The Legacy of Fort William Henry: Resurrecting the Past

7 Artifacts Discovered at the Fort

7 Artifacts Discovered at the Fort Every summer that we dig at Fort William Henry, we have operated a field laboratory somewhere on the grounds of the fort, either within a reconstructed barracks building or inside the Cemetery Building that is south of the fort’s parking lot (fig. 7.1). A visit to our field lab in the 1990s found Merle Parsons, a retired school teacher, in charge, and her successor in 2011 and 2012 was Elizabeth “Betty” Hall, yet another retired school teacher with a passion for archeology. Thousands of visitors have now had a chance to visit our summer labs at the fort, where they can watch volunteers wash, sort, and identify artifacts. A great many of these visitors have stayed to ask questions, which is fine with us because we like to believe that our work is meaningful and pleasurable for others. After all, why spend hundreds of hours washing pottery sherds and rusty nails if they aren’t going to provide interesting stories for visitors? Our processing and identification of artifacts has continued every winter at Plymouth State University, where literally thousands of fragments of glass, pottery, nails, bones, and armaments have been cleaned, bagged, and entered into artifact catalogs on a computer. The old adage that laboratory work takes at least three times as long as actual excavation is, if anything, an underestimate. As ongoing analyses are completed, artifacts from recent excavations are gradually being added to those from the 1950s excavations and kept in secure storage rooms at Fort William Henry. Although many of the best artifacts discovered during the 1950s are currently on display, there are many others that have always been in storage or that periodically rotate between storage and display as exhibits are updated. Over a hundred boxes of artifacts recovered between 1997 and the present are now in the process of being added to the fort’s permanent collections, thanks to the field work of the State University of New York Adirondack archeologists, the laboratory work at Plymouth State University, and especially the identifications of Betty Hall. A rich body of literature describing eighteenth-century artifacts has been created by archeologists and specialists in early American material culture. Preeminent among these are A Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America (Noel Hume 1969) and Fort Michilimackinac 1715–1781 (Stone 1974), but other excellent artifact descriptions are also available in Michael Coe (2006), and Lynn 72 ✴ legacy of fort william henry Evans (2003), Jacob Grimm (1970), Lee Hanson and Dick Ping Hsu (1975), Karlis Karklins (2000), George Neumann and Frank Kravic (1975), Catherine Sullivan (1986), and David Starbuck (2010). In addition, every archeological site report typically includes lists of the artifacts found, permitting detailed comparisons from site to site. These comparisons are essential in order to investigate sources of supply, the routes along which supplies traveled , and consumer choices (personal preferences) in the eighteenth century. At an even deeper level, analysis of the artifacts recovered through archeology permits interpretations about the quality of life when people were far from their original homes and the degree to which the latest innovations in consumer goods had spread to frontier settings. Thus at Fort William Henry we need to ask whether the armaments, tools, tableware, provisions, and personal artifacts were the same as at contemporary British forts and domestic sites in the colonies. And if not, why not? Because this was an outpost on the far frontier of colonial America, should we assume that soldiers possessed “just the basics”? Were there any amenities, any traces of the lives that soldiers and officers had known back home in England or in the American colonies? The 1950s When the northwest bastion of Fort William Henry was excavated in the 1950s, Stanley Gifford and his team uncovered a superlative collection of armaments that included large quantities of musket balls, smaller lead shot, 7.1. Identifying artifacts inside the cemetery building in the summer of 2012. Artifacts Discovered at the Fort ✴ 73 grapeshot, and canister shot (fig. 7.2), bayonets, halberds, fragments of mortar shells, and gunflints—that is, a very military assemblage. (Examples of these are illustrated in Starbuck 2010.) This was superb evidence of the French assault on the fort and the British defense of it. In the parade ground and barracks areas, Gifford also discovered a more domestic assemblage, including pottery and glass, hoes, spades, tobacco pipes, buttons, and all of the paraphernalia...