Following an encouraging first week of digging, anticipation was high ahead of day 2. It was slated to be a full day: two test pits; A visit from Peter Thomas, Abbie Flood’s great-grandson and an archaeologist with more than 40 years-experience of working in New England soils; and, a theory to test involving a possible original site for the Wayside as we chase down whether it was moved.
A lot for one day.
After a short strategy meeting, we dug in. Literally. We wanted to expand Trench 1, adding a second 50×50 test pit onto our original trench. We’d heard encouraging noises upon hammering in a boundary nail. It was time to find out definitively if we had a wall.
Trench 2 had turned up some archaeology on our first day: a bit of brick, tiny shards of glass. We wanted to keep going down.
Peter, our guest, was keen to get a sense of the various soil layers. He wondered about the relationship between clearly disturbed soil and something natural. A series of soil core samples were the plan.
He’d also read something in one of the property deeds that made him wonder if the house might have been moved. We’d need to break out the tape measures.
Meeting done, we broke into groups and got to work.
Pete set about taking soil core samples, shadowed by students keen to learn more. After only a few minutes, he’d created a very loose conceptual map of disturbance. Our dig site contained a fair bit of fill before hitting natural soil. Sandy stuff. Exactly as it should be on a house site. Across the road, near a possible original house site, undisturbed soil was generally close to the surface—at least until approaching what might have been a house site. Then it was more fill. Interesting…
Back in Trench 1, the students soon found the source of the encouraging noise from day 1. Not a foundation wall, but certainly large rocks. One appeared to have been carefully split. Probably part of the foundation, but out of context. Bulldozed into place during destruction of The Wayside.
Meanwhile, Trench 2 was proving to be exceptionally rich. Nails started to come up. Most were modern “wire” nails, but another was older, square, handmade. Precisely the mixture one would expect from a nineteenth century house that was dramatically remodeled in the late 1940s. Some of the modern nails looked like roofing nails. Logical given the extent of remodeling the Franciscans did to the structure when they converted it into classrooms and dorms. They’d removed a cupola, added dormer windows, changed the roofline. You’d expect plenty of roofing nails.
Beyond that, students uncovered more shards of glass: more window glass, a bit of brown glass, likely from a beer bottle. Evidence of students partying in the 1950s or early ‘60s? Older? In that same area, the students turned up some clam shell. Evidence of a shore dinner hall?
The Trench 2 team started to find something else: rocks. Lots of them. One was clearly part of a concrete foundation. As the end of day 2 approached, we’d found the first recognizable bit of our house! Trench 2 needs to be expanded.
With students buzzing in the trenches, another group got hold of tape measures and began pacing out the distance between our site and the location Pete thought could potentially be an original house site: a flattish bit of grassy ground just off the road.
It looked the part. If you figure in erosion. Holding our earliest photos of The Wayside up, one could imagine that trees, seemingly lower down a hillside, might signal the drainage just to the left of the site. Upon measuring—an act that confused drivers trying to make their escape at the end of the workday and uncertain whether to drive over our tape—the distance was tantalizingly close to what is listed in the deed.
Interesting.
But why the house move hypothesis? A fair question.
Two things. First, a description in one of the deeds could suggest that the original house site was 330 meters north of The Willows. Interesting, but there was a second factor that Peter couldn’t shake. Alonzo Mitchell did not get on with his mother and sister. The reasons are murky, but evidently multifaceted.
First, the family story is that Alonzo was a bit unscrupulous in terms of how he made his money. Didn’t matter if it was legal, moral, or honest. At least, that was the impression Peter had. His grandfather had once stumbled on a gun fight in a cornfield where the lower Decary parking lot now stands. Apparently, law enforcement had run across rum smugglers. It’s not at all clear that Alonzo was involved. His wife was reportedly anti-alcohol. Still. There’s a sense that he might have been. After all, “he was up for anything to make a buck,” as Pete recalls.
We need to look into this much more. Family stories can be incredibly reliable, but they can also be transformed by time, by the process of being passed along from person-to-person, and by anger-fueled embellishment.
Second, it appears that Alonzo opened a shore dinner hall at The Wayside. Right next door to his mother, sister, and niece? But when did he open it? One document suggests that he opened his restaurant in 1904. As much as four years before Abbie evidently opened hers. Who was encroaching on the other? Clearly we have some investigating to do.
Third, Alonzo had a unique pet, a crow named Pompey. The bird could reportedly speak and it had a mischievous streak. One family story holds that the bird waited until Abbie had hung out the laundry. It then coated its feet in mud and proceeded to walk up and down the clean clothes. The bird turned up dead shortly after. Not the stuff of happy family relationships. (See full story below.)
Fourth, and finally, Abbie did not get on with Alonzo’s second wife, Rose Ann Davis, who cooked at the dinner hall. Reallydidn’t get on. Abbie would not utter her name, opting instead to call her simply “the woman under the hill.”
Given all of this, would Alonzo really want to build a house so close? Surely not. Maybe the Franciscans moved it to be closer to their new academic building?
Maybe.
Any way you cut it, family dynamics are always complicated. That is the nature of humans. Those complexities shape, even define, history in almost every way and can never be out of mind. Certainly, we need to take them into consideration as we try to understand our site.
Note: By the next day Pete was second-guessing his earlier theory. The language in the deed simply wasn’t clear. Other documents further challenge the theory. For example, language in family obituaries talks about Alonzo living in a house “adjacent” (or “next to” in other documents) and across from a pond. which sounds suspiciously like our house site.
We’ll keep looking into it.
So, have we actually found the foundation wall and can we use that to accurately map the foundation and full siting of the house? The clam shell and fragment of bottle suggest that we might be hot on the trail of our shore dinner hall. Will more turn up? Can we continue to figure out the story of Alonzo Mitchell and his various relationships? Was the house moved or was that idea a dead end?
All we can do is to tune in next week to find out!
