and a Pandemic of Smallpox, 1756-1766”

In addition, on Friday afternoon there’s a walking tour of the Ticonderoga battlefield led by Director of Archaeology Margaret Staudter for an extra cost.

Basic registration is $175, but there are discounts for being a Fort Ti member, registering early, and participating online instead of on-scene, so a member like myself can listen to the presentations for as little as $100. There are also scholarships for teachers who are attending the War College of the Seven Years’ War for the first time. Check out the whole registration scheme at this webpage.

The Legacy of Sharon Ann Burnston

This weekend I heard the sad news that Sharon Ann Burnston had died.

Sharon was a mainstay of the New England Revolutionary reenacting community, enthusiastic about living history, scholarly rigor, and what other people were researching. Even when her health limited her mobility, she was a presence at major events.

Sharon had degrees in anthropology and experience on archeological digs. Her most eye-catching academic work was “Babies in the Well: An Insight into Deviant Behavior in 18th Century Philadelphia,” published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1982 and later in the volume In Remembrance: Archaeology and Death, edited by David Poirier and Nicholas Bellantoni. 

Starting with collections in Pennsylvania, Sharon studied colonial clothing and made herself an expert on what people wore and how to recreate those garments. Her book Fitting and Proper: 18th Century Clothing from the Collection of the Chester County Historical Society is a small book with a big influence.

Sally Queen Associates shares one sample of Sharon’s clothing research, an analysis of a quilted petticoat. On her website are similar articles, such as her discussion of a gown that came down from Deborah Sampson.

Several museums drew on Sharon’s expertise in clothing and other textiles. So did theatrical productions, and even Hollywood entertainment, not always concerned about historical accuracy; she designed the civilian garments Barry Bostwick wore in playing George Washington in two 1980s miniseries. After moving to New England she helped to develop guidelines for women’s and children’s clothing at reenactments, sharing patterns and advice and leading by example.

A native of Brooklyn, Sharon was proud of her Jewish heritage. That faith inspired her interest in social justice, her concern about prejudices, and the colonial seders she organized.

Sharon Burnston’s family has announced that people may make donations in her name to the Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation, the non-profit living history museum and farm in the Delaware Valley where she volunteered and worked for many years.

Archeology at the Loring-Greenough House

This week the city of Boston’s archaeology program is undertaking a dig at the Loring Greenhough House in Jamaica Plain.

According to the city’s announcement, “The goal of this project will be to survey the basement of the house’s early 19th century summer kitchen and areas of the door yard ahead of planned improvements.”

On Facebook the team elucidated:

Ahead of plans to lower the floor of the basement under the 1811 summer kitchen, we will conduct an archaeological investigation on the use and functions of that space so no potential cultural deposits are impacted by these improvements.

The kitchen basement where we will be digging has three chambers: the western chamber labeled on historic plans as being part of a cistern, the center chamber containing the main supporting arch for the building extension and sitting directly under the fireplace in the kitchen above, and the eastern chamber which is accessible by a small doorway and may have been used for smoking food. We also want to determine if there are any pre-kitchen deposits or features that survived the creation of the basement.

Many people have used the site over the centuries:

• Indigenous Massachusett people left stone tools found in previous surveys.
• The Polley family were the first English people to build a home on the property, in the 1650s.
• Joshua Cheever, a Boston selectman from the North End, bought the Polley house in 1746; it’s unclear whether that became his country house or an investment property.
• Joshua Loring, who gained the rank of commodore in King George’s War, purchased the property, tore down the earlier building, and commissioned the Georgian mansion that survives today.
• After the Lorings left as Loyalists, the provincial and Continental Army used the deserted house for barracks and a hospital during the siege of Boston.
• The state confiscated the property and sold it to the widow Anna Doane, who then married lawyer David Stoddard Greenough.

The team wrote:

Previous archaeological surveys of the Loring Greenough property don’t mention the presence of enslaved individuals on the property. We plan to address this by sharing their stories and hopefully locating deposits within the south yard that date to the pre-1785 time period when there is documentary evidence of enslaved people at the house.

Cheever and Loring are known to have owned slaves while Stoddard set up an indenture for a small child born into slavery (as I’ll discuss tomorrow).

Early this week came this update:

We think that the parged [mortar-covered brick] surface to the west was the bottom of the cistern, which basically took up a whole third of the basement! That means that the brick wall was the only thing holding back thousands of gallons of water from the rest of the basement.

People can visit the Loring-Greenough House from 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. on weekdays to see the archaeologists at work.

Digging into the Archeology of the Revolution

Here are a couple of items from Revolutionary War archeology.

After the Battles of Saratoga, the “Convention Army” of Crown prisoners of war marched to eastern Massachusetts, where they were supposed to board ships for Britain.

Instead, the Continental Congress decided to toss out the surrender agreement between Gens. Horatio Gates and John Burgoyne and keep those men (and not a few women and children traveling with them) in inland parts of the U.S. of A.

Hundreds of people were still held captive in Charlottesville, Virginia, in early 1781 before being moved north to York, Pennsylvania. In what became Springettsbury township, the Continental authorities built a compound of huts surrounded by a stockade fence that was named Camp Security.

The next year, hundreds more Crown prisoners, this time from the Yorktown surrender, also arrived in the area. More huts went up, many outside the stockade for people who didn’t seem to warrant strict surveillance; that area got the name of “Camp Indulgence.”

When the formal end of war finally arrived, those prisoners were freed to go back to Europe or make new homes in America. Locals quickly reclaimed the land and the wood. But the memory of the prison camp remained. Unlike other former prisoner-of-war camp sites from the Revolution, the land that Camp Security sat on was never heavily developed.

Eventually people moved to preserve the site, now property of the township. Locals formed the Friends of Camp Security. The Conservation Fund added to the protected land.

A 1979 archeological study found buckles, buttons, and other items linked to British soldiers, confirming local lore about the location of the P.O.W. camp. This week researcher John Crawmer announced that his team had located part of the stockade wall, identifying a “pattern of holes and a stockade trench that matched stockades at other 18th-century military sites.” Next season those archeologists will try to determine the full dimensions of the stockade and search for other features.

In other news, this past summer a different team found the remains of thirteen Hessian soldiers killed in the Battle of Red Bank, New Jersey, in October 1777. That was the same time the “Convention Army” was moving east toward Boston.

Emerging Revolutionary War will host a conversation with one of those archeologists, Wade Catts, to learn about the discovery and what it might say about those soldiers.

That event will be live on Facebook on Sunday, 30 October, starting at 7:00 P.M. The conversation will also be recorded and made available through Emerging Revolutionary War’s Facebook and YouTube accounts.

H.M.S. Endeavour Under Attack?

The story of the shipwreck in Narragansett Bay that’s probably, but not officially, H.M.S. Endeavour continued this month as the Boston Globe reported that the remains are being eaten away.

Brian Amaral has been covering this story, and in this latest installment he described how Reuben Shipway came from the University of Plymouth to investigate the biology of the wreck (in cooperation with local authorities).

Not only did Shipway find naval shipworms, or Teredo navalis, in wood brought up from the seafloor, but “He saw larvae on their gills — that meant they were breeding.” Indeed, shipworm might share responsibility for only about 10–15% of the warship remaining.

What’s more, “Shipway found evidence that a crustacean species called gribbles had eaten at the wood from the outside, a sort of two-pronged attack that will, in time, eat anything that’s exposed to water until it’s gone.” While the material is safer when buried in sediment, currents in the bay and warming water mean that underwater environment will always be changing.

Shipway also examined his samples for evidence of species from distant oceans, which would add to the evidence that this particular wreck is the Endeavour, later renamed H.M.S. Lord Sandwich. None came to light, but Australian archeologists are already convinced.

There remains the big question of who wants to fund further exploration and any attempts at preservation. The ship came from the British navy. It’s in U.S. waters. In world history, it’s most significant as the vessel that brought Capt. James Cook and the British to Australia, and that country is most interested in it.

Meanwhile, the shipworms and gribbles are still living their lives.

Celebrations and Shipwrecks in Rhode Island

I read a couple of thought-provoking articles about Revolutionary Rhode Island this week.

Prof. Ben Railton of Fitchburg State University wrote his column in the Saturday Evening Post on Independence Day in Bristol. The town had its first recorded celebration of the day in 1785, giving rise to this article’s title, “Considering History: The Contradictions Behind America’s Oldest July Fourth Celebration.”

Railton writes of contradictory histories:

The first of those two histories is Bristol’s central role in the slave trade, which emerged at precisely the same time the community was beginning to present those Fourth of July celebrations. In Unrighteous Traffick, a series of 15 compelling articles for the Providence Journal in 2006, journalist Paul Davis offered a comprehensive history of Rhode Island’s central role in the slave trade across the entire 18th century. As Davis puts it, “Rhode Island ruled the slave trade. For more than 75 years, merchants and investors bankrolled 1,000 voyages to Africa. Their ships carried some 100,000 men, women, and children into New World slavery.”

Bristol was far from alone, but it emerged as the center of the trade at a particularly fraught moment, in the post-Revolutionary period when Rhode Island had officially outlawed slave trading. As Davis notes, “almost half of all of Rhode Island’s slave voyages occurred after trading was outlawed [in 1787]. By the end of the 18th century, Bristol surpassed Newport as the busiest slave port in Rhode Island.” . . .

Exemplifying that trend is the story of the multi-generational DeWolf family that came to be synonymous with Bristol and even Rhode Island itself. As Davis writes, “the DeWolfs financed 88 slaving voyages from 1784 to 1807 — roughly a quarter of all Rhode Island slave trips during that period.” They used their profits to construct the city’s emerging infrastructure, as with their 1797 founding of the Bank of Bristol with $50,000 in capital.

In addition, the Boston Globe Magazine published Brian Amaral’s article about a dispute rising from the waters off Newport. As Boston 1775 noted in 2016, scholars have reached consensus that the same ship that Capt. James Cook sailed around the world as H.M.S. Endeavour was—under the name H.M.S. Lord Sandwich—scuttled off Rhode Island in 1778.

That news came from the Rhode Island Marine Archeology Project, directed by Dr. D. K. Abbass. In 2018 Boston 1775 reported an upcoming lecture by her about the challenges of identifying any particular underwater wreck as the Endeavour/Lord Sandwich.

This past February, the Australian National Maritime Museum did just that. It declared there was enough information to pinpoint the former Endeavour, the ship that established Britain’s claim to Australia. But then Abbass complained that announcement was premature, that the only definitive statement should come from her organization.

Amaral’s Globe Magazine article is headlined “Is a famous shipwreck in Newport Harbor? An international fight over the answer has turned personal.” It’s part recap and update on the historical investigation, part profile of Abbass. Clearly she has a strong personality. She has to, she might well say, to have built a career in her field.

Is Abbass sitting on a pronouncement about the crucial wreck site to guard her stake? Did the Australian museum break protocol with her for the sake of national politics? Can’t both of those things be true?

Dredging Up Details

Here are some recent dispatches from the realm of eighteenth-century marine archeology.

A few miles downstream from Savannah, a dredging operation has brought up nineteen cannon that experts believe date from the Revolutionary War.

Specifically, from the fall of 1779:

When French ships carrying troops were spotted off the Georgia coast, the British hurried to scuttle at least six ships in the Savannah River downstream from the city to block the French vessels.

Since the cannon would have been useful on other ships or ashore, the scuttling must have been hasty indeed.

Read more from WAMU here.

In Alexandria, Virginia, officials are trying to decide what to do with timbers from four ships discovered along the Potomac River from 2015 to 2018, as shown above. These were most likely merchant ships, not warships.

Preserving that wood requires keeping it wet. Since the finds, most of the timbers have been kept in city tanks while “Some pieces of the largest ship have been undergoing restorative treatment and study at Texas A&M.”

Now there’s a proposal to carefully place the pieces of at least one keel in a pond in a public park, which would be turned into a waterfront museum featuring the artifacts.

WJLA has more details.

Finally, with the 250th anniversary of the burning of H.M.S. Gaspee coming up next month, Rhode Islanders have renewed efforts to locate the remains of that ship.

Finding the Gaspee appears to depend on the wreck being preserved and hidden in deep silt that can nevertheless be penetrated by “sub-bottom-profiling sonar.”

Recovering artifacts would be a more expensive proposition for another season, and then there’s a legal issue: the Gaspee is still the property of the British government.

For more coverage, see the Providence Journal.

Prehistoric Dolphins at Washington’s Birthplace

While poking around the edges of yesterday’s posting on young George Washington and dolphins, I came across a news story I missed last year.

On 16 March 2020, the National Park Service staff at the George Washington Birthplace National Monument in Fredericksburg, Virginia, waded into a situation with the help of paleontologists.

I knew that N.P.S. historic sites have strict rules about arranging for archeological study before starting any excavation or construction to be make sure no useful finds are destroyed. I hadn’t thought about the rules for capturing even older scientific evidence, but of course the same principles would apply.

The Washington Birthplace site sits next to the Potomac River, or actually a bit above it, which explains the need for paleontolgists:

For several years park rangers have been regularly monitoring the emergence of fossils within the rapidly eroding cliffs along the shoreline at the monument. Some barely exposed fossil bone discovered and documented the previous year, by the monument’s chief ranger Tim Sveum and NPS paleontologist Justin Tweet, was now more visible revealing identifiable skeletal remains.

Monitoring and repeat photography of the freshly exposed fossils was undertaken by park ranger Wesley Spurr who observed that the high rate of erosion resulted in the loss of three bone elements over a two-week period.

Photos of the fossils visible at the surface were forwarded to paleontologists Vincent Santucci and Justin Tweet (NPS Paleontology Program), and Stephen Godfrey (Curator of Paleontology, Calvert Marine Museum), who confirmed the remains of the ancient marine mammal. It was also apparent that these important fossils were “at risk” and in imminent danger of being swept away.

The rapidly exposed fossil turned out to be from a form of extinct long-nosed dolphin in the Eurhinodelphinidae family. Furthermore, whle the scientists collected that specimen, they also found “a second and more complete fossil dolphin skull” nearby.

The paleotologists dated those fossils to fifteen million years ago. For Washington, that would have been an unbelievably long time. Educated Americans of his era were still learning about the world being less than five thousand years old.

Nonetheless, Washington was very curious about fossil discoveries, as Mount Vernon discusses. Like his fellow Virginia Thomas Jefferson, Washington was particularly interested in signs that elephant-like mastodons lived in North America.

In 1770, Washington wrote in his diary about a place along the Ohio River “Where the Elephants Bones were found.” Two years later, land speculator Dr. John Connolly sent him a fossil tooth from Big Bone Lick, writing, “I just stumbled upon the tooth I now present you with.”

In the winter of 1780, during the long stand-off with the British in New York, Gen. Washington and some of his officers took time to visit a site in Orange County where a ditch digger had unearthed bones and teeth. The man who owned that land, the Rev. Robert Annan, wrote that the commander-in-chief “told me, he had in his house a grinder which was found on the Ohio.”

I therefore think that Washington would have been intrigued and even excited by the news that deep below his childhood home were the fossilized bones of extinct dolphins.

A King of Bath Stone and Coade Stone

Here’s a news story from London that caught my eye a couple of days ago and made me go digging for more detail.

This statue representing Alfred the Great stands outside Trinity Square Church in the borough of Southwark. At one point people thought that it or part of it was a medieval sculpture salvaged from an old church.

That would put Alfred among the contenders for the oldest outdoor statue in the British capital. Considering London’s smog problem in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it must have weathered a lot.

Recently a team of conservators led by Dr. Kevin Hayward and Prof. Martin Henig studied the statue and announced that it is both younger and much older than people thought.

That team concluded that the lower part of the statue was originally carved from Bath stone to make a sculpture of the Roman goddess Minerva. Its style is typical of the early second century, around the time of the emperor Hadrian. When complete, that statue was about ten feet tall.

The upper part of the statue, including the chest, arms, head, and cloak that hangs down around the legs, wasn’t carved at all. It was molded in Coade stone, a mix of clay, terracotta, silicates, and glass fired in a very hot kiln for four days.

That process shrinks what the sculptors molded from that clay mixture, so making the top part of Alfred fit so well on the ancient stone bottom required expert calculations and manufacture.

Here’s where the eighteenth century fits in. The inventor of Coade stone was Eleanor Coade (1733-1821), a London businesswoman. Her father was a Baptist wool merchant in Exeter. Perhaps more importantly, her maternal grandmother, the widow Sarah Enchmarch, ran a very successful textile business from 1735 to 1760. After Eleanor’s father went bankrupt, the Coade family moved to London, and she set up her own business selling linen.

In 1769, Eleanor Coade bought Daniel Pincot’s artificial stone factory in Lambeth, keeping him as the manager. Two years later Coade found Pincot “representing himself as the chief proprietor,” so she fired him and promoted a sculptor named John Bacon to supervise the works.

Coade appears to have improved the formula for artificial stone. And she kept that formula secret; Coade stone wasn’t replicated until the 1990s. She also improved the line of products the company offered, exhibiting sculpture and ornamental goods at the Society of Artists in the 1770s. Among the designers Coade worked with was Benjamin West.

The Coade Artificial Stone Manufactory’s statuary and molded ornaments proved to be long-lasting. It offered designs to fit with the fashionable neoclassical style of architecture. In 1780 Coade landed a royal commission from George III to decorate a chapel at Windsor Castle, so she could boast a royal endorsement as well.

After Bacon’s death in 1799, Coade took on male cousins as her junior partners. She never married. In her will she left bequests to several female friends, stipulating that money would be their property independent of their husbands.

It’s not clear when the King Alfred statue was produced; the earliest record of its presence at the church is from 1831, so the Coade company might have produced it after Eleanor Coade’s death. There’s a Roman archeological site nearby, so one possibility is that the Georgian-period sculptors found the Minerva lower body, assumed it was from a medieval church, and produced the quasi-medieval statue of King Alfred to make the body whole again.

“Hardly men left enough to saddle their goat!”

Francis Grose (1731-1791, shown here) had a short career in the British army, filling the lowest officer’s rank of cornet during the 1740s. He later became a militia captain and adjutant. But his heart was in historical research.

Grose, a hard-working if not particularly talented draftsman, published four volumes of images of Britain’s medieval ruins from 1772 to 1776. 

During the American War, Grose’s militia unit was activated to defend the home country, and that caused him trouble in two ways. First, he couldn’t spend his summers traveling and sketching, as he’d come to like. Second, he had to administer the finances of camp, which he did poorly, putting him into debt.

As a result, Grose had to publish a lot more books in the years after the war. In addition to more sketchbooks, he came out with his oft-cited Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) and A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions (1787).

Grose also drew on his military experience. In 1783 he was the anonymous author of Advice to the Officers of the British Army, an acerbic satire on how the army operated in the recent war. And in 1786 he collected stories from many sources into Military Antiquities Respecting a History of the English Army.

One of those sources was Maj. Robert Donkin’s Military Collections and Remarks. In a footnote on pages 265-6 of his 1788 London edition, Grose quoted (though inexactly) what Donkin’s book said about the Royal Welch Fusiliers, their gilt-horned goat, and the disrupted St. David’s Day dinner of 1775. Grose’s reprinting of that anecdote ensured it remained available to readers into the next century even when Donkin’s book became rare.

In 1818 Samuel Swett published his first essay on the Battle of Bunker Hill as an appendix to an edition of David Humphreys’s short biography of Gen. Israel Putnam. In a footnote he provided a somewhat garbled explanation of the 23rd Regiment’s goat tradition:

From a tradition that a former Prince of Wales had ridden from his principality into England on a goat; a very large one, with gilded horns, was always maintained by the corps, and they celebrated the anniversary of the feat by a procession, rejoicing and exultation.

As the sources from the 1770s indicate, the fusilier officers observed St. David’s Day, but perhaps this was how some old Bostonians understood the ritual.

The next figure in the spread of 23rd Regiment goat lore was James Fenimore Cooper, the New York novelist. Three of his first five books—the three that were most successful—were stories of eighteenth-century America. Cooper made a plan to write thirteen more novels about the Revolution, using actual historical figures and events, one for each original state in the union.

The first of those books was Lionel Lincoln, or The Leaguer of Boston, published in 1825 to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of war. Cooper put a lot of effort into depicting historical events such as the Battle of Bunker Hill, but the plot was his usual overcooked melodrama. That might not have been a problem except that for some reason Cooper thought that his public wanted to read about an aristocratic Loyalist antihero.

Lionel Lincoln was a critical and sales failure, and remains so to this day. Cooper abandoned his plan to write more books like that. His next novel was The Last of the Mohicans.

In Lionel Lincoln one character discussing the British casualties at Bunker Hill says: “the Fusileers had hardly men left enough to saddle their goat!” Cooper then showed off his research with a footnote:

This regiment, in consequence of some tradition, kept a goat, with gilded horns, as a memorial. Once a year it celebrated a festival, in which the bearded quadruped acted a conspicuous part. In the battle of Bunker-Hill, the corps was distinguished alike for its courage and its losses.

Cooper probably relied on Grose’s Military Antiquities or Swett’s footnote, or both, for his information, which is notably vague on the particulars. Either way, it’s clearly an allusion to how the Royal Welch Fusiliers celebrated, not how they entered battle.

But that’s not how people chose to read it.

TOMORROW: Putting a goat on the battlefield.

Digging into the Three Cranes Tavern in Charlestown

I was intrigued by the Massachusetts Historical Council’s webpage for the archeological site of the Three Cranes Tavern in Charlestown.

As the page explains, Charlestown was settled in 1629, the year before Boston, and that site was originally the location of the Great House that served as a meetinghouse, storehouse, and protection. In 1635 a man named Robert Long bought part of the property and opened the Three Cranes Tavern, named after a well known public house in London.

The Three Cranes remained in the extended Long family and one of the town’s busiest taverns for the next 140 years. In that time, tax records and the archeological record show, the owners added a separate dwelling house, brewery, stone foundation, and wine cellar.

As of 1763, the tavern was the southern end of the stage coach route from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The horses were stabled there while passengers could continue over the ferry to Boston if they chose.

In 1766 proprietor Nathaniel Brown mortgaged the property to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. Without banks, I’m guessing, that was one of the province’s few chartered institutions that could lend out money.

Then came the war and destruction, as the webpage says:

The long history of the Three Cranes Tavern came to a fiery end on June 17, 1775. On the night of June 16, 1775, rebellious colonists occupied Breed‘s Hill. General [Thomas] Gage responded by sending British troops to remove the Americans from the hill. The famous Battle of Bunker Hill ensued. Rebel snipers in nearby Charlestown shot at British soldiers from windows, so General Gage [sic] turned his cannon on the town setting fires everywhere. By the end of the night most of downtown Charlestown, including the Three Cranes Tavern, had burnt to the ground.

Although the damage was great, most of the streets, chimneys, and foundations were visible among the rubble. The citizens of Charlestown cleaned up the debris, filled the site of the tavern over, and created an open market in its place. Market Square was renamed City Square in 1848 to celebrate Charlestown becoming a city.

It actually took quite a while to reuse the tavern site. Nathaniel Brown was a Loyalist and apparently gave up on the property, moving first to Pownalborough, Maine, and then to Nova Scotia. The Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company went into abeyance from 1775 to 1786. Finally in 1794 the artillery company donated the land to the city.

For those who want to dig deeper, here’s a 2014 article about Boston city archeologist Joe Bagley’s work on the site and a 2016 reevaluation of the evidence by Craig S. Chartier.

Investigating the Jason Russell House

The Arlington Historical Society just provided an interim report on various investigations into one of its historic properties, the Jason Russell House.

This building was the focus of the deadliest skirmish on 19 Apr 1775. Russell and eleven militiamen, mostly from Danvers, were killed in and around the house after being caught by a flanking guard of regulars protecting the main British column.

Joel Bohy has assembled a team to study the bullet holes preserved in the fabric of the house. They found more holes than had been previously identified, some at trajectories indicating they were ”fired through the [upper] windows from the street below, either as a preventative measure or to target a person shooting out of them.”

The dispatch describes how those bullet holes are being studied:

The team examined every hole and strike and measured with calipers to determine the caliber, which can often determine whether the projectile was discharged by a British soldier or provincial. They used metal detectors and a video scope to investigate within the walls. Scott swabbed each hole to detect for lead residue, and the team used ballistics rods and laser lights to determine the trajectory of each musket ball.

Other ongoing investigations include 3-D laser mapping of the building and grounds, a scan of the grounds by ground-penetrating radar, and even experiments firing flintlock muskets at targets built to mimic the house’s walls.

In addition, the society is still hunting for the house’s bullet-riddled door, which the Russell family sold to a collector in the late 1800s.