VIRGINIA-L Archives

From: "Nena Smothers" <>
Subject: [VIRGINIA] Ft Eustis-dig update
Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2006 02:25:55 -0800

Scratching the surface
Mulberry Island on Fort Eustis is dense with 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century
artifacts


BY MARK ST. JOHN ERICKSON 247-4783 December 13, 2006

Reach down into the sweet, rich soil that covers most of Mulberry Island and
you're liable to find much more than roots and worms.

Prehistoric stone arrowheads and scrapers lie just below the surface, left
behind by a Native American culture that reaches back 12,000 years. Broken
clay tobacco pipes lurk here, too, cast off by English indentured servants
during the days of John Rolfe and Pocahontas.

Civil War buttons add to this subterranean history, describing a time when
the fate of the Confederacy depended upon the island's earthen defenses.
Then there are the small yet provocative fragments of everyday life left
behind by the freed black slaves who swarmed here when the war ended.

So lush and numerous are the buried clues that finding and unearthing them
all would be impossible, says Randy Amici, cultural resources manager at
Fort Eustis, the 8,300-acre Army base that has occupied the property since
World War I.

But in an ongoing archaeological survey that's expected to last several
years, he and his team hope to explore and map the secret history of this
place in ways that could shed significant light on one of America's most
historic regions.

"Fort Eustis is probably the most historically significant Army installation
in the country," the archaeologist says.

"This is one place where we have the full picture - the full temporal span -
and it's really going to add to our understanding of the cultural
development of the Peninsula. But it's going to take a lot of work."

Bounded by the Warwick River on the east and the James River on the West,
Mulberry Island is a 7-mile-long peninsula that - at its northern neck - is
just a few hundred yards shy of being a true island. Skiffes and Bailey
creeks cut in from the northwest to help define this historic chokepoint,
which frustrated the Union army's advance during the opening days of the
1862 Peninsular Campaign. A dozen other streams meander in from the
southwest, enlivening the map with such names as Fort Creek, Morley's Gut
and Pauly's Run.

These easily traveled liquid highways made the surrounding land a prime
piece of real estate from the beginning. Among the recent finds is an early
Archaic-period arrowhead in such pristine condition that Amici, who
specializes in prehistoric cultures, believes it has never been fired.

"In my experience, points this pristine are usually found at domestic
sites," he says. "So somewhere in the neighborhood we're likely to find
signs of habitation."

English settlers found the island attractive, too, beginning with about 60
to 80 men who were sent down river from nearby Jamestown in 1609 "to live
upon the oysters," Capt. John Smith wrote. As early as 1613, other settlers
may have followed, drawn by the fertility of the soil and ease of
navigation. By 1619, Rolfe and partner William Peirce had patented the first
of 1,700 acres on which they would cultivate some of Virginia's best
sweet-scented tobacco.

"Almost every time we put a shovel into the ground - bam! - we're finding
evidence of an early 17th-century site," Amici says. "When people started to
leave Jamestown to look for land, they settled along the tributaries of the
James River first - and Mulberry Island is one of those places. It has high
dry ground, good soil and the tributaries they needed to get their tobacco
out."

Nearly 245 years later, African-American slaves churned these buried sites
up as they transformed the landscape into a series of earthen forts
anchoring the west flank of the Confederate defensive line. So dense was the
history at mighty Fort Crafford, which encompassed seven acres and boasted
20-foot-high walls, that later archaeologists would find not only Civil War
artifacts but also the remains of both 18th- and early 17th-century
structures.

"We have all kinds of sites that are talking to us - and waiting to say
more," says local historian John Curry of the Fort Eustis Historical
Association. "This place is a treasure waiting to be discovered."

Driven mostly by the dictates of the National Historic Preservation Act and
- to a lesser extent - by Fort Eustis' takeover of numerous military
missions from soon-to-be-closed Fort Monroe, the archaeological survey is
building upon the findings of several previous studies.

Exploiting advances in technology and vastly improved knowledge of both
prehistoric and early colonial sites, Amici and his team hope to make
significant gains over what was discovered when the last survey of Fort
Eustis was conducted in the mid-1980s.

"Surveys like this are always improving with time. So you always find out
more than you knew before," says Marley Brown, director of archaeology at
Colonial Williamsburg, which carried out several focused excavations here
during the 1990s.

"And when you're talking about Mulberry Island, which incorporates some of
the earliest settlement sites in Virginia, you're talking about a place
that's very important. You've got virtually everything on that property,
including Native American sites. It's just an amazing resource."

Williamsburg-based historian Martha McCartney - whose new book on early
Virginia settlers and settlements is scheduled to appear in 2007 - sees
similar potential for improving the still cloudy understanding of what
happened when the first colonists left Jamestown.

"The island's importance has been recognized for many years. But we still
don't know as much about it as we should," she says. "Something like this
can be expected to turn up a lot of evidence that's important."

Just how much new information will be found remains to be determined. At
least some artifacts will be displayed at the 1725 Matthew Jones House,
which has added the job of archaeological lab to its role as architectural
museum.

Amici also plans to incorporate all the findings into an online map that
will enable users to read every note, see every artifact and examine every
archaeological feature turned up in the field. The resulting horde of
evidence could easily climb into the thousands

"The great thing about military installations is that - where you have
disturbance, there's a lot of disturbance, but it tends to stay in the same
place," he says. "So everywhere else there's a great deal of preservation -
and that really adds to the potential."

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• [VIRGINIA] Ft Eustis-dig update by "Nena Smothers" <>