New Highway Uncovers New Histories: Archaeology Mitigations From the U.S. Route 301 Mega Project in Delaware

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heidi Krofft. Jason Shellenhamer.

The historic farm site of Samuel Dale, an AME minister and leader in the African American community around Middletown, Delaware, was identified and evaluated for the U.S. Route 301 project.  The site was determined eligible, however, it was decided that a traditional data-recovery would not yield the greatest mitigation benefit.  Instead, a historic context detailing the African-American community in St. Georges Hundred from 1770-1940 was prepared to mitigate the impacts to the site.  The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael J. Gall.

This paper synthesizes the results of 45 soil geochemical studies undertaken on historic archaeological sites in Delaware since the 1990s that utilized weak acid extraction methods. Analysis was completed as part of an alternative mitigation survey for Delaware’s U.S. Route 301 project. The data reveals the importance of soil geochemistry in site and feature interpretation, site boundary delineation, archaeological site prospection, and spatial use analysis within sites. Soil geochemistry aids...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Crane. Christopher Bowen. Dennis Knepper.

Versar gathered information on 58 previously excavated wells from across Delaware including size, shape, depth, the methods and materials of construction, location, and date among others.  Comparison of data from the sample found patterns in well depth, location, and use of material through time. The results suggest future avenues of research to explore the ways in which well construction might relate to occupant ownership status as well as the temporal evolution of farmsteads. This synthesis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley H. McKeown. Meradeth H. Snow. Rosanne Bongiovanni. Kirsten A. Green. Kathleen Hauther. Rachel Summers-Wilson.

Bioarchaeological interpretations of five burials from a small family cemetery likely associated with one of the domestic structures at the Elkins Site integrate information from in situ data collection and standard laboratory assessment, as well as DNA and stable isotope analysis. Four of the burials (two adult males and two adult females) were tightly clustered and the fifth burial (a male infant) was spatially separated within the cemetery. Despite craniofacial morphology that could be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany M Raszick. John Bedell.

The Bird-Houston Site is a homestead that was occupied from around 1775 to 1920. During that long span the site was used in various ways by diverse occupants. Two houses stood there; the earlier log house was replaced by a frame house around 1825, and the two houses were far enough apart to keep their associated artifacts separate. The site’s occupants included unknown tenants, white property owners, and, after 1840, African American farm laborers and their families. Excavation of the site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ilene B. Grossman-Bailey. Michael J. Gall. Adam Heinrich. Philip A. Hayden.

Rich and provocative data on 1740s to 1850s tenant occupations were revealed by Phase II and III archaeological investigations at Locus 1 of the Rumsey/Polk Tenant/Prehistoric site.  Documentary research, the recovery of 42,996 historic artifacts, and the discovery of 622 features, provided a rare glimpse into the lives of free and enslaved African American workers and white tenants living side-by-side in the racially charged atmosphere of 18th- and 19th-century Delaware. Artifacts like wolf...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kerri S. Barile. Emily Calhoun. Kerry S. Gonzalez.

In the summer of 2012, a dozen Dovetail archaeologists and scores of volunteers toiled in the sun to excavate the Houston-LeCompt site, located along the newly proposed Route 301 corridor in central Delaware. Using test units, backhoe scraping, feature excavation, and artifact and ethnobotanical analysis, the team recovered an astounding amount of data on the Houston family and generations of subsequent tenant farmers who worked the land. House cellars, kitchen refuse pits, wells, and sheet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William B. Liebeknecht.

The Elkins A & B site has produced some of the most interesting data seen along the U.S. Route 301 corridor.  The site represents two very different sites from two different periods in the 18th century.  Elkins B, the earlier of the two , was occupied from around 1720 to circa 1740 on property owned by John Greenwater Jr. This site had array of interesting items, such as a set of red-bodied earthenware vessels thought to have been manufactured in Philadelphia by the Hillegas brothers, numerous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Wilkins. John Bedell.

On behalf of the Delaware Department of Transportation, The Louis Berger Group completed an archaeological data recovery at the Noxon Tenancy, a circa 1740 to 1770 domestic site in St. Georges Hundred, New Castle County, Delaware. The site was part of the Noxon’s Adventure parcel, patented in 1734 and owned by two generations of the Noxon family. However, the Noxons did not reside on the property, and site was likely a tenant-occupied farm. Phase III test unit and feature excavations yielded a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory Federal Curator.

This paper shares an in-depth comparative study focusing on clothing-related artifacts recovered at the Houston-LeCompt site as part a Route 301 data recovery project by Dovetail Cultural Resource Group. The site was occupied in rural Delaware from the mid-18th century until about 1930, and it is representative of the evolution of a typical middle-class clothing assemblage. Eighteenth-century artifacts illustrate specific forms for different garments while a decline in artifacts in the early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael E. Fowler. Kenneth J. Basalik.

Abstract: Additional archaeological fieldwork is not always the most cost effective means of mitigating project impacts to archaeological sites. DELDOT in conjunction with the Delaware SHPO has recently developed a series of alternative mitigations for projects on the US Route 301 Project. One of these alternative mitigations involves material culture studies. The material culture studies are unusual in that they address the material culture from numerous historic archaeological sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justine McKnight.

This paper will focus on the interpretation a large flotation-derived floral dataset produced from seven archaeological mitigations accomplished under the Route 301 Mega Project.   A diverse range of features (wells, cellars, smokehouses, root cellars, middens, kilns, slave quarters) were sampled from a variety of domestic, agricultural and small-scale industrial contexts that comprised the social landscape of rural Delaware during the 1700’s and 1800’s.  The collective floral data make a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Burrow. Patrick Harshbarger.

The alternative mitigation for the Reedy Island Cart Road Site envisions a historic context that will provide a capstone synthesis for evaluating the significance of 18th-century archaeological resources in southern New Castle County. During the U.S. Route 301 project the Reedy Island and Bohemia Cart Roads have emerged as important archaeological features; the cart roads link heretofore unrecognized 18th-century resources, mainly small dwelling and nucleated farm sites, to a trans-peninsular...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Chadwick. Elisabeth A. LaVigne.

As geophysical surveys become more common and a standard procedure on archeological projects within the United States, the question raised is whether or not the methods and systems being used are appropriate for the questions being asked by the principal investigators. Therefore, a compilation of geophysical methods used during archaeological investigations and their results in the Middle Atlantic region, primarily those used on transportation projects, was conducted as part of the Route 301...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D. Brad Hatch. Danae Peckler. Joe Blondino.

From the beginning, initial studies at the Armstrong-Rogers site left more questions than answers. Located within the floodplain of Drawyers Creek just north of Middletown, Delaware, survey and testing efforts uncovered the partial remains of a stone foundation and many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artifacts. Was this the home built by the Armstrong family in the 1730s? An 1820s building occupied by James Rogers? Or something entirely different? The answer, in the end, is a little of all...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wade Catts.

  The Upper Delmarva Peninsula was a region on the periphery of military activity during the American Revolution. For a short time in 1777 the area witnessed some troop movements and experienced the effects of invasion and war. The longer lasting impact on the region was the constant need for foodstuffs and materiél required of the fledging American nation. With no strong logistical system, state and national governments called on their civilian population to fill the void. While the 1777...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Burrow.

In 1743 Boaz Boyce, guardian of the son of William Cardon, deceased, accused tenant Robert Whiteside of cutting valuable timber, and evidently of obstructing the planting of an orchard. The Cardon/Holton site is identified with Whiteside’s tenant homestead.  Artifact analysis suggests an occupation date range of circa 1720 to the 1760s.  Dendrochronological dates from well timbers indicate construction in c.1737 and rebuild or repair c.1753. The core of the farmstead was fully excavated,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Clarke. Heidi Krofft.

The Delaware Department of Transportation is in the midst of its largest public works project in over 15 years. The U.S. Route 301 project will construct 17 miles of new highway across the central portion of Delaware. The archaeology program for Section 106 compliance for this project has utilized the talents of 10 cultural resource management firms (CRM). To date the CRM firms have identified 66 archaeological sites at the Phase I level, 27 at the Phase II level and 14 were found eligible for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gwenyth A. Davis. Alice H. Guerrant. Craig Lukezic.

A 2007 study conducted for the National Cooperative Highway Research Program examined cultural resource professionals’ views on the usefulness of historic contexts, and found that, "…SHPO and state DOT staff rarely use historic contexts to evaluate the National Register eligibility of properties." However, Delaware has a long and well-established practice of encouraging the development – and use – of historic contexts. The US 301 project archaeological investigations presented an opportunity to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Lenert. Brooke Blades.

Survey along the US Route 301 corridor was guided by a 2006 predictive model. The effort was informed by previous modeling efforts in Delaware and by earlier models primarily prehistoric in focus.The historic component identified margins adjacent to older roadways as having at least medium potential for sites and isolated house locations shown on nineteenth-century maps as high potential locations. Sites dating to the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were at times encountered in medium...

DOCUMENT Citation Only adam heinrich.

Analyses of faunal assemblages dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are able to show how domestic livestock and wild fauna were managed, collected, and consumed by colonial and post-colonial New Castle County, Delaware farmers and their laborers. Animal species, their numbers, and butchery marks on their bones reveal identities, possible coping strategies and/or cuisine in rural Delaware. These faunal remains are also able to provide some data that can allow archaeologists to...