Excavations--Parterre--Excavation Units South 21.5 West 71 and South 14 W78

These two units provided our first "windows" into the stratigraphy in the central oval (S21.5 W71 left) and northwest planting bed (S14 W78) of the parterre. Excavation in the planting bed provided a wealth of information about gardening practices from the mid-19^th century to the present (see also S2.5 W30 and S2.5 W40; S19 W83; S14 W88). In this unit, the upper 0.6 - 0.8 feet consisted of good planting soil tilled as recently as the last few years! Within this deposit, we also identified and excavated four planting features.

The unit placed in the parterre’s central oval bisected it and the brick path that encircled it. The upper 1.2 - 1.4 feet of soil in the mounded oval had been dug up and redeposited when the Lairds installed a fountain here in the 1920s and again when the Historical Society restored the original treatment of the central oval 60 years later. The Lairds’ gardeners cutan even deeper trench to install a pipe for an extensive water-sprinkler system; it cut through a layer of soil brought in by the Coupers’ in themid-19^th-century to prepare the ground for their garden. Beneath the bricks of the path, also dating to the Lairds’ 1920s renovation of the garden, we uncovered remnants of three 19^th-century path surfaces —th most recent one of gravel, an earlier one of crushed coal, and the earliest a mixture of coal, coal ash, gravel, and sand. The latter may date to the late 1840s installation of the parterre.

In the planting bed, we uncovered an undisturbed 19^th-century planting hole below the recently-tilled garden soils and, in both units, a thin remnant of the 19^th-century garden bed soils, complete with an 1860s penny to help date it! Below this surface lay a gritty, clayey fill layer with little material culture. It also extended into S19 W83 and the corner of S14 W88. As the Coupers’ prepared this area for their garden, this 0.1 - 0.2 foot thick deposit was spread to cover and seal the underlying layers of kitchen midden and debris from the 1824 fire. After demolishing the burned house in the months after the fire, the Reads and their servants used the site of the former kitchen yard as a trash dump. In the two-and-one-half decades between the fire and the Coupers installation of the parterre garden, more than 0.5 feet of soil accumulated, laden with food bone, shell, and broken kitchen and dining wares that have much to tell us about the Read family’s daily life after the fire and Mrs. Read'’s death. In the unit closest to the burned house, at 2 feet below the surface, we uncovered the remains of the devastating fire —0.3 foo of charred wood, charcoal, and ash. Oyster shells, and lamb, mutton, pork, beef, turkey, chicken, and other fowl bones—the remains of the old house’searly 19^th-century tenants’ meals—lay scattered throughout the charred mess. Below the remains of the 1824 fire, kitchen trash deposits from the George (I) and Gertrude Read family (1767-1802 in the house) and later tenants extended another 0.5 foot into the ground. Analysis of the oyster shell, food bone (including the cow mandible shown here), smashed dishes, glasses, cooking wares, buttons, tobacco pipes, and straight pins will help us understand the material world these families built and in which they lived.

Our next time marker was a dense concentration of decomposing building schist, fragmentary bricks, decaying mortar, and window glass behind during the Reads’ renovation of the house beginning in 1767 when they moved in. Below this, the amount of bone, shell, and household trash dropped off considerably, indicating that the earlier residents of the house used this yard differently than the Reads. Only a few small fragments of blue and white delft plates, redware bowls, tobacco pipes, nails, broken bricks, a roofing tile fragment, and lead from casement windows hint at the building’s appearance and furnishing during the late 1600s and early 1700s. As we approached subsoil at about 3 feet below the current ground surface, the soil contained more and more flakes of gold and deep red-colored jasper from Native Delawarean stone tool-making. They were, however, mixed with occasional flakes of brick, delft, and nails. This suggests the site’s earliest Dutch owners brought in fill from an as yet unknown location nearby to raise and level the Delaware River shoreline before beginning to build the town they called New Amstel.

QuickTime Movies from the excavations!

• South 21.5 West 71 Duration: 18.8 seconds Size: 728KB
  
• South 14 West 78 Duration: 14 seconds Size: 580KB

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