 How's the sound? Can you hear me in the back? Excellent. Thank you all for braving the elements today to come out to listen to this talk. This is one that is very near and dear to my heart because archaeology is the subject that I have been passionate about since I was very young. I did get a degree finally in my late 30s in archaeology. Do not have the field experience of the many archaeologists in the area whose work I have come to know and respect. So I'm going to, this is a tribute to archaeology and Civil War history. And it's an overview of where we have come from and where we hope to go. What you see on the screen today is a little bit of promotion for Knox County and our sesquicentennial commission. Knox County a year ago recognized the importance of commemorating our Civil War past and we've been working 15 member committee putting together events such as this and more that you will see. 2013 is our big year. That's the year where most of what happened in Knoxville happened. And so that will be our 150th. So it looked to August of 2013. We have wonderful things going on south of the river that we'll be talking about and downtown. This is one of those things downtown. This is the visitor's center at Blunt Mansion and we will be opening a downtown gateway. This is not meant as a destination by itself but this will be an information center for guided tours, walking tours, self-guided tours, maps, all of that information that we've been collecting now about what is Civil War history. And this will be open, hopefully it'll be open six days a week, 11 to five, that's our grand plan if we just get somebody to fund it. It always comes down to that. But this is a downtown presence in Knoxville that Knoxville has not had in 150 years in terms of Civil War history. All right, let's look at archeology and the study of Knoxville's Civil War past. How do we know where to look? Well, basically we have, this is in quotes, Poe called it his beautiful map. When he perceived the copy of this map in March of 64, fresh from the printers, he looked at it, he wrote to his wife's center copy and he said just simply it is a beautiful map and it is, it is a very technically and topographically and geographically and all of that militarily this is a beautiful map. But we can go one step further today and many of you know we've already done this and we have Mr. Charles Reeds here who actually did the beautiful graphics for it. What we can do is we can take Poe's beautiful map and we can enlarge it, we can fly over it, we can superimpose today on yesterday. These pale lines, I'll go a little bigger here, are the streets of Knoxville in present day. These blue lines and red lines are the union fortifications and the Confederate fortifications. The railroad is exactly where it was. Kingston Pike is where it was. When you look at the downtown grid, and I'll just move it slowly, you can see that our present day streets line up with the downtown just as it was in 1863, 64. The river very, you'd think it'd be different for at least wider because of what TVA did back in the time, what, 20s and 30s and TVA in the 40s even longer. But in fact, the river is very close to what it was. River was called the Holston at this time, same river though, and on the south side of the river you can see beautiful details of topography and military installations. This particular one is interesting. There's a beautiful quarry on the Fort Dickerson property. If anybody's ever been out there, you can stand and overlook and it is a spectacularly impressive natural, well not natural, it's not natural, it's a whole dug in the ground to quarry stone out of. But underneath it, it coincides exactly. Bright blue line is today's water and the blue line underneath it is a union fortification. So some of these are irretrievably lost, but, and I'll talk about these piece by piece because of some amazing things that have happened in the past four years. We now have the possibility of saving, interpreting and making a true community resource of these beautiful places south of the river. Now, let's see, we'll go back to PoseMap and other maps. Knoxville is extremely well documented. I don't know if many of you are familiar with this one. This map was done by a man who was a private from Ohio. He came here in 1864. He was stationed at the top of Fort Dickerson and he was an amateur artist and he gave us this very detailed drawing of what Knoxville looked like and of course he's a soldier and he's interested in fortification. So here we have Fort Sanders, here we have the top of the hill at UT, we have Fort Dickerson where he is staying himself where his troops are and the downtown grid. This is Cumberland Gap. And when I first thought I thought, well, that's an exaggeration but he probably knew it was there because so many of the troops came down through Cumberland Gap after the original Union occupation but as it turns out, there's a letter from a man who was writing in 1864 and a soldier from another unit. He is on top of Fort Dickerson and he describes seeing Cumberland Gap in the distance. So I imagine that those two accounts completely unrelated to each other probably verify pretty well that the Cumberland Gap can be seen from the top of Fort Dickerson. I have never personally seen it. I don't know if the air is not as clear now. We certainly know that's true but from the top of Fort Dickerson with all of the trees down as they were during the war the view must have been spectacular. So this kind of information is another way that we know what Knoxville sites looked like in 1864, what buildings were where, what the street pattern was like. We did find out these hearts. This is a little bit of a side story. The hearts attributed to Valentine's Day were the reason that this particular picture was saved. It was in a collection in Ohio in an old Valentine collection. As it turns out, the heart is actually the symbol of the 23rd Army Corps and this was never meant to be a Valentine but it got saved because somebody thought it was and so this one kind of happened into the present day. That's the way a lot of artifacts just happen into the present day. Mostly, very frequently, it's completely random as to what shows up 150 years after something happens. This map, not as clear and the point of this map is that it has a key. I think what happened was a man named Seth Abbey who was a sergeant. He was about 65 years old. He was a sergeant, very unusual. For a man that old to be in the ranks but I think what it is that he copied the poem map and then he added a wonderful key with all of these different points of interest and with those little letters. So if you look at his map in detail and you can blow it up. Oh, the power of computers is just wonderful. You can blow it up and you can find all those little letters and you can find where the Baptist church was or the steam flowering mill or the grist mill or the mansion house. All of these things are labeled and they're put onto this Abbey map. This one exists in Nashville and they've been working very hard on the archives, the state archives to digitize these old maps and make them available to us online. It's a resource that is fascinating. You can sit down at seven o'clock at night and look up at 11 and realize that you have been playing with old maps for four hours. Another way we have documentation of what was where, the newspaper. Now of course these aren't gonna be as accurate. These were not produced by the military. They had embeds, they had reporters on the scene, they had people writing up the history but for instance here you can see Dr. Roger's house. This is a house that was mentioned several times in other documentation. There was a diary by a lady named Elizabeth Carat, wait a minute, Baker, this is Baker Crozier. Okay, Elizabeth Baker Crozier was a diarist and she mentions action south of the river at Dr. Roger's house. That's in a letter and her diary and there we have Dr. Roger's house again on the map. That big beautiful map of Knox County has Dr. Roger's house on it. So but it's very comforting to find reinforcement so that you find in several places the same information about a place that is still potentially on the map. You can see here too, it tells us this is where the 27th Kentucky was lined up, the 24th Kentucky camp, Wilder's battery, all of this great information about where people were, where the units were, where they were positioned. And of course it's not static, they may have moved around but this paper is very nicely dated right there, December 5th, 1863, New York Tribune and there we have a snapshot in time on the ground south of the river. Now another kind of information we have about what was there is this kind of military drawing. This was then in 64, it was not done by Poe, the original Fort Sanders at least at the time of the attack which was November 63 just had these front two bastions, the western bastions were completed. This work was completed by a man named Davis Tilson, he was an engineering officer and he came to Knoxville after Poe left, Poe in fact was personally recruited by Sherman to go with him and be the engineer in charge of the march to the city. Poe was the one who put down the corduroy roads, who figured out how to rip up railroad tracks. I suspect he's the one who invented Sherman bow ties if you've ever heard of what they did to railroad ties so they couldn't be used again. You heat them in the middle of a fire, it gets malleable and then you can pull the tie in that kind of position around a tree. It's a very effective way of making a railroad inoperable and Poe because of the work that he did here, Sherman who got here in early December after the battle was over, met Poe and was very impressed with his abilities and so Sherman went for a little while to Nashville but then he went down, he was on the campaign with Sherman, he was in Atlanta, he was in Savannah, he was in Columbia and his papers are at Library of Congress, he wrote a diary. He was a man with an eye on the future, he wrote extensively, daily, letters, diaries, notation and he also made sure that all of those papers were donated to Library of Congress so they are all available. Now another good way to know what was there is if you like this. This is somewhere between a map and a painting but the larger version is printed in 1871, this is Gay Street, this is the nice residential area where people who could afford to want it to live, this is St. John's Episcopal Church. Over here is First Presbyterian Church and you can see they're not just little blocks, the detail of the architecture is there. Down here, Perez Dickinson's house with the same kind of architecture we know from other ways and I'll tell you a little more about that. So this kind of schematic is extremely useful in looking at what was there and what might be left in the archeological record. Now of course we've got photography. This was a portrait, a painting, a picture, a photograph, four panels taken in 1866. By Manning Schlierer, he was a photographer here in Knoxville and this can be blown up again with a wonderfulness of computers. This is Second Presbyterian Church. This is the Methodist Church, Church Street Methodist Church before it enlarged itself and before then that enlarged congregation moved itself over to Henley Street. So this is where those two churches were pretty much across the street from each other. This is the courthouse, Gay Street. Again, First Presbyterian Church, very easy to recognize. The railroad is up in this direction and of course there's the river and this detail when you blow it up is amazing. You can see the wash on the clothesline. That is one way they told, I think it's this one, that they said this must have been taken on a Monday. Monday's wash day. You can also tell by the shadows what time of day. Sun's gonna be over here in the west. This is a late afternoon photograph. There are so many of those kinds of hints as to what's going on, when this was, where it was that can be derived from the detail in it and they don't just depend, well, depending on the resolution of course. If you get the right resolution, when you enlarge it, it doesn't just become big pixels which is very frustrating when you're trying to find detail. But the detail in here has been captured by the camera and when you enlarge it, you can get after detail that is astounding in some cases. Now of course we also have a full scale excavation. Not to name names, but Steve Dean and Smiley Clap and Earl Heth were responsible for putting together just an amazingly accurate full scale reproduction of Fort Sanders out in East Knox County. And I often think about that first conversation when Steve called Earl to say, and Earl, Dr. Heth is a military fortifications expert. We're so fortunate to have him in our area and we can ask him about all the details that only an expert would know. But can you imagine the first phone call when Steve calls him and says, yeah, I'm gonna build a full scale replica of Fort Sanders. And Earl was probably going, uh-huh, let me know when you're finished. That's interesting to hear, really, but he did. And this was built for the DVD that we put together to go with our exhibit. The battle that was reenacted for this DVD so that we had the authenticity was reenacted on a full scale replica of Fort Sanders. And since that time in the fall, in October, they've had reenactments and educational programming and just very well done, historically accurate, historically sympathetic events out at this fort that's still there. It is, before the sesquicentennial, there will be another event at that location. It's not exactly hidden, but it is on private property and it is in a cow pasture. And so it's not open to the public. But when these events are announced, they are welcoming everyone to come and learn and see what this is like. Apparently the guys who did the first reenactment were beside themselves to be able to try to charge up this parapet that Confederates did. The blood in the DVD is authentic. They scraped their knuckles, they tripped over the wire. It was, nobody had ever had a better weekend, I think. Now, of course, we've also got an 18, well, an 1863, 150-year-old, almost entirely intact in the park south of the river called Fort Dickerson. And it's beautiful. Unfortunately, we have not really protected it in a way. You go some places in the state and they have wooden ramps so that the people can walk out into the middle and look at the earthwork. You don't get to run all over it and picnic on it and all of that. Plus, these trees are an issue. And the park service has done a lot of work trying to figure out what do you do with a 150-year-old genuine artifact? If you take the trees down, it's gonna disrupt it. Trees are natural, but they weren't there in 1863. There are a lot of issues when you think about preserving, interpreting, making it, stabilizing it, but also making it available to the public for historical, to re-live the past. It's real, it's there. It's really not deteriorating much now because it's got grass and leaves all over it, but it is also a perishable resource. And of course, some of the things we have in town, like what they call during the War of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum looks exactly as it did in 1840, but it was built in 48 and it was used by the Confederates for the first half of the war as a hospital and by the Union during the second half. So this is a living, working artifact and it looks now, it's gone through several stages. I believe it was stuck old for a while. It was a city hall for a while. It's gone through several uses. It was TDA used it for a while and now the Duncan Law School. But it is a beautiful building that has certainly survived the test of time and kind of wish they didn't put that big high rise behind it. She said, it spoils that cut off as much as it could, but it does kind of spoil the skyline. So anyway, what does archeologically collected knowledge bring to the historic record? Once we've got all of that, and I didn't even talk about the official reports and the letters and the diaries and those kinds of detail. What else do we need to know? How is it that we don't know everything that there is to know about that time period? Why bother digging in the ground? Well, there are some good reasons to dig in the ground. First of all, we can support that historic record. There's nothing like reading primary documentation and then reading some of the history books to realize history's all about interpretation. And it's like every time, you know, we hear of to the victor goes the spoils, well to the victor goes the history. The winner gets to write what happened and not all of our historic records are as actually based as we think they are. You have to be a very critical consumer to look at any kind of historic interpretation and believe it, at face value. There's no downside to reinforcing what you think you know is true about history and archeology can certainly do that by physical remains. Also, refutation, well the flip side is you may have believed something forever and when they went to look for it in the ground there was some way that all of a sudden the evidence said no, that's wrong. That's what you thought, that didn't happen that way. Of course, another thing is you can augment history. Maybe all the details didn't make it into the history books. For instance, the African American history in Knoxville is very sparse as it is all over the South before Emancipation, before written history. So it was oral tradition, oral culture, many, some slaves, enslaved people could write things down but there was no formal mechanism for transmitting written history. And so using archeological data is a great way to fill in the historic record for whole elements of our society who didn't get included. Also, there are brand new discoveries to be made. There are things that come out of the ground that you had no idea was a part of whatever it is, go into it thinking you know something about. Also, it's not just items that show up archeologically and we have real archeologists here in the room who know that what you're looking at is the relationship between artifacts and features. Features are stains in the dirt, they are remnants of burned material, they're wagon wheel ruts, they're things that you can't take away and put in the museum, but they are always important when it comes to telling the complete story of what happened there on the ground physically in the past. And also now archeology has so many wonderful scientific techniques to apply to dirt, to apply to the things that come out of the dirt. And also archeologists will tell you it's a never good idea if you can help it to completely excavate any site. If archeology is destructive, just like anything else, when you dig a hole in the ground what you've got left is a hole. And if you haven't documented it very, very meticulously on the way down with all of the tools that we have now, photography and computer measurements and all of that, well then you've done no good. But also if you completely excavate the site then you have taken the possibility away from future archeologists who are gonna come in with surely bigger and better kinds of scientific techniques to get even more data out of the ground. It made me, we used to be that we scrubbed all of our artifacts and we made them clean and pretty. And then we discovered DNA could be taken from tools, from weapons. And then it seemed like maybe that wasn't such a good idea to clean them up quite so well. So there are things that will come in the future that maybe we know about now and think we're gonna do and things that we can't even guess. But responsible archeology will leave some of it so that in the future it might be revisited. Of course there are times when you have no option. It's gone and we're gonna talk about that now. All right, yeah it's a little wordy. I'll just read this to you. The cycle of human activity is first of all actions of the present fade into time. Physical remains are subject to the destruction of natural forces. Many locations face the additional destruction of successive human activity, development or progress. Some events and errors are vital to our understanding of who we are as individuals, a community, a nation. Professionals have sophisticated methods for retrieval of what remains in the ground. Laboratories provide analysis and preservation. Museums do interpretation, exhibits and programming. Using archeological results, a museum such as ours offers artifact conservation, preservation and archiving. We do educational touring. We have school kids here and senior groups and church groups and anybody who we can accommodate. We are welcome to come and see what has been preserved in this institution. Also we have education collections for students. There is our students, our younger students, older students get a big thrill out of handling real artifacts. Things from Native American pastings from Civil War pasts. They're a certain subset of what we get. We don't know anything about it and it's not a risk to let people handle them. And so those things are made available for education and also our exhibits. I was very pleased to see many of you looking at the Civil War exhibits and the archeological exhibit on the way through. So, and also a museum is for what we're doing here today. Programs for the historical enrichment of the entire community in Knoxville and the thousands of descendants of the men from all around our nation who fought and died here 150 years ago. This is important. It's not just regional, although there's nothing wrong with just regional, but this is something that applies to what happened to our whole country 150 years ago. Now, there have been many years of archeological effort that have been gone, the people in this room, I just wanna, I won't embarrass you by having to stand up, but Dr. Jefferson Chapman over here, Mike Boss, has been, this report was in 1980 and we have all up here, Mike and Jennifer, they are archeologists in the field today. Are there any other professional archeologists here? Anybody? All right, well these are the people who know the science of it, who know, and it is hard work, believe me, and most of it is truly boring. You are so focused on details and going down, down, down, flake by flake of dirt before you find anything interesting, but the science of saving that stuff and producing for posterity something that would have been lost is really very gratifying. So I wanna start with back in 1982 and those of you who have been here for longer than I have know that the Hilton Hotel on Church Street was built about that time and about the time the archeologists from UT got access to the site, this is what it already looked like. Yeah, there was not a preliminary plan. There was, I don't even know what the legislation was then. Right now, if you are using any kind of federal money, you're required to do an archeological impact survey, but I'm not sure if that's okay. Was there federal money with this, Jeff? No. So this is what it looked like when they started trying to say, whoa, halt, let us just take a quick look at what you've got here. And they did that. They produced several reports for this whole downtown project that looks like this. Another thing too, when I started looking at these reports from the early 80s up until now, the technology for producing photographs and producing charts and graphs and printed material and all of that, we have just blitzed into the future in terms of being able to technologically, not just with words or sketches, but with detailed, well, I'll show you. I'll show you, I won't tell you. This is what it looked like and this is what they said in that early days. Finally, as a result of follow-through, they arched archeologists at the University of Tennessee some beneficial means of raising awareness and recruiting support with regard to the need and methods of preserving our cultural resources have been presented to city government agencies, private developers, and other responsible individuals. Admittedly, not every cultural resource can be saved simply because it is there, but it is hoped that the management of such valuable resources can soon become the focus of strategically planned investigations to learn something of our past cultural heritage. So that was 30, what, 32 years ago and we're still working towards that goal. In downtown Knoxville, there was another site that was excavated in 1988 in the sovereign bank site. It is beside the beautiful Baptist Church and it's there still, the Baptist Church was not on that site during the Civil War. It was on Gay Street, but any rate, this is the family home of Perez Dickinson. He was a man who came to Knoxville from New England. He was a distant cousin of Emily Dickinson and no, she never came. Some of our local history says, oh, Emily came and wrote such and such poetry while visiting her cousin. Probably not. Emily didn't travel much. She was a recluse and she probably was never here in Knoxville. When he died, very wealthy man, very modest tombstone, but he chose to put on his tombstone a resident of Knoxville, 71 years. He was very proud of the fact that he was a Tennessean. He built a very large, beautiful home on this lot on Main Street and this is an 1856 sketch. This is, as you can see, a very old photograph. This is a blow up from one of those 1866 photographs and you can see it kind of steps down the hill. They called it Italianate and it doesn't, I don't know what that means, but architects do. This shows you, it was rather significantly enhanced in the front. This was when it was the Adkins Mansion. It was apparently demolished in about 1949 to build a parking lot. And I talked, some of the most finest people in town I go out to visit are the thanks alive group at the Baptist Church. We had so much fun, they're very concerned about history and community and all of that, but when I was, I asked them one time about the Adkins Mansion and they said, well, we had the opportunity to buy it, but it was a lot of money and it was such an old building and someone else had put in. Anyway, I thought it had happened within the past 10 or 20 years, but the Saints Alive Group, when I realized the average age, they were talking about whether it was just happened. 1949 wasn't all that long ago, apparently, in some of the working memories of the leveling members of the Saints Alive Group. So we taught, when I came out of the discussion, as they said, I thought it just happened, but in fact it was 1949 when this building was lost. The facts from the excavation. This is one of those times where people actually used archeological data to look at a sociological issue. That is, was Perez Dickinson a slave owner? Perez came from New England. He came to Knoxville. He first, he was gonna be a teacher. He discovered that it was way more lucrative to be a merchant and so he went into business with his brother-in-law, James Cowan and they became Cowan and Dickinson or Dickinson and Cowan, one of those and then they got together with him, Clungs. Anyway, he was one of the wealthiest men in town. He did very excellent trading. During the war, we know that he went back up north for a while, he came back in 1864. Early in the war, he was brought before a court who they questioned his loyalty to the Confederate cause. There was some kind of fine involved, but one of the more oral traditions about him was that he was an abolitionist, that he had established an abolitionist newspaper that he allowed African Americans to conduct church services on his back porch. All of these things kind of reinforced the idea that he was an early advocate of emancipation and release of slave, demolishing slavery as an institution in this area. When they excavated his property, there were slave quarters and when you look at the tax records, he paid tax on slave and there's really the physical record of the slaves, it was his house, he built it. And so that's pretty conclusive right there. And that's one way where kind of oral tradition, history people think they know and archeology can come together and the record can be corrected. There's no doubt that he was a slave owner. And that's pretty much everybody in town. There were no ardent abolitionists. In Knoxville had slaves, domestic servants mostly. The terrain, the landscape was not especially conducive to large scale farming, plantation. There weren't very many slave holders with large numbers and slavery was not a major issue for Knoxvillians and Knox Countyans when it came to reasons that were going to war. Now that does not diminish the issue and the larger scope of the war, but in this area, it wasn't that people were anti-slavery or pro-slavery. It wasn't economically effective. There was no reason economically to have large numbers of slaves. But morally or religiously or whatever, most Knoxvillians did not have an issue with slavery. Now the second one, and there were probably others, and I didn't try to do totally every excavation that was out there, but this one was good because in 1993, the Severville Hill site, which is on the far east of the south of the river line, this would have been way down here. I realize most of you can't see this, but it's on the south side of the river and it's about as far east as the federal's put in any kind of fortification. So this site was basically Bleylock construction. It had bought the hill for dirt and they did, however very kindly agreed an archeological excavation and helped to fund it. So this is what was going on in 1993. There are some very interesting features. This is a hearth with the logs in it that's the excavated hearth. Some of the artifacts that came out of it, these things are, there's a, pencil lead, and this would be the pencil lead, and this is probably the tooth of a comb, pipe fragment, a wet stone, and this is a tiny little dice, or die, one dice, one dice, it, and these artifacts are actually in our exhibit upstairs if you look up there, you can see them. These are tiny little things. They are not impressive. They're not musket balls and the sabers and that sort of thing, but they do tell the story of what it was like for soldiers living in the back side, the city side, the back side of the hill, the front side of the hill is defended to the south, so the soldiers are gonna live on the back of the hill and this report produced some very interesting information about how these cabins were constructed and what kind of artifacts they left behind. And this is a picture of what it looks like out in our exhibit. Now, this is 2006. This is on the south side of the river, right along Cherokee Trail. Many of you may have seen it going in. After a grueling fight, and this was not something I knew about actually at that point, I really didn't know too much of the details, but the land was sold to a developer and there were people in town who knew a lot about it and have spent hours and hours of personal time trying to get a historic overlay on this property, trying to convince city government that the land was civil war significant, that there could be some stuff there, but the process, whatever transpired, I do not have all of those details, but what I do know is this is what the end result was. The big earth moving equipment went in. There you go. And this is the kind of stuff that came out of the ground. These pictures are, there was an amateur historian, oh, the guy who, he's a reenactor, he's extremely interested in civil war history. While the bulldozers were moving around, there were guys out there with metal detectors. They were trespassing, it was illegal. At this point, it was a done deal, and yet they felt that it was worth the risk and they were eventually told to move off. But this is the kind of stuff that they were pulling out of the ground. All of these musket balls, the straps, there's one of these cases, and I can't see the details too well, but there's a Whitworth rifle shell, which if anybody knows armaments from Whitworth, it's a rare beast, it's a long range sniper rifle that the Confederates had. Stuff like this, more musket balls or mini balls, fork buttons. I think he divided them so that the red are Confederate artifacts and the blue are union. Big artillery pieces, one of that. And this was all way after the fact, but right here is a human jawbone and a human tooth. If this had been reported, this would have shut down the excavation. This is hallowed ground. This is a Civil War veteran. That's all we know of there. There was not a full skeleton excavated, or if there was, it was gone. The man who showed me this stuff said, his brother-in-law has way more than this in his garage, and it's an opportunity that we missed. It was by the time all of the legal process and the opposition and whatever we did as a community to try to at least survey it before it went to condos, that did not happen. So, things got better. All of a sudden, the economy fell apart. And the property went back on the market. I guess that's a good thing in some ways because in 2008, I can't remember what this year is. I said, hey, I can't remember what this year is. Anyway, the Aslan Foundation and Legacy Park Foundation have gotten together, and we have an unexpected second chance for that property south of the river. In 2009, we hired the archeological expertise of NAC-Tech, and they did, and this is the Civil War Roundtable and the Aslan Foundation, and we did an archeological survey of Fort Higley. This is using laser techniques to get the lay of the land, and this is great. This is a beautiful map, topographical map, feature map. The yellow here, this is the modern road that cut through, and up here, there was a house. But the rest of these things are Civil War era, and they are just where they were and it's very nicely preserved, at least as a geographic location and fortifications. Again, you can see the detail that went into this. Unfortunately, we did not find a single artifact. Now, there wasn't meant to be completely excavated, that wasn't the point, it was a survey, but this area had been so thoroughly metal detected that there was nothing left. There was one tiny piece of barbed wire, and barbed wire is post-Civil War. About this big and a pop-top, that was it. And we hear that there are basements all over Knoxville, marked Fort Higley that have stuff. And you know that if it was going to go condo as it was supposed to, well those things we would call, we would say, well thank goodness, that somebody saved it before it got demolished. But since we had the chance to do archeology, we're very disappointed that there was nothing left to augment the information that we have about this site. However, this site is saved and it is beautiful and it is being interpreted and it will be part of the thousand acres south of the river, starting up at IAMS and going down to UT Medical Center that Legacy Parks is working on. The amount of community involvement and support, the trails, the biking club, I think it is, the Smoky Mountain Biking Club. Anybody hear from that group? Anyway, apparently these guys can put in a trail in a weekend. It is an incredible asset for an urban area such as ours to have this acreage with the historic sites, the history, the beautiful Tennessee woodlands, the views from up there, the river. It is going to be something this community can be very, very proud of. Now we did a second archeological survey at the Higley property, this is near Loghaven. And this was done the next year in 2010. We had a beautiful old historic hearth chimney. This is what the excavation looked like. In front of the hearth, there was an area called a, it's either a vegetable cellar or, well there's not a good name for it. Any help? Root cellar, that's it. Root cellar. And it's just a natural collection site for things that fall down on the floor, fall through the cracks, maybe even they might have swept the floor and things might have gone into here. But there was a lot of stuff in here. I was personally hoping for a femur with a mini ball in it because this was supposed to be a hospital site. We had the opportunity to talk to a lady who's father bought the place in 1944. And when I called her on the phone, the first thing she said was, it was a Civil War hospital, you know. And I said, well I'd heard that but how did you know that? And she said, well, the man who sold it to daddy said that it was a Civil War hospital. So, okay, and we'd had indications in the records that there, now a hospital in Civil War times really just means anything with a roof. Some place to get the guy's hand out of the elements. And on the 25th of November, 1863, the Battle of Armstrong Hill that produced all of those artifacts that you saw that came out through the red dirt, there were casualties. And it makes sense that one of the very few buildings in the area would be used for casualties. However, once again, the Civil War, whatever, if there had been Civil War artifacts here, we did not find them. We did find some great stuff. This, for instance, is the sill of the original cabin. I asked the lady about who had lived there, well, what about the historic cabin on the site? And she said, well, I didn't know any cabin, I never saw a cabin. And we had already known that there was this pile of logs from a historic cabin that somewhere in some kind of effort to preserve, people had stacked them, had numbered them, there had been a cabin on the property, but the lady who lived there said she had no idea, she'd never seen a cabin. As it turned out, those sills, the hearth, the original settlers' cabin, which was probably started built in the 1820s, had been completely enclosed by the house that was built up around it. So when the house that was from the 40s, 30s, 40s was demolished inside with a settlers' cabin. That's not unusual. That happens in East Tennessee really quite a lot. They kind of just build it around and they put some sheet rock or lathe or something, plaster on the old walls and then build out and expand and these treasures can be found inside. Now this one was found before, well, somebody did try to preserve it. As I said, they did stack it off to the side, they did number the logs, but it was too far gone for us to preserve it. So, but that information was interesting, valuable and absolutely that building was there in 1863. However, the amputation pit that we thought maybe we find or any of those good things like maybe an insignia, just something, not to be gory about it, but to say this Civil War history happened here and here is a story to be told. But artifacts did come out of the ground. This is a very odd looking pipe. One of my colleagues here tells me there's one similar to this in a museum in Florida. It would have been a tobacco pipe. You got a bone-handled knife, a coin, 1897. It's always nice to have a coin. Nothing like a nice date falling into the pit and below and above. Of course, as archeologists will tell you, you can't be sure that things didn't get stirred up at some point and some of the time stratigraphy is, well, hard to give full credibility. Nevertheless, these are the kinds of things that came out of that pit in front of the hearth. Lots of pieces of pottery, these kinds of personal use items. Early in the excavation, they did find a finger bone, but that was it in terms of anything like. And of course, on a house site, cabin site like this, there are very, very many ways you can lose a finger bone, so that didn't contribute to our knowledge of the Civil War past. Now, Morgan Hill, this is the beautiful exhibit that is curated and exhibited out here, and this is the one that Mike worked on and produced a report for us that was just spectacular. There's, in the exhibit out here, this is unpublished. This is a painting by Ken Smith, who's a Civil War artist. This is basically for everyone who lives here in front of Tyson Junior High School on Kingston Pike, where that big tide box building is, on the other side of the road, where the sorority village is going in. This is where this Confederate artillery line was positioned. It's on post map, and they found it pretty much where a post said it was. This is standing up in that student housing building now looking down. Remember what that site looked like before? All the construction was going on. Started, it's going on now. Up to the side here, these are hearts that were cut into the sidewall of the trench. It's November. It is freezing cold. The troops, Long Streets troops, some of the artillery, some of the artillery, some apparently were picked up in Chattanooga and Earl will keep me straight about this, but they weren't all necessarily from Virginia summer, but many of them came down on the train from Virginia with summer uniforms, and now it's November and it's an East Tennessee winter. These guys are freezing and they are down in the trench and they're building fires along the wall. This area here was all excavated. Now this is what happens when it rains, but here you can see the soil staying. And in this case it's so important as archeology. It's not just the stuff you pop out of the ground. That's the problem with metal detecting. This is a whole feature. It's a story, and if you've gone through with a metal detector and dug in the ground and popped things out, they're gone. It's not part of the story. I'm not to mention the fact that it disturbs everything else to do that. Oh, it's such a great learning opportunity. These are the archeo kids from the museum here. One little boy found a part of a bottle, I think. I forget what it was. It was some tiny artifact. He's gonna remember that the rest of his life. He was thrilled. It was real. He found it. Everybody recognized his effort, and this is the kind of learning teaching experience that is so powerful for kids. Anyway, digging along, there's a nice little buckle from a knapsack tin plate. What I think are the best. These are the wagon wheel ruts from the case on, and I believe this is carbon residue. Guys, am I right about this from the cannon? Anybody? Yeah? All right. And this is a close-up of that feature. It's gone now. It was under a sorority house, so it's gone. But then these things, and he said, what are all these little twists of wire? What is that? If you look at the friction primers, that's what they used to ignite the charge for the cannon. And then all these little things would be just thrown away, but look at all of them there on site. This shows you, the cannon wasn't just there. They were fighting the cannon. We know that from the historic record, but here it is, proved positive in the artifacts. This is, this is kind of sad, I think. I don't know. It's just a little marble. A lot of these guys are teenagers. It's very boring, except when people are trying to kill you. So it's, you know, you gotta do something to pass the time. This is a beautiful piece of pottery that is from South Carolina, Georgia area. It's very distinctive edge field proper pottery. It's called, and people who know the details of it can place it geographically. We know the troops in the trenches were from Georgia, South Carolina. We know that Brevard, let's see the guy, Joseph Brevard, who's the general? He's first and second name. And he's staying at Crescent Bend. Kershaw, thank you. Joseph Brevard Kershaw. He was from South Carolina. He's staying at Crescent Bend. We know his troops were part of those manning the trenches and this geographically fits what we know from that. Now, when you look at this and you say, okay, out of the ground and out of the attic, we have some of these beautiful buckles here and they're much prettier than the one that came out of the ground. But basically all we know about this one is somebody donated it to us. This one we now was found in a Confederate trench in Knoxville, Tennessee. But that trench was open for about 10 days in 1863. And you think, well, why is it that Confederates are, why do they have a belt buckle from the Union? Well, they need it. Everybody needs belts. Oh, the pants up. But the supplies for the Confederates are running low and they probably just found a belt buckle that worked. And we have heard that the, if you turn it upside down and you'll see that in our case. It does not say US, it says SN. And that stands for Southern Nation. And so this belt buckle could be very functional and still not give away any credit to the other side. This is the exhibit outside. If you haven't stopped to see it, please do that. And I just want to talk a little bit about this. Mining for artifacts. We were at Fort Higley one time, a bunch of us looking at driving down the road. And across the road, there were about five men with metal detectors walking in a row, sweeping. This stuff is valuable. You can get online and you can sell it. And people do. I want to show you this picture. I'm not going to tell you where to go to find it, but it's, whoops, all of this stuff came from Knoxville sites recently. And it's for sale on eBay. Not eBay, it's a private site. Although people do sell artifacts on eBay, there's a huge amount of trade with artifacts that are, so everybody says now, everybody's smart enough to say, I got it on private property with the owner's permission. And maybe they did. We don't know. But what we do know archeologically is when you pop all this stuff out of the ground and sell it as an entity without the context, without the story, without everything else that goes along with it, that our community loses. This is Knoxville's story. And everybody of course likes Civil War artifacts. You could buy mini-balls at Cracker Barrel. There are a ton of mini-balls out there, and it's not that any one mini-ball is all that significant. But if it's the mini-ball that took down General Sanders in our town, in a place and time that we know, it becomes significant. And for the most part, if you're just going out there with a metal detector and you're taking things out of context, then we lose. And so that's the end. Three o'clock. Any questions? Yes. I don't know. I don't know. If there's federal money involved, they should be. But if it's just private, it's not required. Yes? Yes, it is. Library of Congress has many maps online. And you can go and find that particular map. It was published in the 1890s as a part of the official atlas that goes along with the records. And it's easily, you can download a copy of it. But just to promote ourselves a little bit, the overlay, present day maps, they're available upstairs. Any other questions? Yes? Well, the Legacy Parks Foundation is all about preservation, conservation, taking. We can't go back and undo what's been done already. But that land will never be built on. There will be no further encroachment on what's there already. As for planning to excavate, if there's a part, there are some visible earthworks, that sort of thing. There are no plans to do any further excavation of what's there. In fact, most of things now that are left as they have become over 150 years if they haven't been disturbed, it's not going to deteriorate very much more than now. And that's like, there were no structures, but there may well be artifacts and a distribution. However, there has not been a plan put into place to go after any of those. Mm-hmm, uh-huh. Yeah. Oh, it was. That's right. Yes, absolutely. It is saved. It is absolutely saved. Legacy Parks did that for us. Much local money contributed to do that. No, it is now part of Noxville Heritage. Question? I don't know of any studies done there. I do know that about the Underground Railroad, there was a very good publication put out at the state level by our state historian about underground railroad activity in the state of Tennessee. Of course, coming from the deep south to get to Ohio, you pretty much have to go through Tennessee. And one of the things that he emphasized over and over is it was secret. It wasn't well documented. People did not name names, and it's difficult to go after that history. But one of the things was that perhaps Perez Dickinson, being the abolitionist that we now think he's not, had a tunnel down to the river so that people could come and get off boats and come through the tunnels and have safety at his house. But of course, any of those homes along the river, if you go to Bleak House or Crescent Bend, everybody's in even Maybury-Hazen House, somebody will tell you, oh yeah, there's an old tunnel down to the river. But it's always somebody's friend who has been in that tunnel, or I've never really had it confirmed that there is that tunnel connection to the river. And to answer your question specifically, there has not been any archaeology done that. But it is very early. But African-American Church? Yes, yes. And if I had more time, and I was going to try to blunt mention Charlie Faulkner, who has done amazing work preserving and excavating and a lot of it on its own time and effort has dug at Blunt Mansion and Ramsey House, I'm not sure who did the work at Maybury-Hazen House. But again, that was in the early 90s. And you can see some of the artifacts up there on display that came out of the ground. But right now, I don't know of any particular plans in the works to do more. Yes? It was the Higley Cabin site. And it's part of the Fort Higley property. Yeah, I kind of missed that one. Well, yeah, so many of the things that we try to project into the past from today, we're not going to get absolutely correct. That's true. George? Fort Stanley has been purchased by Aslan Foundation. Fort Stanley is saved. And Fort Hant Stanley will be interpreted and probably will be a part of that 1,000 acres so that it will be accessible to the whole community. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's everywhere. There's a huge, huge show in Nashville every year. And you can buy everything from $75,000 rifle to some mini balls off the back of a truck that somebody just popped out of the ground and is selling for a dollar a piece. Civil War artifacts are, there are many, many of them. And it's a huge, there are many levels of how that interferes with communities' heritage. Yes? I don't know the answer to that. But certainly, as part of the university, we would appreciate seeing that. Mike, please. You're working on it. Mike works for ARL, Archaeological Research Lab, which is UT's archaeology professional group, and the ones who did our wonderful work at Morgan Hill and at Higley Cabinside. All right, we're starting to lose people. So I probably better call a halt to this. But I'd be glad to talk to you afterwards. Thank you very much for coming. Come back next month. Thank you.