Archaeologists Search Through Southern Maryland Swamp
ALLENS FRESH, Md.
(AP) ―
June 21, 2009
Deep in the heart of Charles County at the head of the Wicomico River, sweet gum, beech and sycamore trees surround 20 miles of seldom-explored swampland where more than 300 years of
history lie buried beneath dank, soggy soil.
This month, St. Mary's College anthropologist Julia King is digging for the history of the Zekiah Swamp and the roots of Charles County with help from students at her university and volunteers, the College of Southern Maryland and the Smallwood Foundation. Foundation President Michael Sullivan said he provided $40,000 for the study because of his pride for the area and passion for its history.
"There is a lot of history that's not been told," Sullivan said, "and a lot of sites yet to be discovered."
The county's first courthouse was built in 1674 at a site found last year. Now King and her team have found remains of what is believed to be Gov. Charles Calvert's summer house.
"Zekiah is just the coolest place," King said. "The more I get to know it, the more exciting it becomes."
King's search — which includes digging for a structure known as Zekiah Fort built in 1680 to resettle hundreds of friendly Piscataway Indians with new Marylanders — will last for several years and is the first in the swamp.
After King's team found the courthouse site last summer, they started doing shovel tests this month to find Charles Calvert's home titled "His Lordship's Favor," also built in 1674.
That's where "I resolve to live in the summertime," he told his father, calling it a "healthful" place free from the political challenges at his Mattapany mansion. He wanted to build the mansion of brick but settled for a wooden "earth-fast" home "according to the fashion of the buildings of this country.
Using maps dating to the early 1700s, which only included sketches of the property and not its location, students and volunteers dug hundreds of 2-foot-holes looking for artifacts and brick fragments. And they found plenty of them near the Charles County landfill.
But King said the site "didn't look like 1674" because the items could only be dated to the 1690s.
"So, I go back into the records and realized that Charles Calvert built the house, and has every intention of living there, but the circumstances of one's life change," she said.
Charles County had a tumultuous history around that time, with Indians fighting Virginia and Maryland colonists before Virginians tried to overthrow the state government. Ten years after the home's construction started, Calvert left Maryland, never to return.
To be sure whose home it was and when someone — and who that someone is — lived there, King said, "I need to survey all around it and rule out all other properties. This is extremely tantalizing."
Even so, King is keeping her survey crews on another search detail, digging shovel holes and testing fields based on old maps as they look for the Zekiah Fort from 1680.
"It's always a challenge. Every day is a different learning environment," said Amy Publicover, a 21-year-old College of Southern Maryland anthropology and archaeology major.
Sophomore Sara Greenwell found a fragment of a Spanish coin at the house Calvert may have built. "I just couldn't believe it ... that something from so long ago was in my hand. I just wanted to keep it forever," she said.
But slow days and not finding what the team's looking for forces the archaeologists to move on, deeper into nearby woods to keep finding Charles County and Maryland's hidden history.
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Information from: The Baltimore Sun,
http://www.baltimoresun.com(© 2009 The Associated Press.
