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UAB Archaeology Field School

Eager to search for additional evidence of the kitchen at the Slave Quarters at Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park, field school participants line up to start digging.  The crew split its time between the Quarters at Tannehill and the Gorgas Home at Brierfield Ironworks Historical State Parks, unearthing important new evidence about both sites.  The new units at the Quarters yielded fragments of additional iron cooking vessels and large folk pottery storage vessels which support the hypothesis that a kitchen once stood here. 

Ceramic tobacco pipe.

One of the more interesting artifacts found during the dig was this well preserved smoking pipe that doubtless provided its slave owner moments of pleasure during the arduous wartime years while the occupants of the Quarters made pig iron for the Confederacy.

Crew assembles for first day of dig.

In June a dig team launched a search for site where Civil War general Josiah Gorgas and his family lived during an ill fated effort (1866-1870) by the former chief of the Confederate Ordnance Bureau to reopen the Bibb Naval Works.  During the war, the ironworks had supplied pig iron used to cast the famed Brooke guns and cannon prized by southern artillerymen.

Remnants of multiple shallow stone hearths.

A large double fireplace discovered early in the dig became the key we needed define the foot print of the Gorgas home.

The base of a double fireplace.

House corner.

Time ran out before we could determine the full dimensions of the substantial structure but we did succeed in locating several brick support piers and one house corner. 

The Gorgas home is an important part of the Brierfield Ironworks Historical State Park because of the historically significant people who lived here. Josiah Gorgas had achieved prominence in the Confederate military because of his role as Chief of the Confederate Ordinance Bureau. His wife, Amelia Gayle, the daughter of an Alabama governor, went on after her husband’s death to serve as Director of the Library, named in her honor, at the University of Alabama.  Son John Crawford Gorgas developed the program of mosquito control that eliminated yellow fever and made possible the completion of the Panama Canal. In later years, as US Surgeon General, John Crawford would revisit Brierfield telling his hosts that his childhood days there had been among the best of his life.

Introduction

This fall, winter and spring we will conduct a series of weekend volunteer digs at the Slave Quarters Site at Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park. We have a list of enthusiastic volunteers and should be able to accomplish a great deal.  Not everyone will be able to attend every dig weekend. If you can just make one, we will be happy to see you! If you haven’t signed up to volunteer but want to, email Dr. Bergstresser at jackbergstresser@aol.com. We will send out an email notice to all our volunteers at least a week before each dig weekend.

If you have no archaeology experience, don’t worry! If you don’t mind hard work and getting dirty, we’ll teach you how to dig and keep up with the paperwork. Most of the units we will be excavating are very simple with no complicated stratigraphy or subtle features.  They will provide a great learning experience.  For units with features or other complications, we have more experienced diggers to do the job. The more weekends you can attend, the more you can learn. By next spring you could become a first class digro, a real field animal.

Work will start each morning at 9:00 and run until we get ready to call it a day. If you need to leave early, don’t worry.  We will assemble at the Museum at the Park and go to the site as a group.  Once you learn your way around, you can show up at the dig site on your own.

We have all the tools and equipment that will be needed.  You need to bring gloves, bug spray,  something to kneel on, sturdy clothes, and lunch. We’ll have water, drinks and snacks.

If you don’t want to bring a lunch, we can always send out a runner to pick up some burgers from Top Dawg, the best restaurant  in Green Pond, Alabama, not far from the park.

Map to the Park

Plan of Attack for the Volunteer Dig

We will be doing most of our digging near House 1 in the vicinity of a trash pile that we discovered this  summer.  We named the units in this area the Fork Units after Crew Chief Jessica Brown discovered a fork and a small mid-19th century ceramic fragment eroding out of a small patch of dark stained soil that had been exposed by recent rains. One of the exciting finds from these units was a shell casing from a 52 caliber Spencer repeating rifle like those carried by the Union cavalry raiders who freed the Tannehill slaves when they swept through the ironworks on 31 March 1865.  There are a few photos of our work in these units in an earlier blog post.

Two facts make me want to return to this area and complete the units that we did not finish during the summer.  First, we recovered numerous animal bone fragments from the suspected trash pile.  Secondly, we  recovered what I would consider to be a relatively large number of cast iron cookware fragments in units just to the southwest of the Fork Units.

House 1 and the nearby Fork Units.

The most notable of these cast iron cookware fragments was a large piece of a pot lid as shown below.

There are many potential explanations for the large counts of bone fragments and cast iron cookware pieces but one that interests me is the possibility that there was a kitchen nearby.  Our findings at House 2, at the other end of the Quarters, suggest that it was occupied by single males. House 1 on the other hand was probably occupied by a family with a woman present. Is it possible that this woman was a cook for the single males? And, did these men take their meals in a dinning hall and kitchen that was located near her home?

We may never be able to answer these two questions but its worth a try. I look forward to meeting everyone.  Keep an eye out for emails about dig dates.

Dr Hick.

Laura Dehmer, a history intern from the University of Montevallo, discovered the burned floor sill to her right against rocks. Since it was against the downhill side of the chimney pile and buried under clay chinking that fell away from the chimney, it survived. Other evidence that the house had burned was probably washed away over the years by sheet erosion. The question is, did the Yankees burn the house, or did it burn some time later? This is one of the important questions we hope to answer in June.