Rainy Days and a Mystery Feature

Sisyphian Sympathies
by Lisa Kraus

This week ended more or less as it began, with the volunteers and crew bailing and briefly opening the site, then closing up shop as torrents of rain swept across eastern Virginia and dumped oceans of water all over us, the site, and our hopes of digging at the distillery. Nonetheless, the crew has been gainfully (and muddily) employed in useful tasks all week long.

Laura Schick and Lacey Wallace ran the flotation tank all week, processing flotation samples for several sites at Mount Vernon. Others cleaned, labeled, and rebagged artifacts in the lab. Another rainy-day activity was a trip to the Smithsonian's Anacostia Museum, which currently features an exhibit on the transatlantic slave trade. (For information on slavery at Mount Vernon, see mountvernon.org/education/slavery.) One high note, public interest in our activities was high this week because of numerous TV and newspaper reports resulting from last week's media field school.

Our working theory is that the feature is possibly the fill of a cellar. But how do we know the distillery even had a cellar? And how would the cellar have been used? Here we turn to the documentary sources to look for evidence of a cellar at the distillery. A cellar is mentioned three times in 1798 farm reports: "planing, rabbiting and laying down the floor of the 2 rooms over the cellar" on February 18; "cleaning out the cellar" on February 25; and "cleaning out the cellars at the distillery" on March 3. These entries certainly lend credence to the existence of a cellar, but its function, location, and construction time and type are not detailed in these brief mentions.

We're able to ascertain the dates of the distillery's construction from the farm reports. During the week of October 14, 1797, workers are "digging the foundation of the distillery," and workers are "finishing the foundation of the distillery" the next week. The building's frame is up by the week of December 16. If there is a cellar, when was it put in? Prior to the erection of the building, after the foundation is built? These are questions we should be able to answer through the archaeology.

In the eighteenth century, a cellar's walls and floor might have been brick, stone, or even earthen. They could have been many feet deep or very shallow, depending on their purpose. One can imagine many storage purposes for a distillery cellar, including a place to store empty wooden barrels, grain to be distilled, or barreled whiskey to be sold. Plantation manager James Anderson wrote on June 21, 1797, that "a strong cellar must be at hand to Lodge the Spirits in...." If Anderson had his way, we should be able to find that strong cellar!

How are we going to figure this all out? Time to get dirty. We've taken pre-excavation photographs, and we're mapping the soils in unit 691, the first square we've chosen to excavate. We're starting here because it'll give us profiles along the east, west, and south walls. We then plan to open unit 640, diagonal from 690, and likely unit 740. This will give us a checkerboard excavation pattern. Our intent is to get the most profile views of the stratigraphy in this depression that we can.

We promise to keep you posted on the north rubble field excavations. Now, if we can just get a sunny day to actually do some digging!!