Special Edition    Daily Report    October 11, 2004

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The Fort Edwards  Archaeologist

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Report on the Archaeological Excavations at Fort Edwards, home site of Joseph
Edwards and a French and Indian War frontier fort of Col. George Washington. This second major archaeological excavation is part of the ongoing project of The Fort Edwards Foundation of Capon Bridge, West Virginia, to preserve, protect and interpret the home site and fort site at Joseph Edwards's land grant on the banks of the Cacapon River in Hampshire County, West Virginia. This site represents both an early settler's home of the second quarter of the eighteenth century and a French and Indian War fort in Col. George Washington's chain of forts protecting the Virginia frontier. The excavation is under the direction of Dr. Stephen McBride of McBride Preservation Services of Lexington, KY. This report provided by The Foundation.
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Today we continued working on the main areas studied yesterday. The area of the burn marks outside the stockade that had yielded the Artifact of the Day yesterday (the fireplace or kitchen tool) and the bottle bottom two days ago did not reward us much today. The pit from which the tool came was doubled; Rebecca is digging in the pit while Myrisa continues to scrape to see if anything lies below the surface. In the background Ann works on enlarging the area where the eighteenth century bottle bottom was found. That area (enlarged on the right) contained a mysterious pile of rocks, but there does not appear to be much significance to it. Ann is shown at the right with the rock pile.

Dr. McBride photographed the feature after the artifacts (fireplace tool?, bottle neck and lead disk) had been removed.         Today instead of having Hampshire Homebuilders with their backhoe we had our own members working with their equipment. Shown at left is Fred Berkeridge, Mayor of Capon Bridge and longtime member of our Board of Directors, working a backhoe for us. The long reach of the hoe certainly saves a lot of shovel work.

The other major area of work is where the stockade wall and in-wall bastion intersect with the cellar features. The dark wide line coming in from bottom left is the stockade in-wall bastion which will intersect with the rock pile at center. We do not know yet which of these features was built first; we will have to do some more work before we can determine that. The pile of rocks on the right edge of the picture may be another separate cellar feature or chimney. Under the jumble of white plastic is another wall segment. The large ditch running through this picture from top to bottom was our exploratory backhoe trench dug in 2001.     At another trench we find the area of Dr. Gardner's 1990 stockade feature. As we expanded the area around it we discovered several distinct features. Just behind the team members is a rock pile (shown at right). This could be a covering for a trash pit or it might be a base for something. We will have to work on that tomorrow.

Artifact of the Day     In spite of the fact that we are not finding many artifacts, every once in a while we find something really exciting. It seems that someone long ago lost a quarter. That is not 25 cents, but a quarter of a Spanish silver coin. Unfortunately, the part with the date is cut off, but we will get a coin expert to look at it and, hopefully, tell us exactly what it is. [Shown larger than actual depending on compute resolution.] This is actually where we get the term "quarter" from when people broke coins valued by their weight into smaller pieces.   Most Retiring Worker     We have to include here a picture of our most retiring worker. Although you may not be able to see through the windshield, rumor has it that this equipment operator is the Foundation's soon to retire President. Seems that they let just about anyone work around here; times must be hard.