Old Dirt – New Thoughts

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.

The stone foundation’s exterior has a mortar covering most of the exposed stone to create a smooth surface. The foundation’s interior has no such surface covering, instead the stacked rock is clearly visible. Our excavations inside the church are producing more and more rubble, including fire-stained stone and brick – our first clear evidence of the fire that consumed the church.

^{Brenna with fire-stained brick from interior rubble}

Even more intriguing are the few small fragments of colored class we’ve found while excavating the foundation along the south end of our “T” trench. Some fragments are a bright blue, but this week we also found yellow-green glass. Our glass compares favorably with fragments found years ago by members of the congregation, which they identified as from the 1900 church. Are we finding glass fragments from the rose windows? How thick was the stained glass in these windows? (Our glass is about the same thickness as normal window glass). How many different colors were used in these windows? It’s difficult to tell anything about the 1900 church windows from the historic photographs, but rose windows in other churches were often extremely colorful. As usual, we find something in our excavations and we end up with twenty more questions to research!