An exploration into the history of UNC produced more than just some rubble.
The excavation began late last summer when construction crews resurfacing the driveway of UNC-system President Tom Ross' house discovered the foundations of an old building, the Second President’s House, buried beneath it.
The construction of the Second President’s House began in 1811 or 1812. It housed former President Joseph Caldwell, the first president of UNC-Chapel Hill before the UNC system was created, until his death in 1835. Former UNC-CH President David Swain lived there until 1868, followed by a series of other faculty members. In 1886, the house burned down.
“The house was a total loss, and in the aftermath of that disaster, all the debris and rubble was used to fill in what was a full basement of a building,” said Steve Davis, the associate director of UNC’s Research Laboratories of Archaeology. “And so what was uncovered last summer was that fill that had filled in the basement.”
Vin Steponaitis, director of UNC’s Research Laboratories of Archaeology, said the remnants from the fire ended up being some of the most insightful artifacts from the excavation.
“A lot of the stuff that survived the fire but did not get sort of scavenged and reused ended up as rubble in the basement inside the foundations. And those are some of the things that we found,” Steponaitis said.
“Those things included a cast iron stove that would have been used by the University president starting in the 1840s, a lock from the front door, a lot of artifacts and details about the building that were discovered as a result of that excavation.”
Davis said the excavation gave valuable insight into the location of the historic building.
“(We also uncovered) the tops of the stone foundation that marked where the walls of the building stood,” he said. “What was important about that was that we didn’t know exactly where the walls of the house stood. It turned out to be shifted over (from where the current house is) because the house would have been centered on a larger lot that existed at that time.”