Digging up clues about an early Monongahela River boatman

Jonathan Crise, 22, a California University of Pennsylvania senior from Perryopolis, Pa., sifts through soil looking for artifacts that might shed light on the social status of a riverboat captain who plied the Monongahela River in the 1800s. (Scott Beveridge/Observer-Reporter photo)

BROWNSVILLE, Pa. – Archaeologists sifting through the soil where a riverboat captain lived in the mid-1800s are looking for clues that might shed light on the class status of the first men who plied the Monongahela River.

They’re also helping Brownsville, Pa., scholar Marc Henshaw complete the research for his doctoral degree in a study of those who worked the river between the 1830s and early 1900s.

So far the volunteers have unearthed artifacts that mostly predate 1860, when Capt. James Gormley sold his house overlooking the river to a judge and relocated to Ohio.

That suggests the judge “just tore it down when he bought it,” said Henshaw, 35.

Another big find at the dig is a Sheffied folding knife handle made in England that leads Henshaw to conclude Gormley’s occupation made him a man of stature in the community.

“It is a pretty good indicator he was not just an average individual,” he said. Such a knife “would have been expensive to import.”

The house, though, must have been small with rooms just 12 feet wide, judging from the size of its foundation built right atop the ground with river rocks and without mortar.

“They didn’t build a builder’s trench,” Henshaw said. “It’s not a pretentious house. The location is pretentious because it’s downtown. He could walk to the wharf. It would have been expensive property. His boat’s more his home.”

Among the other artifacts found in the dig are glass and pottery shards. Henshaw boasted the other day on his Twitter feed workers had also unearthed an Indian bead at the site.

The Observer-Reporter carried a story about the project not long after it began in early May, and became delayed due to an especially wet spring.

Here is that story:

By Scott Beveridge, staff writer

BROWNSVILLE - Dee Dee Snook, shovel in hand, makes note of several tile shards unearthed by a small band of volunteer archaeologists at Brownsville property that once contained a riverboat captain's house in the mid-1800s.

The small white and faded-green sections of porcelain look similar to those that adorn any number of antique fireplaces in the Brownsville area, and were probably scattered here when the house next door was demolished, said Marc Henshaw, the leader of the dig.

"It's all hand excavation," said Snook, 36, a graduate student at nearby California University of Pennsylvania. "We're trying to find out a little more about Brownsville.

Led by the industrial archaeology research of Henshaw, the volunteers are working on a small overgrown lot once owned by Capt. James Gormley.

Not much is know about Gormley, other than he piloted the "Jesse R. Bell" and sold his two-story frame house in 1862 to a prominent judge before moving to Ohio, Henshaw, 35, said.

"The rest of that is a mystery," he said.

Those digging through the ground Gormley once owned have been looking for glass bottles, shards of china, marbles and any other artifacts the man's family might have discarded. The items should provide some clues as to how well men of that era who worked the rivers lived, compared to those in other occupations.

"It may tell us something about the social stratification," said Carl Maurer, 73, of Washington, a member of the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology. "Believe it or not, we'd like to find (evidence of) the outhouse because of the things people threw down in them."

The property on a steep hillside along Bank Street and overlooking the Monongahela River would not be considered a desirable location today. It's just beyond the near-vacant downtown, across the street from a dilapidated clapboard house once used as a set for the 1984 movie "Maria's Lovers," starring Nastassja Kinski, John Savage and Robert Mitchum.

But in the 1850s it was the perfect place for someone of Gormley's stature to live.

"Everybody walked and his work was just down the street," said Henshaw, who lives in Brownsville.

Men like Gormley who traveled the rivers "were almost like celebrities," but they did not make a lot of money," Henshaw said. The captain lived in a frontier economy where wealth was accomplished through traded goods, rather than the estimated $400 he earned a year.

Henshaw is undertaking this project to complete his doctoral dissertation at Michigan Technological University in Houghton.

For the most part, archaeological projects in Southwestern Pennsylvania have taken place on ancient Indian settlements, he said.

"Historical archaeology is a real boom around here, but no one is thinking to ask what was here and use it as a research tool," he said.

The project is expected to last a month, and public participation is welcomed.

"When you finish, you go away with this stuff with more questions," Maurer said.

Staking new ground at America's most-famous archeological site

AVELLA, Pa. – Albert Miller knew he was onto something when he began digging around a groundhog hole at the foot of an ancient rock ledge on his property decades ago and pulled out a few burned bones.

In no time, he unearthed an intact Indian flint knife without realizing his find in Independence Township, Pa. would someday lead to one of the most important archaeological finds in the United States.

Afraid of looters, he covered the pit and kept these discoveries to himself until he could find the right person to lead a professional dig at the site, said David Scofield, director of what since has become internationally known as the Meadowcroft rock shelter.

The dig would eventually last for three decades and produce evidence that travelers had been camping down under the shelter for at least 16,000 years, making it the oldest known evidence of human occupation in North America.

“This site just kept going down," Scofied said. “It just blew everyone away. No one had a clue it was this old.”

Among the other early items to be unearthed in 1973 by James Adovasio, a professor at the time at the University of Pittsburgh, were “a chronology of beer cans and drug paraphernalia” left behind by modern parties, Scofield said.

Since then, teams led by Adovasio have discovered more than 20,000 items that range from stone and bone tools to flint and pottery fragments. They also have found 956,000 animal remains that include those of the now-extinct passenger pigeon, as well as elk, turtle and rabbit. Add to that 4 million plant remains, with the most common of them being hackberry seeds.

The most significant artifact is a speartip that has been classified as the oldest such find in American and named the Miller lanceolate to honor Albert Miller.

Other archeologists with opposing theories about the arrival of mankind to North America have attempted to discredit the discoveries by Adovasio, who now teaches at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa. One argued that the coal-rich ground in southwestern Pennsylvania skewed radio carbon tests that were used to determine the dates of his discoveries, Scofield said.

“It’s been a lightening rod for controversy. There were a lot of questions as there should be in science,” he said, adding that most people in the field have since come around to agreeing with Adovasio about Meadowcroft.

Scofield and his staff are working on a game plan to make the best use of this property that also is home to a village of relocated and restored buildings from the 1800s. They want to craft a tour that would first take visitors to the rock shelter to introduce them to the arrival of humans to the continent. From there, they would visit a new Indian village under construct before heading to a yet-to-be-developed sheep farm similar to those that dominated Washington County in the early 1800s. The tour would continue to the restored buildings before ending back at the shelter to discuss modern science and how it is used to evaluate the dig.

“The land is the common theme,” Scofield said. “We’re really building a vibrant tourism industry,” he said

More than $260 million was spent in this county on tourism in 2006, the last year the numbers were crunched. This type of spending is expected to skyrocket because of new gambling opportunities at The Meadows Racetrack & Casino, as well as shopping at Tanger Outlets about 20 miles to the east in Washington, Pa., Scofield said.


(Captions: David Scofield, director of Meadowcroft rock shelter, top, discusses the depths archeologists have gone to unearth evidence of humans in North America. A replica of one of the huts covered in cattail mats that were used for shelter by Monongahela Indians in southwestern Pennsylvania is part of a new attraction at the tourism destination.)