Excavations--Parerre--Excavation Units South 2.5 West 30 and South 2.5 West 40

[Surverying]Due to its permanence, we selected the northwest corner of the George Read II house as our datum point. All surveying and positioning of excavation units reference this point. Consequently, the southwest corners of our first two excavation units were located 2.the 5 feet south and 30 and 40 feet west of this datum.

In the contemporary garden, these units lie in the northeastern portion of the parterre. Based on historic documents like this drawing prepared during planning for construction of the George Read II house, we believed the back wall of the earlier house’s kitchen wing lay roughly in line with the back wall of the main block of the Read II house. Thus we hoped to find remains of the earlier house’s foundation and the yard just behind its kitchen. We also sought information about the later gardening activities in this section of the parterre.

Excavating these units proved to be no easy task! On the surface, the northern ends of the units contained sod, while the southern ends cut into a planting bed adjoining a now overgrown boxwood hedge marking the northern edge of the parterre. Since Historical Society of Delaware gardeners had last tilled the planting bed in the early 1980s, they had dug several planting holes into its rich soils. Each one left a distinctive stain, or "signature," in the soil. In our excavation units, we encountered seven of these recent planting holes. At 1 foot below the surface, we discovered water-sprinkler pipes cutting east-west across both units, just along the planting bed/ sod interface. The Laird family installed them as part of an extensive watering system in the 1920s. All of the soil in both units that overlay the water pipes had been brought in at that time. Beneath the pipes, the division between planting bed and sod was evident in soil differences extending another 0.5 feet deep. The general configuration of this planting bed has not changed since the Coupers installed it in the late 1840s. The archaeological signatures of three 19th-century planting holes also survived the later gardening activities.

[Brick Paving]Two feet below the surface, we uncovered a layer of brick paving that extended across both units. Few artifacts lay in the soil between the bricks, but the bricks themselves provided clues to their date and purpose. Broken, and often covered with mortar, they had obviously served another purpose in a former life! The layers of soil above and below them, the artifacts in these layers, and documents relating to the 1824 fire suggest the bricks began life in the house that burned in that fire. The sections of the paving we saw indicate a path leading from the surviving, Read II house west into the yard, behind the remains of the burned house. Close examination of the bricks in the western unit showed a planting feature from the later 19th-century garden cut through the path, and that it incorporated part of an earlier, more carefully laid path. This path ran at a diagonal to the other, was built of whole bricks laid in a prepared sand bed, and had a special brick edging.

[Kitchen Wall Foundation]In the western unit, the brick paving sealed a deposit of fire-altered brick and mortar representing the burning and demolition of the earlier house in 1824. Cutting through this layer along the south end of the unit, we found partially intact remains of back kitchen wall foundation. The schist foundation had been robbed along its western end when the house was torn down.

In the eastern unit, below the paving we encountered a 0.5 foot-thick layer of sandy soil full of butchered cow, pig, and sheep bone, oyster shells, clay tobacco pipe fragments, and broken pieces of 18th-century ceramics. This deposit, now buried under 2 feet of more recent soils, represents the kitchen yard of the earlier house when George (I) and Gertrude Read and their family lived there between 1767 and about 1800. Below this in both units lay a series of thinner deposits containing varying amounts of brick and mortar building rubble, evidence of the building’s construction and then extensive renovation by the Read family in the 1760s. Two postholes, from early 18th-century fences, an earlier kitchen, or an outbuilding, cut through the earliest deposits into subsoil. Below these layers, at approximately 3 feet below the existing surface, we reached the naturally occurring soil, undisturbed by people.

[Movie]QuickTime Movies from the excavations!

ATTENTION WINDOWS USERS: Having trouble with the QuickTime movies? Click here to go to a site where you can download the QuickTime movie player program.

[Trowel] Return to the Parterre Excavations Page

[Trowel] Return to Archaeology at the George Read II House