Digging into the past

Nov 08, 2023

For local amateur archaeologists, identifying scraps of the past has its own quiet place at the Greene County Historical Society Museum.

Tucked away in the downstairs portion of the museum's refurbished library in the old brick boiler house is the forensics lab of Pennsylvania Archaeology – Mon/Yough Chapter 3. The long room the chapter shares with museum archives has the space needed for the machinery of archeological forensics. Tables gridded with tape to match the portion of the dig where each shard of broken glass, pottery, button, coin or bone found are now being filled with what remains of the Green Tree Tavern stand, a horse-powered "stand" (read: frontier truck stop) that once served haulers and teamsters in the early 1800s as they moved wagonloads of crops and goods to market on Burds Road, Fayette County, decades before the National Road was finally established in 1822.

Retired doctor Doug Corwin of Washington – "I retired four years ago and got into this after attending a meeting." – turned on the lights and plugged in the fine-grade sandblasting chamber that removes centuries of oxidation from horseshoes, nails and, in this case, a small metal pistol, its handle now partially free of corrosion. Was it an ornament? A military decoration? A child's toy? When cleaned, labeled and cataloged, it will take its place as a piece of not-so-ancient history, yet still somewhat a mystery, caught in that span of time between when the tavern stand was built – early 1800s? – and the year it was said to have burned down – sometime in the 1840s.

There is a row of well-lit stations here where individual grid pieces get pored over, pieced together, identified, put in plastic bags and archived. Corwin opened one bag to show the contents better – cut bones, teeth and bits of broken tableware with beautiful glazed designs.

"I thought when I started, the tedium would put me off. In fact, it's drawn me in… fitting pieces of pottery and glass together, looking for patterns. Especially if you like history as much as I do," Corwin said.

North American archaeology sometimes digs down thousands of years to trace the comings and goings and cultural settlements of hunter-gatherers as they made their way from Asia after the last Ice Age and spread across the continent. The Mon/Yough Chapter is no exception.

The winter 2014 issue of "Greene County Living" featured my first story about the chapter "Unearthing the past at the Shriver Site" in Whitely Township. Led by then chapter president Carl Maurer, the late archaic period dig attracted students from the archaeology and anthropology department of California University of Pennsylvania, now PennWest California. They were there with their (now retired) professor and advisor, chapter member John Nass. Local volunteers also came to help, eager to experience the thrill of holding a 5500-year-old blast from the past, be it bone, stone or chert – the flint that arrowheads are made of. The hunter-gatherer encampment they unearthed predates the Monongahela people who lived in villages, farmed and made clay pots. It was identified by spearheads, broken arrows, rock tools, dark soil and charred stone from the campfires of nomadic living. The many flint flakes found in certain places indicated arrows were being reshaped and re-knapped for hunting before the hunters moved on.

Another level of the more recent past just as intriguing in its own historic right is the long-forgotten Greene Tree Tavern stand on U.S. Route 40 that the chapter began excavating in 2019. It sits across the road from the Abel Colley Tavern, a historic brick dwelling built in the mid-1840s, now home to the Fayette County Historical Society.

I caught up with the Mon/Yough Chapter on May 6 as members opened site 36FA588 for the season. The heavy plastic tarps that had kept out the rain and winter weather were pulled back by the time I arrived at 10 a.m., and members were busy recalibrating the dig lines to square up where they would trowel, one careful scrape at a time. Last season's screening tables were ready to go, and buckets, shovels, gloves, tape measures and wheelbarrows were waiting.

Besides Maurer, Nass and Corwin, Dwayne Santella came from Uniontown to lend a hand. He summed up his post-retirement years from working in corrections with a cheerful, "When I got out of prison, I got my bachelor's degree in archaeology!"

Gregory Bedel, a 2021 PennWest California grad with a degree in archaeology under Professor Cassandra Kuba, is now a gallery assistant at the Carnegie Museum of Art. He admitted he was happy his schedule allowed him to make it for the opening. So was Laura Coley from North Huntington, 50 minutes away. Once a Nass student, Coley has been "wanting to get back into it."

Finding a good reason to dig here happened "two or three years" before the site was started, Maurer told me over lunch, gesturing across the road. "I was sitting over there under a tent identifying artifacts people were bringing in. John (Nass) stopped and was rooting around over here, and he came back with a couple of pieces of pottery." A past older than the Abel Colley Tavern was hard to resist. The first muddy road that ran past this early truckers stop followed the path indigenous people traveled across the highlands of Pennsylvania to the watersheds that flow to the Mississippi River. Revolutionary War veterans turned farmers and merchants would follow and settle along its route to farm and do business.

Artifacts that the chapter finds here remember when the coin of the land might be a Spanish real, an 1827 two-cent piece, a wagonload of rye whiskey or a stash of fresh cured ham. In the early days, this ten-mile stretch between Uniontown and Brownsville, where the Monongahela River led to markets in New Orleans, was called Burds Road, likely named after a family living along it. Tavern stands offered inexpensive eats and a chance to water teams and rent extra horses if needed to get heavily loaded wagons up the steeper grades ahead.

"Before they installed the toll road, the road was a mess. Jefferson was president when the road was planned," Maurer noted.

When the National Road was laid in stone in 1822, Burds Road was incorporated into it, and business began to boom at the Green Tree Tavern stand.

"We think it was burned in the 1840s, but there's still some questions we have to answer – we need to determine the extent of the ash. We’ve found enough for a forge. You can see the dark soil over there – there's been a fire in that dark spot." Maurer pointed. Perhaps the forge was there.

That cut stone rectangle inside the foundation might have been a smokehouse: cut pig bones suggest slaughter. The screenings have found lots of cut bones, along with boar teeth, bits of coal and charcoal, smoking pipes, horseshoes, nails, broken bits of New Geneva stoneware, dinnerware, shards of glass, things that get lost, dropped, broken and thrown away. This could be just part of the tavern's complex of structures. The main building might be over there in the backyard. It will take more seasons of excavating to find out.

Today, time was measured by the scraping of the trowels; twenty-minute stretches loaded in buckets, then pushed through screens with gloved fingers as artifacts emerged. The glisten of coal bits and boar teeth, the sparkle of glass, sometimes clear, sometimes touched with blue. Sometimes – oh wow! – two pieces fitting together to become the hint of a vessel or a plate. Then another bucket to screen, notes to log, time for lunch under the pop-up tent. Laughter. More stories, observations, opinions, counter opinions. More buckets, slowly working down to the subsoil by recorded degrees, finding more bits of the early 1800s to be added to the forensic grid waiting in Waynesburg.

Corwin held up the find of the day – a large piece of glass that more than sparkled; it was shedding rainbows into the afternoon light as he moved it around for me to see the letters on its flattened surface. Glass blown into a mold; early 1800s, here, you can feel the letters the molten glass flowed into what was engraved inside the mold. I was transfixed. I held it and felt conscious time get caught in a vortex of wonder as the glass continued to shed microscopic bits of its prismatic self before my eyes as I moved it. Patina. Blown glass, fresh from the sand banks of the Monongahela River where Albert Gallatin's glassblowers are busy making it, now centuries later breaking down and giving itself up to the molecular mix with every movement of the air it touches. As I hold it.

Those rainbows got hold of me. They were hard to shake – I kept seeing them all the way home as I drove west into the setting sun to Greene County for the same hour and 20 minutes it took Gregory Bedel to get back to his own digs in Pittsburgh.

It seemed like no time at all.

The Green Tree Tavern site will be active Thursdays and Saturdays except for weather and holiday closures. Field times are 9:30 a.m to 2:30 p.m. Lab days at the GCHS museum are Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Information is updated weekly on Facebook and online at Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology Mon/Yough Chapter 3. The public is invited. Membership applications available. For more information on chapter activities call 724-984-0634 or 724-554-3796.

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