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Burned and buried: an uncovered legacy

While doing construction work at UNC President Tom Ross's house on Franklin Street the remains of the original house were discovered under the driveway. Professors and graduate students from UNC's Research Laboratories of Archaeology work to unearth ruins from the site.
While doing construction work at UNC President Tom Ross's house on Franklin Street the remains of the original house were discovered under the driveway. Professors and graduate students from UNC's Research Laboratories of Archaeology work to unearth ruins from the site.

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.”

Brett Riggs, former adjunct associate professor of anthropology and now the Sequoyah Distinguished Professor in Cherokee Studies at Western Carolina University, led the excavation, but he said it was not intended to be a complete one.

“It was not a full-scale excavation. There wasn’t time, nor was there actually reason to do that,” he said. “It was simply to document what was exposed by the construction.”

The excavation provided an opportunity for research, Riggs said.

“There was documentary research performed to try to determine more about the house and how the ruins we found matched up to documentary accounts,” he said.

Davis said members of the archaeology department had been busy after the excavation preparing the artifacts for display.

“What we spent most of last fall and part of the spring working on was cleaning and stabilizing the metal artifacts, particularly the stove fragments,” he said. “And then we exhibited those artifacts in the North Carolina (Collection) Gallery last spring. We had an exhibit that ran from early spring through mid-June called ‘Hidden Campus.’”

Steponaitis said opportunities to conduct archaeological fieldwork this close to home are quite rare.

“It’s every few years something comes up in this part of campus, which is the old part of campus, that requires some archaeological attention,” he said.

university@dailytarheel.com

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