Our Logo Designer

My name is Alex Baird; I designed the logo which was chosen to represent the Port Tobacco Archeological Project.

The logo was created in Adobe Illustrator. After struggling with different concepts (including many fruitless attempts to draw a convincing tobacco plant), I finally decided to depict a landmark of the town - the Chimney House - in a simplified, abstract manner, and to let the project name take a more prominent role in the design.

The typefaces used are, I think, the real attraction, and for them I cannot take any credit. The words "Port Tobacco" are in Strange Newes, a beautiful font based on 17th-century typography, created by Scottish artist and type designer Feòrag NicBhrìde. The other words are done in Hypatia Sans Pro.

As for myself, I live in Toronto, Ontario with my parents and our small menagerie of pets. I'm currently studying digital publishing and graphic design at George Brown College, and I hope to someday earn a living as a freelance graphic designer. Until I get to that skill and confidence level, I am available for small projects (such as logo design) free of charge; if anyone would like to commission such a project, they may contact me at alexandrabaird(at)rogers.com.

I was quite surprised to learn that I won this logo contest, especially since the other submissions were so beautiful and so skillfully done. I wish to thank PTAP for providing this opportunity, which allowed me to practice my nascent skills, and to (in a very small way) contribute to their worthy project.

-Alex

Lab Update

So as you have already read, our day out at Port Tobacco last week didn't produce the results we were hoping for, but that doesn't mean it was devoid of information. I have just finished updating our catalog and map for the area with the information from last week. The area we were focusing on was around the Chimney House, front and back. In the front of the house we found what we would expect, 18th-century artifacts.

In the back, where we were looking for the infamous carriage shop, we were looking for mid 19th-century artifacts. And, in fact, we did find some of those artifacts, including ceramics and machine cut nails. Now, by no means does this tell us anything about the carriage shop but it does tell us that there was occupation there in the time-frame we were looking for.

Some architectural debris did come out as well: brick, nails, and mortar. While it doesn't help us date anything, it is still interesting to find them several hundred feet from the Chimney House itself.

It was nice to be out in the field at Port Tobacco last week even though it was for just a day. By now you all know the history of the town and as we have all said many times, you never know what you're going to find when you put a shovel in the ground out there. Every shovel load tells us more and more about the history of the town and its occupants.

That's all for now!

- Peter

Sometimes Shovel Testing Just Doesn't Work

Maybe we were cursed by the Blue Dog or maybe Scott put a hex on us for having fun without him, either way yesterday's fieldwork did not turn out as planned.

You may recall that our last day of fieldwork was during a wet and cold day in December. We were anxious to get to the rear yard of Chimney House where Atzerodt's carriage shop is reputed to have been located. While laying in the transects along which we were to shovel test, I thought I could pick up the faint depressions that often mark the locations of buried foundation. The crew was cold and wet but focused on the mission. The wet snow picked up and the ground became too muddy to continue and we left the field before completing our mission.

Yesterday we set out to finish what we had started. It was warm and sunny so the conditions seemed right. But it did not take us long to realize that the rear yard of the Chimney House is just too marshy for shovel testing to work. Determined, we excvated a few STPs but soon hit wet clays and sands with little soil development above them. The digging was difficult, the screening was difficult, and there just was not enough artifact content to draw any conclusions.

We stopped digging and spent a bit of time wondering why anyone would build in this marshy area. We considered the possibility that we were being too literal with the "behind the Chimney House" supposed location of the carriage shop. We came up with some alternate plans to test the area, none of which we could attempt with the equipment we had brought that day, and called it a day.

We will do some archival research to help us pin down the carriage shop location and utilize some remote sensing techniques to evaluate the potential for archaeological deposits to exist in the marshy northwest portion of Port Tobacco. We will find Atzerodt's shop, eventually.

-April

Back to Port Tobacco Tomorrow

The team (minus the healing Scott) will be out at Port Tobacco on Tuesday. We are going to complete our shovel test survey of the Chimney House and Stagg Hall properties. As always, volunteers are welcome.

-April
--------------

Wagon Boxes

I've been asked about distinctive artifacts from carriage and wagon shops, such as the one operated by the Atzerodt brothers behind the Chimney House. I found this photograph of 'wagon boxes' that I recovered from a wagon shop site in central New York.

Although called wagon boxes, these are wheel bearings that were inserted into wooden hubs. The axle, well greased, turned inside the boxes. The flanges readily observable on the top and bottom objects, and to a lesser degree on the left-middle specimen, prevented the box from turning inside the hub. The greased axle and box arrangement allowed for smooth turning without damaging the wooden hub.

Wagon boxes were typically cast iron and they typically were produced by American iron furnaces that also turned out cast iron pans, kettles, and other household and agricultural products. Because they were cast rather than forged, these boxes or bearings were difficult to recycle. When broken, the wheelwright or vehicle maker generally discarded them. When broken wagon boxes are found on the site of a carriage or wagon shop, it is a pretty good indication that the shop took in repair work. We will be looking for these, and other vehicle parts, when we complete the survey behind Stagg Hall and Chimney House.

Jim

Thomas Howe Ridgate

It seems that Port Tobacco certainly had its ups and downs through time. The economy prior to and following the American Revolution saw many prosperous merchants lose everything as a result of the War. Thomas Howe Ridgate was one such merchant. Ridgate lived at what we now call the Chimney House, one of only three surviving 18th century buildings left at Port Tobacco.

We have learned that there was a big push to move Port Tobacco to LaPlata in the late 19th century. There was also talk of moving the County Seat to Chapel Point at one time. Ridgate and others like Thomas Stone started a petition in 1783 to keep the Seat where it was and were successful...this time.

Ridgate was a partner in the firm Barnes and Ridgate whose function was the tobacco trade. Before the Revolution, the colonies traded almost exclusively with Great Britain and since the colonies revolted, the British developed a bit of an attitude toward fair trade with their insolent children. Ridgate (and others) developed heavy debts to sustain their lifestyle in the hopes that the war's end would bring them prosperity again. It was not to be. When Ridgate died in 1789, his estate was inventoried and included many personal belongings, some slave holdings, and property. His poor widow was entitled to little of it and was only able to retain her "dower amount", equivelent to 1/8th of the estate value.

The burial marker of Thomas Howe Ridgate at Betty's Delight in Port Tobacco.

The Chimney House spent much of the 19th century in need of repair and by the 20th century it was nearly lost. Fortuntely, it was saved and is an historic jewel today.

The Chimney House restored

The Chimney House in the 1970's. (Note in the foreground the foundation of the Brawner Hotel.)

Updated Map

In early December we extended the grid north into the Chimney House and Stagg Hall properties. If you remember it was quite cold and wet those couple of days! While there we also did some testing around the area which we think is the location of George Atzerodt's carriage shop.

There is still more work to do in this part of town but I have updated the map of the area showing the shovel test pit's we excavated as well as Chimney House and Stagg Hall. As Jim has stated in a previous blog, we are expecting to get back out to this part of the town during the winter to continue our work. At that point we will continue to excavate around the two houses and map the back of the properties.

Our project is growing all the time and we look forward to getting back out in the field to continue our work. Even though winter is just upon us I can't wait for the warmth of the spring and summer so we can all get back out to Port Tobacco! Until then we will be focusing on the artifact analysis, grant writing and archival research.

-Peter

Carbon Copy?

As an unexpected example of how some research discoveries are totally accidental...

I opened my Port Tobacco album in iPhoto today and the historic photos were sorted slightly different than usual. The side-by-side alignment of two photos led me to notice something that I had not noticed before. The Wade House and the Chimney House are nearly identical in architecture.




That is the Wade House in the top photo and the Chimney House on the left side of the bottom photo.

One reason that I find this particularly interesting is that (as some of you may have noticed) I have a strong interest (or mild obsession) with the cellars of Port Tobacco. This is not about the artifacts that a buried cellar may hold. Instead I am interested in the reasons the cellars were constructed and the reasons some became filled in while others did not. I think the cellars of Port Tobacco will tell us a lot about the early workings of the town and its eventual demise.

I think an area of the town has just been bumped up in priority for spring fieldwork.

-April

Limits of Shovel Testing

Tuesday the team was shovel testing in front of the Chimney House and Stagg Hall. While screening the soil from STP 409, they recovered a Lincoln cent, then a Late Archaic projectile point, and then another Lincoln cent. Sometime during the process they also recovered a sherd of British Brown stoneware.

The pennies are dated 1942 and 1948. The point is several thousand years old, and the ceramic sherd is an 18th-century import (probably from before the American Revolution). Together this group of objects illustrates one of the principal limitations of digging shovel test pits that are less than 1½-ft in diameter: we can't control for stratigraphy. That is, we aren't sure whether these four artifacts came from one layer of soil or several, nor do we know if the point came from the lowest portion of the soil profile, the sherd from the middle, and the two pennies from the upper. We can be sure that they represent aboriginal, 18th-century Euro-American, and 1940s occupation of the immediate vicinity.

We do not know whether the layers of soil representing those occupations retain their integrity; that is, whether or not they have been disturbed by utility installation, cultivation, or driveway construction. That is why we need to dig larger units (3 ft by 3 ft, or 5 ft by 5 ft) in which we can carefully remove one layer, or stratum, at a time and collect the artifacts separately for each. Hopefully, we will begin digging such larger units in the Spring.

Jim

Report from the Field

First the good news: There was no wind out at Port Tobacco today. The last two days saw gusts up to 40mph and we were exhausted from trying to stay upright.
Now the bad news: There was a constant wet snow today which turned us into muddy frozen popsicles. I could not feel my toes for most of the day. I was happy to get home and discover they were still attached.

We completed the shovel test pit survey of the front yard of Stagg Hall. We recovered more fire cracked rock and other evidence of a prehistoric occupation of this area. We also encountered a large number of tobacco pipe stems and stoneware near the village square, possibly suggestive of the location of an 18th century tavern.

We then moved into the rear yard of the Chimney House in an attempt to identify the location of Atzerodt's carriage shop. The artifact density was relatively low in the rear yard but what we did find was mainly architectural debris. The findings are inconclusive at this point but once the artifacts are washed and analyzed we may have a better idea of what was located there.

We have decided to cancel fieldwork for tomorrow. The site is a muddy mess and it will take a few days for the soils to dry out. We will still be working, just in the comforts of the Gibb Archaeological Consulting headquaters. The last three days have produced an artifact assemblage that needs to be processed and Jim and I have more grant applications to work on.

-April

Lynching at Port Tobacco

The crew has been working in the front yards of the Chimney House and Stagg Hall for the past two days and we are making exciting finds. I'll leave the details of this effort to Jim and April to blog about. While having lunch yesterday in the court house (it was cold!), Jim and I discussed the fact that many of the notables from Port Tobacco were not the most savory type. Being a port town, by nature, it attracted not only wealthy merchants and land owners, but also a large array of scaliwags as well. George Atzerodt is perhaps the most notorious along with those responsible for the beatings of Josiah Henson and his father as well as other slaves. Today I reference you to a mob lynching that took place in 1896. Joseph Cocking was held in the Port Tobacco jail awaiting trial for the murder of his wife and sister-in-law. A mob of about 30 people, masked and some dressed in women's clothing, removed Cocking from the jail and hung him from a nearby bridge. There are several speculations about the reason for this. Some say it was because the mob wanted to save the tax payer the expense of a trial. Maybe it was because they just didn't like him anyway. We'll never know.

We are looking forward to two more days in the field and can hopefully finish the yards of Stagg Hall and Chimney House. I just found out today that Atzerodt's carriage shop was located directly behind the Chimney House. I'll let you know if we find any supporting evidence.

Report from the Field

Scott should be providing another blog on the people of Port Tobacco today but here is a quick report from the field to keep you updated.

It was another cold day at Port Tobacco. We continued our shovel test pit survey at Chimney House and Stagg Hall. We recovered artifacts from a wide range of time periods. One STP contained a quartz projectile point along with two pennies from the 1940s. Another had a fragment of incised prehistoric pottery. The Native American occupation of the site may have been much more significant than we had thought.

-April

Report from the Field

It was chilly and windy but such trivial matters can't stop the Port Tobacco Archaeological Project! We extended our mapping grid to the Chimney House with the total station and flagged the locations for our shovel test pits. As is usual at Port Tobacco, every shovel test pit revealed its own unique history. Scott's team encountered two STPS with about 40 pounds of brick rubble in each. My team had one STP filled with plaster and another filled with large oyster shells. The other STPS excavated today contained a bit of everything, from tin-glazed earthenwares to yellowware.

This is our first official foray into the north part of Port Tobacco so we are a bit short on interpretation until we have a chance to do more research. For now we will just say that the artifacts recovered today are likely the remnants of the row of businesses that fronted on the north side of the village square.

The team will be back at the site tomorrow, regardless of what Mother Nature throws our way. Wednesday may be a different matter. With snow/sleet/rain forcasted, we may need to spend that day in the lab.

-April

Tomorrow's Target

Synchronize watches: our target tomorrow is the Chimney House just to the right of the courthouse, at 9:30AM.

No: it doesn't look like this today. The picture was taken in the late 1930s, I think, when it was owned by the renowned avocational archaeologist, Alice L. L. Ferguson. It was surrounded by tobacco and apparently abandoned and deteriorated at the time.

Historic Photos of a Different Kind

For your viewing pleasure, I present you with photographs of the 1960s excavations of the Port Tobacco Courthouse and the St. Charles Hotel. As I was not present, or even alive, when these excavations occurred, my narration will be minimal.


This appears to be the removal of courthouse rubble.


Exposed foundations within the courthouse.


Apparently artifacts of Native American origin were found.


Excavation within the cellar of the St. Charles Hotel. The cellar door of the Chimney House is visible in the background.

-April

Before and After, Part 2

Two of the three remaining 18th century houses at Port Tobacco (Chimney House on the left and Stagg Hall on the right) are the subject of today's before and after photographs. It is difficult to take photos of these two houses now because of the dense vegetation in the front yards.

There are a few differences in the architecture of both houses. At the time of the black and white photo, Chimney House had two front doors and was presumably a duplex, and Stagg Hall has a front porch. The older photo also shows that the well (the caged area in front of Chimney House) was in a slightly different location than it is now. Although barely visible in the color photo above, the outbuilding adjacent to Stagg Hall is also still standing, as are several others.




-April

The Wade House and Centennial Hotel

Jim and I have been discussing strategy for the upcoming ASM Volunteer Weekend at Port Tobacco. We plan to conduct shovel test pit excavations in three different locations during the weekend. This will allow volunteers to get a feel for the variety of deposits that exist in the project area. Depending on the number of volunteers, we may also open up some larger 3 by 3-foot or 5 by 5-foot units to further explore some interesting deposits.

The first location to be surveyed ASM weekend will be the area of the Wade House and Centennial Hotel. The Centennial was one of three hotels/boarding houses in Port Tobacco during the late 1800s. The picture above is of the Centennial in 1915. The Wade House is on the left. The picture below is of the same two buildings, taken from the opposite angle. From this picture it seems as if the Wade House has a prominent double chimney, like the Chimney House. This picture also suggests that the Wade House may have had a brick-lined cellar like that at Chimney House.

The Wade House and Centennial Hotel area of the site should be very rich in artifacts and provide valuable data for our research questions. We are particularly interested in comparing artifact assemblages from the Centennial with that of the St. Charles Hotel, excavated in the 1960s.


-April

A Mapping We Will Go

We spent the day out at Port Tobacco but did not dig a single hole. Instead we used the total station to lay in six datum points and get three dimensional coordinates for hundreds of surface features, buildings, and vegetation.

There are several goals to all this mapping.

First is the creation of an accurate site map that documents where we have excavated. One of the areas we mapped today was excavated by avocational archaeologists approximately 15-years ago. Without a map of their excavations we cannot determine the extent of their efforts until we re-excavate there. The photo above shows one depression they left behind.

Second, a site map that documents the locations of buildings, trees, paved roads, and other obstructions provides visual explanation of why certain areas were not excavated.

Third, we are documenting the 2007 version of Port Tobacco that may prove useful for future historians, archaeologists, planners, etc.

Lastly, an accurate digital map of Port Tobacco can serve as base map over which the various maps of the late 1800s town can be laid. Computer software can be used to stretch compress, or rotate the historic maps until they fit with the base map. For this process our most important refernce points are the corners of the Burch, Chimney, and Stagg Hall, houses as they are the only structures that are depicted on all maps.

-April

The Cellars of Port Tobacco

One interesting architectural feature found in Port Tobacco is the brick cellar that is accessible by a doorway in the chimney foundation. Both the Burch and Chimney Houses, two of the remaining 18th century buildings, have this type of cellar. At this point in our research it is not clear if this feature was common throughout the town.

It is likely that these cellars, accessible from exterior of the buildings, served as warehouse space for the port. Currently, the Burch House cellar is filled in with sediment while the Chimney House cellar is used as living space by the occupants.

We are interested in understanding the history of these cellars and hope to determine the reason for which the Burch House cellar became in-filled. It is likely that the decline of the port decreased the value of the cellar storage space. However, this does not explain why it became filled in with sediment.

Our limited excavations around the Burch House included careful study of the soils in the rear yard of the property. Here the soil is several feet deep but with little obvious stratigraphy. The current working hypothesis is that the Burch House cellar may have fell victim to a soil slide, possibly a mudslide, that brought sediment down from the hill to the southeast. Upon this hill sits another historic property, Chandler's Hope. Large scale clearing of the land at Chandler's Hope could have lead to the soil erosion that buried the Burch House cellar.

Once we have completed our shovel test pit survey of the town, we plan to conduct additional excavations at the Burch House to test this hypothesis. Future work may even include excavation within the cellar to find evidence of what may have been stored there.

-April