The field phase of our Methodist church excavation is officially done. Yesterday, Hamline’s Grounds Services hauled back all our excavated dirt and filled in our trench. No backfilling by hand for us. My students will never truly appreciate their luck in missing this traditional part of archaeology.

We are now in the lab phase of our project. Our first step is to clean and inventory our collections. What to do with mortar? What to do with lumps of oxidized iron and sand? These are the “fire-cracked rock” of modern urban sites.

The stained glass shards are still my favorite artifact. The splash of color catches my eye as I move around the lab, especially compared to the earthy bricks, limestone, and rusty metal that dominate our collections. We are also finding some dramatic evidence of the fire that destroyed the church, especially as captured in the fusion of melted glass, nails, and wood. Once we finish the inventory we will begin the analysis phase. That’s when we make the real discoveries in archaeology.

Today’s cold weather was well timed. No one in the class seemed disappointed to finish the excavations on a day when the blustery north winds made it feel almost like winter. Personally I like working outside when November turns stormy. It makes coming into a warm house (or a warm lab) feel so good.

I’m very pleased with our accomplishments. Although we didn’t find the church’s organ, we did discover a few new things about Hamline village history. Our lab phase will bring these discoveries into focus, but the stained glass and other architectural details are the most obvious of our finds. The project was also a success as a community archaeology dig and, at least so far, as an educational opportunity. Its great to see how far my students have progressed as field archaeologists in such a short time.

A collapse of our trench wall created the greatest challenge to our research goals. I almost gave up on trying to reach the church basement.

We were down about 140 cm (4.5 feet) in our easternmost unit (farthest inside the church) and just starting to remove brick and mortar rubble last Thursday when the north trench wall collapsed. The sandy soil used to fill the church site after the demolition is so loose that its almost like trying to dig in a sandbox. Although a discouraging setback, we returned on Sunday and in couple hours opened a smaller unit (about 75 cm square) and punched through to the basement floor (200 cm below the ground surface). We found a layer of burned wood about 20 cm thick immediately on top of the concrete floor. Mixed in this burned layer we recovered some wood molding, lots of nails and other metal, a little glass, one ceramic sherd, and a small curved sheet of wall paper. This last find has a paisley print of muted earth-tone colors. We are storing it in the lab refrigerator until we have time to bring it to the conservation lab at the Minnesota Historical Society.

So what should we infer from the sparse finds inside the church (excluding architectural remains)? My guess is that we can say very little. The general absence of church artifacts in the small area of the basement we exposed does not necessarily mean the rest of the church interior would be equally unproductive to dig. As I pointed out to my students, we could “dig” a dozen small squares in our lab and not hit any “artifacts” even though our lab is overwhelmed with equipment and collections. What we are left with, after all our digging, is an inadequate sample from the church interior. The burned layer underneath the demolition rubble suggests an undisturbed fire scene. I think we need to come back to this site for another dig. We now know the stratigraphy and the foundation location. We know where to dig and how deep to go. We could dig a really big hole and I’m sure we’d find that church organ.

^{Stained glass shards found along the church foundation.}

We’re finding a lot of small shards of colored glass. We believe these are from the rose windows. The interesting aspect is the diversity of colors - mostly greens and yellows, but also blue and amber colors. I just held them up to the sunlight a few minutes ago as I photographed some of them for this blog.  While snapping this picture I realized the symbolism. After 80 years of darkness, sunlight is again shining through the church’s stained glass windows.

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!

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.

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}

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?

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 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.

^{Natalie documenting the wall. It doesn’t look like much in this picture, but it is the linear mass in the foreground with a limestone block on top of it.}

The wall we found is about a foot thick. It includes sturdy limestone blocks held together by a very friable concrete. Our first question is whether this is a load bearing wall, or an interior wall? It’s location, running parallel to Asbury Street, suggests it is the outer wall. We need to uncover more of the wall, however, to be sure we have an intact section and not just a chunk of wall floating in the fill layer. Digging deeper will also tell us whether the wall is actually thicker than it appears. Possibly we’re just looking at a narrow remnant of a more substantial wall.

I find the friable cement very curious. It literally brushes away when we try to clean it up. I’m assuming that the church was built before Portland cement became common in construction. Can we determine what kind mortar was used and whether it’s poor condition is to be expected? Maybe the fire weakened the foundation?

Who were the craftspeople that built this wall? What kind of construction techniques did they employ? Was the church built in a standard or vernacular style, or did the craftspeople add unique touches based on their backgrounds and experience?

Besides the wall, we also found some decorative cement work and a small piece of blue flat glass (from a stained glass window?). I’ll write more about these later. I’m excited about the possibility that these finds will add to our knowledge about the architectural details incorporated into the church.