Page 44 - Maryland Historical Trust - Archaeology Colonial MD

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The 1660s brick chapel as reconstructed.
referred to in the documents and folk memo- ry had been wrong. The Brick Chapel site was first reported in Forman’s Jamestown and St. Mary’s: Buried Cities of Romance, published later that year. The site was immediately returned to agriculture and over the next decades, its precise location again lost. After the museum acquired the land in 1980, a project funded by local citizens allowed the Chapel Field to be surveyed and both the Brick Chapel and Priest’s House structures relo- cated. Excavators uncovered the top of the cross- shaped building and verified Forman’s dimensions. A major project to investigate the site began in 1988, aided by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 1990. This work uncovered the chapel and Priest’s House, found several other structures from the first 1630s occupation at the site, and detected hundreds of human graves.
The chapel measured 57 by 55 feet and pos- sessed an unusually rugged foundation three feet
thick and extending into the ground surface five feet. And unlike normal English practice, the workers did not dig a large construction trench. Instead, they dug a trench almost exactly the di- mension of the intended foundation. This meant that the masons had to stand in the three foot wide trench while they laid the brick. An advan- tage of this atypical method is a stronger footing because the brickwork rested against well-consol- idated and firmly bedded natural soils instead of loose fill. Use of this method raises questions as to the origin and training of the construction fore- man. The Jesuits were an international organiza- tion and may have tapped the skills of European trained artisans, although we have not so far been able to locate any records about the chapel crew. An assessment by modern structural engineers led them to conclude that the surviving foundation was exceptionally well-built and is as strong today as when the masons first laid it. The 350-year-old
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PHOTO COURTESY OF DONALD WINTER.