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Seventeen volunteers arrived ready to dig!

So many volunteers arrived that we were able to finish the Fork Units around the trash pile and move on to the units to the southwest where we suspect we will find evidence of a structure.

A final animal bone fragment from the trash pile.

Dr. Sharyn Jones, UAB Anthropologist, removes a final, large bone fragment from the trash pile. Over seven hundred pieces of animal bone were recovered from around the fireplace at House 1 and the trash pile in the Fork Units. Catherine Wright, a graduate student working with Dr. Jones and recipient of the Garnet M. Garvin Internship in Historical Archaeology next semester, will do a study of this important collection.

An abundance of iron cookware fragments.

Part of the handle, one leg and three fragments from the lid of a Dutch Oven found in a single 1-meter square.  Two other units contained multiple pieces of iron pots while other units yielded single fragments.  This seems like a high concentration of ironware that may indicate a kitchen.

The site had visitors much earlier in history.

Two stone arrow tips and a piece of chert, not native to the area and showing signs of having been modified by humans, indicate that this area, which may have been a kitchen during the Civil War, may also have served as a small hunting camp during prehistoric times.

Heading home.

A light rain brought an end to a very productive day. The crew passes the blast furnaces after returning from the dig along the same trail that slave ironworkers traveled daily between 1858 and 1865.

Today was the first of our dig at the Spring Site at Brierfield Ironworks Historical State Park. Crew members are just beginning to excavate the first levels of their one-meter squares. We’re opening a ten-meter trench across what we suspect to be the footprint of a 19th century house. It was a chilly day. Frost the night before. Intermittent rain prevented us from getting much done, but tomorrow, we’re hoping for sunshine.

We call our dig location the Spring Site because it is located just up the hill from this brick-lined spring which feeds into Furnace Branch. The spring probably provided cool water to the occupants of the house we’re investigating.

Dave Jordan, ace excavator from California, opens a square next to a large pile of brick.

The brick is some of the earliest we have identified here at the old ironworks. Hand-pressed, low-fired, it was probably made by slave workers. The Confederate government, eager to build an industrial infrastructure in central Alabama, made hundreds of slave workers available to iron makers. The Union Army had disrupted industrial operations in Tennessee, Virginia, and other regions of the South. The isolated hill country of central Alabama was rich in iron ore, coal, and other raw materials.