September Unit Updates
Our semester-long excavation at the Community Education Center began in early September. Since then, our crew has included eleven community members and ten Penn undergraduates, who have been working in four distinct excavation areas on the CEC’s property. In addition, we have had countless visits from people passing by to ask what we’re doing, share stories, and even join in the excavation. In this post, our students summarize what we’ve learned so far!
Students and community volunteers screen the soil that has been excavated to recover small artifacts.
Test Units 1, 4, and 5: 32 N. 35th Street (Structure)
(Summarized by Lauren Davis, Lily Davis, and Ashley Ray)
This unit is located on the former site of a wooden twin home, built in the early 1850s; our excavation here consists of three adjacent 1 meter x 1 meter (about 3 foot square) units. Two units have begun to reveal wall remnants from one of the homes (visible in the first picture below), while another unit may contain part of the building’s basement (refer to this blog post for greater detail). A gravel layer (likely from the 1960s destruction of the site) separates modern debris, such as nails (like the one held by a community volunteer in the second picture below), Rain-blo gum wrappers, and electrical covers (like the one in the third picture below), with artifacts from the 1930s structures (such as the 1927 penny in the fourth picture below). Additional findings, such as ceramic and iron and glass slag fragments, indicate that the location could possibly have been a site of household industry, and glass bottle shards may have come from a nearby dairy farm or been otherwise used by the people who lived in the house.
Test Unit 3: 32 N. 35th Street (Privy)
(Summarized by Baoying Hu and Sydney Kahn)
The circular outline of this brick-lined privy was visible from the surface of the CEC parking lot (see the drawn map in the first picture below), a clear roadmap to an amazing collection of discarded objects from the past 100 years. There’s another visible privy on the lot, but we chose this one because it would have been within the property lines of 32 N. 35th Street, the subject Test Units 1, 4, and 5, and thus could give us a more complete picture of its residents’ lives. Our plan is to excavate one half of the circle (see the second picture below), allowing us to see a complete cross section of the privy’s history from its use as a latrine and dump for the house before 1930, through a layer of clayey, clean fill that was placed in the privy before its reuse as a dump by the Quaker school after 1930 (which would be the material that is closest to the surface). So far, we’ve dug about 3 feet down (see the third picture below), recovering artifacts like slate pencils, a cow bone, and a lice comb from the Quaker school layer, then a pipestem (held by one of the students in the fourth picture below), oyster shell, and thin glass shards—possibly from a picture frame—from layers within and below the clean fill. We aren’t sure how deep the privy goes in total, but, since there have been no known privy excavations in West Philly, we’ll be the first ones to find out!
Test Unit 2: Warren St. Rowhomes
(Summarized by Megan Kassabaum)
Our geophysical survey revealed a large area of rubble throughout the area of three brick Warren St. rowhomes that were torn down during the large-scale 1960s destruction of the Black Bottom neighborhood. Our first levels of excavation encountered the same layer of white gravel that was identified in the other units, which was laid down after the demolition. Underneath, students and community members (see the first two pictures below) began uncovering lots of broken bricks and other construction materials (nails, tile, and plaster), as well as some small artifacts such as a straight pin, pieces of shell, and a bone button. The bone button (shown in the third picture below) inspired a former Black Bottom resident to tell us a story about a woman who she remembered getting dressed up for church in outfits covered in “Buttons ‘n’ Bows,” a phrase that became her nickname. Last Friday, we uncovered a dense layer of brick (visible in the fourth picture below) that covers the bottom of our excavation unit, fits with what we expected to see based on the geophysical survey, and clearly shows how complete the destruction of the brick rowhomes was.
Test Unit 6: Front of the CEC Building
(Summarized by Sarah Hinkel and Nikki Meyer)
We went in not knowing what we’d find in this unit. We chose to put this unit in the front yard with the hopes of drawing in community members walking along Lancaster Avenue to engage with the project and share their experiences (see the first photo below for a view of the scene from the sidewalk and the second photo for a snapshot of community members touring the site). We have been excavating with shovels (see the third photo below) and are currently at a depth of 23 centimeters (9 inches); in the two levels we have dug, we have found pottery–including two white-and-blue fine porcelain sherds and a patterned red clay crock–metal, lots of coal, and plastic (see the fourth photo below) . As we continue moving forward we hope to investigate a dark feature in the soil, that we think may potentially be a pit, related to landscaping activity, or associated with a pine tree that used to stand in this spot.
