Page 21 - Maryland Historical Trust - Archaeology Colonial MD

for dating or revealing different aspects of colonial life? Aside from Forman’s work, which focused exclusively upon the architecture, there was little to rely upon. Jamestown and a few other exca- vations in Virginia provided some insight, but was Maryland the same? The museum needed a well-documented and equally well-preserved site that spanned much of the 17th-century period to use as a laboratory of archaeology. Fortunately, the museum staff knew of one. The St. John’s site was a plantation established in 1638 by Maryland’s Sec- retary of State, John Lewger, and it was believed to have been occupied throughout the rest of the century.8 Local legend told generally where the house had stood and Forman was able to identify a shallow depression that marked its filled cellar in 1962. With volunteers, he tested the site later that year and verified that it was indeed the St. John’s plantation. It was an excellent candidate to begin learning about 17th-century Maryland.
In the summer of 1972, students with the museum’s archaeology field school began work at St. John’s. Very soon they began uncovering seg- ments of the cobblestone foundation of St. John’s, along with large quantities of artifacts including fragments of Dutch roof tiles. Near the center of the building, intact brickwork came into view: the foundation of a chimney. However, other brick sections seemed to be connected, which initially made no sense and intrusions of some kind were discovered at the corners of the exposed founda- tion and brickwork. Of uncertain purpose, later
excavation of these features yielded several ciga- rette filters in their fill. They were the test holes dug by Dr. Forman a decade before and we were doing the archaeology of the archaeology at St. John’s.
In the next summer of digging, the entire foundation was uncovered and the unusual brick- work turned out to be the remains of an earlier chimney. Two “H” shaped chimney bases were superimposed on each other, one clearly replacing the first. In the cellar, mixed soil deposits showed that Dr. Forman had dug out a substantial por- tion of the fill, leaving one thick unexcavated balk across the center.This proved a very important sec- tion because the study of its stratigraphy (or layers of soil) told how the house had slowly decayed, been demolished, and the site cleared for farming.
When students reached the bottom of the cellar, they found a brick floor but what was most unusual about it was the stone walls. These were of sandstone and displayed the very obvious chisel marks of a stone mason. Indeed, portions of the walls were very skillfully laid. Such wall material was totally unexpected and St. John’s remains the only stone-lined cellar from the 17th-century Chesapeake.
Immediately, the question arose “where did this stone come from?” Given the early date, a likely hypothesis was that the material was ballast from a ship and thus of European origin. Samples were taken and submitted to John Glaser at the Maryland Geological Survey. His analysis con- cluded we were wrong. Instead of England, the stone had come from Maryland, probably from outcrops along the Potomac River in Charles County. This is the earliest stone quarried by Maryland settlers. The stones used in the cobble foundation had been collected from beaches or shallow water as adhering oyster shells testified. When first built, St. John’s had a cellar that was timber lined. Based upon several lines of evidence, we believe that Dutch Merchant Simon Overzee had the stone quarried and installed as cellar walls in the early 1650s when he moved into St. John’s. Notably, Overzee had a tobacco plantation along the Potomac in Charles County.
Entry was at first through a trap door but in the late 1660s, a new entrance into the cellar was cut on the front side of the house. This consist- ing of a brick lined bulkhead with a ramp. On the earthen ramp excavators found remnants of a spilt cedar log, the halves laid flat on each side of the ramp. These apparently served as run- ners to facilitate the lowering of casks of food or
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