VIDEO: Changing the story

UA archeology class uncovers 100 years of farm life

NWA Democrat-Gazette/J.T. WAMPLER Jami Lockhart uses an electrical resistivity device Wednesday June 14, 2017 at the Leetown Hamlet site at Pea Ridge National Military Park. University of Arkansas archeology students are assisting the Arkansas Archeological Survey with the work at the site. The device maps subsurface archaeological features and patterns.
NWA Democrat-Gazette/J.T. WAMPLER Jami Lockhart uses an electrical resistivity device Wednesday June 14, 2017 at the Leetown Hamlet site at Pea Ridge National Military Park. University of Arkansas archeology students are assisting the Arkansas Archeological Survey with the work at the site. The device maps subsurface archaeological features and patterns.

Breanna Wilbanks laid stretched out in the dirt, her head resting in her hand. It's not the typical pose of an archaeologist, but it was working for this college student.

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NWA Democrat-Gazette/J.T. WAMPLER University of Arkansas archaeology student Madison Atchley measures a level June 14 at the Leetown hamlet site at Pea Ridge National Military Park. Members of the Arkansas Archeological Survey led students in the excavation of the site that served as a hospital during the battle in a neighboring field March 7, 1863.

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NWA Democrat-Gazette/J.T. WAMPLER Jamie Brandon, station archaeologist based in Fayetteville and instructor of the UA field school, holds a couple of pieces of glass, a nail and a ceramic shard uncovered at the Leetown hamlet site at Pea Ridge National Military Park. The students and archaeologists from the Arkansas Archeological Survey unearthed 100 years of farm life history at the site.

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NWA Democrat-Gazette/J.T. WAMPLER Archaeology students Kayden Dennis (left) and Madison Atchley dig in Feature 2 at the Leetown hamlet site at Pea Ridge National Military Park. The pit revealed piers and a ramp of a cellar that served three generations of farm families, dating back to 1850.

"What's this? What's this?" She rose from her position holding a tiny object in her hand, asking Jared Pebworth, a member of the sponsored research program with the Arkansas Archeological Survey.

Citizen science

For more information about next year’s archaeological research at Pea Ridge National Military Park and to find out how you can be involved, watch the Arkansas Archeological Society’s website throughout the year.

arkarch.org

"It's a button, two-piece, which means it was made before the Civil War," Pebworth replied as he examined the button. "It's got a Union eagle on it. It probably came from a cuff or a vest or some hat from a soldier or officer."

Wilbanks and about 10 other students were enrolled in a summer archaeology field school, a for-credit workshop offered by the University of Arkansas and led by Jamie Brandon, the station archaeologist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. The students and instructors from the Survey conducted a traditional archaeology "dig" at the Leetown hamlet site at Pea Ridge National Military Park.

The button was taken to Carl Carlson-Drexler, another of the archaeology instructors, who further theorized it came from a cape or overcoat worn by a Union officer. "It was cold and snowy the day of the battle, so they would have been wearing their coats," he said. Drexler-Carlson, the state's station archaeologist at Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia, is a leader in the emerging genre of battlefield archaeology. He has been researching the Pea Ridge battlefields since 2002.

But as exciting as that Civil War button was for the historians on site, another artifact won hands-down for the cool factor: A Sky King secret decoder ring, from the 1940s radio serial and the 1951-52 television series about a rancher using an airplane to fight crime.

The 1947 ring was a "radio premium offered to listeners for "only 15 cents and the inner seal from a jar of Peter Pan peanut butter," according to the Official Spy King Website. The ring included a glow-in-the-dark signaling device, whistle, magnifying glass and Sky King's private code.

The brass ring came intact from the ground at Leetown, and over the next few days, the red plastic cover revealed itself in pieces.

"People can connect with that in a way they can't with a stone tool (recovered from prehistoric sites)," Brandon said. "A Sky King ring like that would probably cost $30 to $40 on eBay today." (A check of eBay Wednesday morning found several listed from $20 to $65.99.)

"The Sky King ring is the coolest," agreed Kevin Eads, park superintendent of the Pea Ridge military park. "But I also like the Civil War button and the square nails."

FARM TABLES

The first settler recorded in the area of Leetown was Abednigo Shelton in 1812, coming from Kentucky, said Jami Lockhart, the director of the computer services program for the Arkansas Archeological Survey. Looking at tax rolls, land records and deed listings is an important part of the archeological process, he explained. Open settlement began in 1837, and prior to that, Cherokee Indians lived on the land.

Shelton's daughter married John W. Lee, a farmer from Tennessee, and the couple was deeded part of Shelton's property, Lockhart continued.

"By 1860, John Lee was gone," Brandon said. "The patriarch of the family became George Sylvanus Lee, from 1850 to 1880. He was listed on the 1860 census as a merchant -- and (historic recordings show) Leetown did have at least one mercantile. By 1870, (Lee) was no longer listed as a merchant, but as a farmer. In 1880, he was listed as a carpenter."

Lee sold the farm to Will Mayfield, who probably expanded the structure around Lee's original log cabin, according to a cultural landscape report and environmental assessment of the park compiled by park staff and presented in 2014. Another home, the Standwix "Wix" Mayfield house was located across the Spring Branch hollow from the Will Mayfield house. Mrs. Pierce Mayfield said she and her husband lived in the Wix Mayfield house before it burned (sometime before 1913). "So they picked up and moved to the Will Mayfield home and lived there until the park was established," Brandon said.

The park superintendent at the time had the Lee-Mayfield home leveled in 1963. "I wish he wouldn't have," Brandon said. "Then we wouldn't have to do this."

Recordings of the historians of the 36th Illinois troop point to Leetown being used as a field hospital for the Union army in the battle which took place on Oberson's fields near the hamlet, reads the park's report.

"Any standing structure would have been used for shelter," Carlson-Drexler said. "March 1862 was really cold. They would want to keep the wounded warm and clean."

He described putting farm tables into service as operating tables and big canvas tents erected for surgery and recuperation wards. "Some wounded laid out in the open," Carlson-Drexler continued. "The hospital was under fire by the Confederate army, with ammunition flying off the battlefield."

The wounded would have been evacuated to the U.S. Army's depot in Rolla, Mo., Carlson-Drexler said.

"Our job is to locate the old roads and buildings," Brandon told his students.

IN PRACTICE

The field school gave students a chance to put into action what they'd been hearing only in theory during introductory classes to archaeology and anthropology. "We get to find out what works and put book learning into practice," said Jamie Middleton, a senior from Cabot.

The students received hands-on lessons in excavation techniques, how to map and process archeological finds, how to identify historic periods of artifacts and more.

"You will learn everything in the technique department, and you will learn it fast," Brandon said. "But you will not be good at it until you have done it many years. Take the time to learn it and do it right."

Students were introduced to the complex numbering system archaeologists use to record and track artifacts. "You fill out a tag for the outside of the bag and the inside of the bag and catalog it on the level sheet," Brandon explained. "There's a lot of redundancy, but you don't want to lose data."

Each student was given an archaeologist's notebook for daily logging, in which he was instructed to list details such as weather conditions, soil structure and color, his expectations and interpretations of each day's work and even graph drawings of the feature.

"Remember, in your notes, you are not writing for yourself," Carlson-Drexler said.

"Write so someone 50 years [from now] will understand what you're saying and can read your handwriting," Brandon said. He spoke from experience as he has spent the last several weeks cataloging items retrieved from saltpeter caves in North Carolina from 1969 to 1970.

The students also spent a day in the classroom learning how to date different types of glass, bottles and bottle caps.

For example, glass that appears purple or amethyst was made from 1870 to 1910. "Clear glass came later because of the materials used to make glass," Wilbanks reported her learning.

Brandon also shared that different bottles for different items -- such as ketchup -- were made in the same shapes by different manufacturers. "They became a consistent shape because most people were illiterate, and the shape of the bottle would let them know what to buy, what to pull off the shelf, so they wouldn't confuse a Purex bottle with a beer bottle."

The information came in handy as the fledgling archaeologists uncovered multitudes of bottles from the site.

Each Friday during June, the students and instructors met in the archaeology lab on the Fayetteville campus to wash and record their finds for the week. "Archaeologists say there are three days of lab work for every one day in the field," Brandon warned the students.

"We're making mud pies," Ryan Smith, a junior from Alpena, said good-naturedly. He was cleaning dirt off a big piece of glass that appeared to have come from a decorative candy dish.

"I'm literally washing dishes -- old dishes," he said as he stood at a sink. "We can probably reconstruct this. We have a lot of pieces (of glass) like this."

"Here are some bottles to clean," Brandon said, coming through the lab. "After the 'nail fiasco' at Feature 1, no one wants to clean nails anymore."

The class also took a day to catalog and preserve a bluff shelter which had been damaged by souvenir hunters in Bella Vista.

TRASH OR TREASURE

The land surrounding the Leetown hamlet was scanned with the latest in geophysical technology twice this spring. During spring break, members of the Arkansas Archeological Survey covered the site, and in May, members of an international workshop, sponsored by the park service's Midwest Archeological Center in Omaha, Neb., got hands-on experience with the technology at the Leetown site.

The resulting anomalies from these two sessions, when compared to maps and aerial photographs of the area, helped the UA archaeologists determine where to dig.

Feature 1 presented to the naked eye as a sunken place in the ground. "It could be a cellar, or it could be a tree fall," Brandon said.

The archaeology teams originally opened two places -- or features -- at Leetown. Students would dig one level of a grid down to 10 centimeters, collecting and cataloging all artifacts found in that grid's level. They also dug around other features that appeared in the grid, such as large stones that could be steps or stairs.

"You are destroying the archaeology level, the crime scene, as you go," Brandon said.

The students took recordings of the kind and color of soil. They drew graphed maps of what was showing on the grid walls at 10 centimeters and took photographs to accompany the data.

Then students started digging the next 10 centimeters of earth and repeated the process with all artifacts. Excavating was stopped at 30 centimeters down, if no more artifacts were found.

All dirt pulled from the grids was shaken through ¼-inch mesh screens, with artifacts from charcoal, to nails, to glass pieces, to bottle caps, to beads, retrieved and cataloged.

Two class members are spending this semester as interns in the archaeology lab, sorting and analyzing the pieces of ceramics, glass, metal and nonmetal.

The students soon found Feature 1 held that "nail fiasco" to which Brandon referred. They collected five bags of nails.

"But nails can tell us a heck of a lot," Brandon continued. "Different sizes were used for different things. They can be pulled out, bent or salvaged. There were nails used for roofing and nails used for flooring. There were square nails dating to the 19th century and blacksmith nails made before the 1800s. They can tell us how structures were put together. They can tell us if the structure burned."

The pit of Feature 1 turned out to be a cellar, confirmed with the students finding a few items that belonged in a cellar -- stoneware, canning instruments and even a handmade miniature brown liquor jug emblazoned with handwritten letters noting it came from Nelson County, Ky., in the 1880s.

"But we think, in the late 19th or early 20th century, they just folded up the walls of lots of buildings they wanted to burn and burned them in this old cellar pit," Brandon said, based on the quantity of nails found in the pit.

The archaeologists believe Feature 2 began life as a cellar under a detached kitchen of the George Sylvanus Lee home; most 19th century buildings had them, Brandon said.

"Things like this make me happy," Brandon said at the site. Ozark rock piers from two sections of excavation seemed to align by sight, he pointed out with a big, child-like grin on his face. A stone ramp leading down into the cellar from an outside entrance also was uncovered.

Another opened feature revealed parts of the home's cistern.

"(The excavated feature) shows three distinct occupations of the cellar: George Sylvanus Lee, the son of the founder from 1840 to 1850; the Will Mayfield family in 1860, where we see some repairs and they lined the cellar; and after the Wix Mayfield house burns and the family moves over, we see more the filling in of the cellar.

"In 1951, the new family moved into the house, got an icebox inside the house, didn't need the cellar anymore. So they started filling it in," he theorized.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Americans living in rural areas with no regular garbage collection just started dumping their trash in creeks and hollows, Brandon explained. People before that buried their trash in pits -- which were treasure troves for archaeologists.

"There are several places in the park that were clandestine trash pits before World War II and the 1940s, places I don't remember seeing houses," Eads said.

"Students had fun with the cellar," Googling items for identification from the field on their smart phones, Brandon continued.

The students uncovered 100 years of farm life on the site, Brandon explained later as he displayed a sampling of items from each time frame.

Pieces of blue and white pottery and a heel plate from a shoe all dated to the 19th century, Brandon said. Then he held up two tiers of what was a three-tier chandelier from the 1890s, before electric lights. "And we've found enough with it that I believe it came from the original Sylvanus Lee farmstead," Brandon said. "We've found some sash weights and pulleys from the windows."

Deer bones, pig teeth and the ball joint of a juvenile cow found on this lowest level of excavation confirmed for the archaeologists that this was a detached kitchen, and the family living there at the time butchered its own meat.

"We have a lot to learn about the 1920s and 1930s," Brandon said after reviewing the next time frame of artifacts. "We think the people living in the Ozarks were really remote, but based on the items found here, I think they traveled a lot."

Among the artifacts were a little girl's silver bracelet, similar to those made by the Navajo in the Southwestern states, as well as tiny blue beads that might have appeared as turquoise on a child's purse -- although these were curious as the census records no young female living in the house during the time, Brandon said. A medallion from the 1915 World's Fair in San Francisco also was uncovered.

"And we have a huge, historic treasure trove from post-[World War II]," Brandon said.

Bottle after bottle -- some still containing liquid -- began revealing their presence, sticking out from the feature walls as the students dug. The bottles often retained labels and brand names: Royal Crown (RC) Cola, Purex cleaning products, Vitalis hair tonic, Colgate toothpaste, Vicks Vapo Rub, Spees vinegar made in Rogers ... even a spray bottle of Off brand bug repellent, which ironically made a bed for a colony of ants.

The students did not remember many of products, repeatedly asking "What's this?" of their instructors. But many readers will. "If it's above ground, it's trash. If it's below ground, it's an artifact," Brandon quipped. "It's 110 percent about context. If you don't have context, you don't know anything. With no context, it's just trash.

"And all that stuff from the 1930s and 1940s is still 80 to 90 years old," he pointed out.

"We found lots of toiletries from the 1920s to the 1950s," Brandon continued. "These were the things of daily life in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. They're all a part of the story of Leetown."

NOT FINISHED

The Civil War button found by Wilbanks became property of the National Parks Service along with every other artifact from the site -- including the Off can. But the button was the only piece pulled from the ground that tied the site directly to the Civil War.

It proved presence of the Union army for Brandon. "It couldn't have gotten there any other way," he said.

The absence of Civil War artifacts didn't surprise Carlson-Drexler. "It was not the battle proper, so it's not unusual to not find battle artifacts. And you are looking at one afternoon in 1862 compared to years of people living here. We've literally excavated 150 years of history."

Neither did it disappoint Park Superintendent Eads. "No, not at all," he said. "They found more information than we ever knew. They've found a hundred years of occupation and farm life, and we will interpret for that -- maybe with some wayside panels.

"They have already changed the story about what we thought about the spot (through the geospatial surveys). We never knew how many buildings were there and what time frame they came from.

"And they are not finished," Eads concluded.

The Arkansas Archeological Society and the National Parks Service are in the second year of a four-year agreement for discovery at Pea Ridge. The Arkansas Archaeology Society volunteers found 600-some Civil War artifacts in 26 acres of Ruddick's Field last year, Brandon said. A final report is due to the park service in 2020.

The Archeological Society and citizen volunteers will dig in Obersohn's field with metal detectors during 2018, and the UA plans another field school in Leetown, Brandon said.

"The battle ranged widely over park land," Lockhart said. "The Confederates called it the 'Battle of Elkhorn Tavern'." The park road that runs in front of the tavern follows the route of the Union soldiers as they marched from Missouri. The road also was known variously as Old Wire Road, Telegraph Road, the Butterfield coach road and the Trail of Tears.

"It's not just a Civil War landscape, but a historic landscape, and we want to know how that fit in," Eads said.

"We don't have a clear map of Leetown," Lockhart said. Various maps show anywhere from seven to 13 buildings, but their accuracy is unknown. The park measures it at 40 acres. An 1876 map shows three clusters of buildings in the Leetown area.

Lockhart continues this fall to apply traditional archaeology methods as well as recent technology to the woods south of the known Leetown site, looking for one of those clusters. He also works with Eads to map features such as springs and wells left in the park by previous inhabitants. Lockhart said he has found the spring box used by the Lee and Mayfield families and hopes historical descriptions of it might lead him to find the main road through Leetown.

"In the hamlet, we were afraid to do anything but cut the cedar trees and look for wells," Eads said, speaking to the park staff's efforts to return the battlefield to its natural appearance at the time of the battle. "We weren't looking for this kind of stuff.

"Based on what they found, next year we will open more up and take more brush out." Aerial photographs from the 1940s actually show the hamlet as an open area with no buildings.

"It's groundbreaking for the park what has gone on in the past," Eads continued. "We've got more archeological investment in Pea Ridge than any other American battlefield. But at 4,300 acres and 600 acres studied by archaeologists, we've just barely covered the surface."

Laurinda Joenks can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @NWALaurinda.

NAN Our Town on 09/14/2017

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