Slowly, very slowly, the church ruin is coming into focus. After six weeks of digging (well, really we’ve worked about 45 hours on site) we are starting to see the scene of what remained in 1926 after the demolition work. We see sections of wall pushed over and bricks strewn about. Everywhere we’re finding limestone fragments.
Wow, what a beautiful fall day! Plenty of sunshine and plenty of wind. The leaves were swirling around us and filling the pits as we dug. It felt really good to be outside doing archaeology on a day like today.
We continue to uncover more of the foundation. It has emerged as a substantial wall, over 50 cm (2 feet) thick. We’re also starting to hit rubble inside the building including small fragments of wood and lots of nails. I view these finds
as a positive sign - that we’re closing in on the church interior and hopefully a glimpse of what might have survived the fire and demolition.
One of last week’s highlights was being joined in our excavation by some fifty 6th graders from Hancock Elementary school. It was a great experience to work side by side with such enthusiastic kids. As expected, we found some nails, ceramics, clinker, bricks, and lots of worms.
The only glitch in the entire day was when we lost Rayna. I never did get the entire story, but apparently one of the teacher’s aides thought Rayna was a 6th grader and
made her go back to Hancock with the rest of the class. We eventually straightened out the mix-up and had Rayna returned to us. To avoid similar problems in the future, we’re asking Rayna to carry some form of ID whenever we have young kids on the site.
Rayna happy to return to our class
A drenching rain brought today’s excavation to a screeching halt. I wasn’t too disappointed, though, since we were near the end of our class period and we’d been very productive before the rain. We are now largely done with the public component of our project and really focused on the research goals. Our units inside the church
are down 80 cm (about 2 ½ feet) with no sign of any building debris. We need to dig fast and furious if we’re to get deep enough to really evaluate what is left inside the basement.
Our trench extension has uncovered a little more of the foundation, but it’s jumbled and not in line with our first section. It’s a little frustrating to be so close to seeing a longer stretch of foundation, but having to wait until Thursday’s class before we can dig again. Archaeologists always say that our profession requires patience, but only working 3 hours a day, two days a week makes for slow progress even by my standards. This nasty rainy, cold and dreary weather worries me a bit. Will winter wait a few more weeks so we can finish the dig, or is time running out?
Our Homecoming open dig was a lot of fun. Our timing was fortunate,
with one of the nicest days we’ve seen this week. I was impressed by our returning volunteers - they knew what to do and started working as soon as they arrived. I had it easy. I just went around talking to people and everyone else did all the hard work. Public archaeology certainly has its advantages.
Maya had the find of the day - a metal enamel cup, slightly crushed but otherwise intact. She found it in a thin lens of ash and coal. The lens appears to be a trash dump, presumably from a coal burning stove. Stratigraphically it post-dates the church, but it indicates some refuse disposal was incorporated into the fill over the church.
It was a great day for Hamline area historians. We had a lot of conversations about the early church history, local architecture, and future sites to dig. All the possibilities are intriguing, I just need to convince Hamline that I should start offering Excavating Hamline History every semester instead of every other year.
We’re expanding our excavations. At the church site we have added a “T” extension on the west end of our trench that will expose a longer section of the church’s foundation. We want to better document the building’s location and construction. We also are hoping to find more artifacts - especially
anything with architectural details. We’ve started to on-cover a mass of fragmented red brick, mortar, and wood. It’s all in a jumble as if it was thrown up against the outer wall during demolition. This pile of debris is important because it indicates we are close to the original ground surface. Everything we find in this strata are likely to be objects from the time of the church.
We’re also expanding the locus of our excavations to include the red brick house across the street. This colonial-style house was built in 1884 and is 
amongst the earliest houses still remaining in the Hamline neighborhood. Assuming the house occupants were home in December 1925, they would have been some of our best witnesses to the fire at the Methodist church. We’ll be digging in the backyard and hoping to find features and artifacts from the early days of this house’s existence. This dig will be our first exploration of a domestic site. The contrast of this excavation with our digs at institutional sites (the church and the university) should provide a broader understanding of life in Hamline village 100 years ago.
