Transcript

Music

Jake:
[0:04] Welcome to Hub History where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.
This is episode 297 recent archaeological discoveries at Shirley Place.

Recent Archaeological Discoveries at Shirley Place

 

[0:20] Hi, I’m Jake. This week. I’m pleased to be able to share a recent talk from the Shirley Eustace House in Roxbury.
It’s about recent archaeological discoveries at Shirley Place that help shed light on the lives of enslaved residents at the 18th century governor’s mansion, as well as evidence of the home’s original location before it was moved into its current position in the 19th century.
The presenter is past podcast guest, Joe Bagley, the archaeologist for the city of Boston who’s led a series of digs at the Shirley House and at the house’s original location across Shirley Street.
This work is important because written records have only clearly revealed the identity of one of the Africans who were enslaved at the house by royal Governor, William Shirley.
Joe Bagley will explain how discoveries of animal bones, forgotten paving stones and a cowry shell connect the dots to the enslaved lives that history otherwise overlooks.
He also shares stone flakes and pottery shards that remind us that the history of Shirley Place long predates William Shirley and company, the Massachusett people who first called it home.

[1:30] But before we talk about recent discoveries at the Shirley Eustace House, I just wanna pause and thank Wayne Tucker of the Eleven Names Project for his recent generous gift on paypal.
The 11 Names project is a digital research project and newsletter with a mission to create an increase the digital footprints of black indigenous and multiracial people who were in Massachusetts during the time of slavery.
Now, I usually promote Patreon because it provides ongoing support for the show.
However, for anyone who’s looking to give us a one time gift, paypal is another great option.
And as Wayne has contributed to hub history in the past, he proves that one time doesn’t have to mean one time only whether you prefer a one time gift or an ongoing sponsorship of as little as $2 a month on Patreon.
Listener support is what makes it possible for me to go on making the show.
Your generosity covers the ongoing expenses of making a podcast for things like hosting security and equipment costs.

[2:35] If you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, just go to patreon.com/hubor or visit hubor.com and click on the support us link to give on paypal or Patreon and a heartfelt.
Thank you to all our new and returning sponsors.
And now it’s time for this week’s main topic.
Our talk this week comes from the Shirley Eustace House Association, the organization that manages the historic Shirley Eustace House in Roxbury.
Fun fact, for newer listeners, the Hub History Podcast was actually born at the Shirley Eustace House, co-host Emerita Nikki and I were volunteer docents there during the summer of 2016.
And we trade stories from Boston history back and forth over the table that served as a docent bullpen while we waited for the next guest to come in and for us to have a chance to give the next tour.
Eventually, we started writing down a list of those story ideas and that list became the starter set of podcast episodes.
We kicked off hub history a few months later, some of those initial story ideas are still in my backlog today.

[3:42] The Shirley Eustace House was home to two governors of Massachusetts royal governor, William Shirley, who had the house built and who served two terms as governor in the 17 forties and 17 fifties.
And then William Eustace, a surgeon in the Continental army during the revolutionary war, who later served as Secretary of War and as a diplomat in the administration of James Madison.
He was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1823 when I was a docent at the house.
Our tour talked about the architecture of the house as it was built for William Shirley.
But the history portion of the tour focused on the Eustace years and specifically Lafayette, stay at the house which you can hear more about. In episode 163.
More recently, the interpretation of the Shirley House has been reimagined to focus primarily on the legacy of the British Empire as this is one of the last remaining residences of a royal governor.
And what’s now the United States during his tenure as Governor Shirley was for a brief time, the highest ranking officer who commanded the entire Imperial British army in North America during the seven years war, which he attempted to use to expand the British realm and to expand his own wealth.

[4:55] Current programming at the house is organized around three themes that tie back to the idea of Empire, the legacies of our seemingly intractable poverty and homelessness, descendants of British poor laws, the environmental crisis, a result of imperialism’s thirst for raw materials, and the legacy of racism as a result of the British slave trade.
When Shirley was, Governor Britain was rapidly monopolizing the Atlantic slave trade.
These themes are not unique to the British Empire and could be seen in the French or Spanish imperial quest.
But we live in the legacy of the British Empire.

Reimagining the Legacy of the British Empire

 

[5:33] If you’ve never been to the Shirley Eustace House, or if you haven’t visited, since this new interpretive focus was rolled out, you should make time to visit.

[5:42] The talk this week is brought to us by the Shirley Eustace House.
But the speaker you’re gonna hear is Joseph Bagley.
Since 2011, Joe has served as Boston City archaeologist, conducting digs educating the public and curating the city’s extensive collections at the archaeology lab in West Roxbury.
He’s also the author of two books, a history of Boston and 50 artifacts and Boston’s oldest buildings and where to find them.
I turn it over now to the Shirley Eustace House Association and Joe Bagley.

Setting and History of Shirley Place

Joseph Bagley:
[6:18] So the talk tonight is really about two separate properties.
The first one being Shirley Eustace House or Shirley Place, but the other one is 4244 Shirley Street, which is kind of lived in the uh the history of the neighborhood for for centuries um through oral history and is now becoming fully unfold uh fully unfolded into the Shirley Place, landscape history um and story of this place.

[6:43] So I think it’s really important to talk about the setting of Shirley Place, the the in archaeology, we talk about it, not just the stuff, it’s about the story and so much of that story is where the stuff is found or where the stuff was.
And so, um this etching from around 1775 I think is really an excellent uh reminder of what Roxbury was in the early um in the 18th century.
And even before that and really well into the late um into the early to mid 19th century, it was a very rural space.
Uh This is the area that’s essentially on the border between the Roxbury neighborhood and the Dorchester neighborhood, which at the time were two separate towns.
Um and this was a really massive house in the state that was located uh quite prominently in the landscape, but it was also situated directly on the shoreline, which is really gonna play a major role in uh some of the earliest history of this property.

[7:40] These two maps I think really show some of the development of the city and the area around Roxbury.
Um My beginning of my talk is really gonna focus in on the history of the property and then we’ll kind of dive into the archaeology from there.
Um You can see on the left map that the property is located kind of on the edge of a wetland, low lying area um near, near some highlands um facing what was South Bay, which is essentially now the South Bay shopping district which was filled in the early 19 hundreds.
And you can see in the map on the right, just how far from the water is now currently located.
But for most of the history of this place, it was really a coastal site overlooking uh water and it would have been probably more accessible via water than even land going back to the 17th, 18 hundreds.

[8:25] Uh This is a bit of a confusing map, but I’ll kind of walk you through it.
So what this is is a light art image and this is essentially a laser scan of um the property around Shirley Place from space.
What it does is essentially it erases the buildings from the landscape and you can definitely still see the, um the streetscape uh carved into the landscape.
But if you kind of squint your eyes a little bit where you’re gonna see is on the left side of the map, kind of a highland area.
Um And on the right side of the map, it kind of drops off pretty dramatically into a lower flat area.
And what that really is is the um is the shoreline of the orig, not the original shoreline, but one of the edges of the, the land form of Boston dropping down into the ocean.
This is really important for the, for the native uh history of this property, the Massachusetts history of this property because essentially what it is is the high and dry location overlooking South Bay, which would have been an excellent place for climbing and things like that.
Um And as I go through the archaeology of the site, you’ll see how this proximity to the shoreline and to that low lying area, but also on its high slope really plays into why we find native creations on the site.
Um While doing archaeology there.

[9:38] Um Europeans arrived around 1630. We know some folks were here a little bit earlier from Europe, but um really the bulk of the original uh European settlers arrived around 1630.
John Winthrop’s fleet came down to Salem from Europe um as part of the Massachusetts Bay colony and kind of dispersed amongst um the Boston Harbor area, settling six towns, including one of them being Roxbury.
Um So there was a small group of, of settlers that came to Roxbury and began um allotting lots of land that was traditionally Massachusetts land to themselves.
Um We don’t know the exact earliest history of the 16 thirties and forties of the property, but we know that by 1650 the property was owned by Abraham Newell.
Um And he arrived in 1634 and received a very, very large allotment, possibly this property as well.
It was located on the edge of town really on the um the border of town uh with um Dorchester Brook coming in from the right very edge of the map um of, of the drawing that Brook ran just south of the property and um defined the edges of Dorchester and Roxbury at the time.

[10:49] So uh Abraham Newell is the first person we have documented owning property in the area.
In seven, in 1672 Nathan Holmes purchased 53 acres of land from several owners including Abraham Newell.
And we’re confident that at that point, uh Holmes had purchased lots of land that included this property because it’s specifically mentioning the edges of Dorchester Brook, which is so close to the property that we’re confident, that’s what it is.
And Holmes later, Purch uh sells the property in 1700 to a man named Peter Allen.
Um And he’s the person who we are absolutely certain from the deed books um is owning the specific property upon which the building is, is um standing, although we’re pretty confident everybody before that did as well, but Peter Allen is the one that has it inclusively in the ownership.
Um At that point when Peter Allen owned it, there was a lot of about nine acres surrounded by multiple other lots that abutted the same lots.
It was kind of broken up into, into land but would have essentially been experienced as one large estate and one of the major parts that it had um included in many of the deeds.
Um going all the way into the 19th century is the mention of the town Clay Pit.
So what is the town Clay Pit? So this map from, I think it’s about 1855 or 52.
I have it again at a later time um where it’s actually mentioned um with the date uh shows the clay pit.
So this is the Eustace Place estate in the middle of the map.
Um And just north and west of the property is this kind of pit essentially.

[12:18] And the town clay pit was an area where settlers had found access to rock clay, which would then be used for making bricks and pottery in some cases.
But really the main goal was to excavate the clay, form them into bricks and then be able to make um brick structures.
Uh The key is really the brick chimneys because most people were making their houses out of wood at this time.
Um And Peter Allen was a brick layer.
We don’t have a record of him being a brick maker, which would have been a separate job possibly.
Um But we’re pretty confident from that information that Peter Allen’s interest in the property was more about the clay pit than it was about the high hill that didn’t hurt.
Um But we know Alan also had a house on the property, so he probably built his house close to the clay pit in all likelihood at the site of the um Eustace place because it was on the highest knoll and um people tend to live on the highest point in the land.

[13:18] Alan died in 1728 and the property passed first to his son and then pretty quickly, his son sold it to a man named Samuel Waldo.
Samuel Waldo owned the property for about 20 years. Um But we’re not 100% confident that he even saw the land.
Um, in many ways, Waldo was um living and occupying in the area of Maine.
I believe Waldo County may even be named after Samuel Waldo, but don’t quote me on that because I’m not certain.
Um But during that 20 years, he also bought up lots of land in New Hampshire and Maine. Um, and was essentially a land speculator.
He also was a brigadier general during the siege of Louisburg in Nova Scotia in 1745.
And that’s where he actually met and befriended William Shirley who had traveled up to the front lines of Louisburg, uh while the Governor of Massachusetts to really rally the troops.
So we think that’s where William Shirley kind of got the connection to the property, uh in the historic records.
And ultimately, it passed from Mr Waldo to Mr Shirley in 1617 46.
So in the time in 1746 the property was sold with a house on it.
So we’re very confident that the Shirley placed uh, mansion is not the original house on the property, but is in fact a second house, possibly a third house because it may be that Alan built a second house himself.
We’re not 100% certain on that, but it’s at least the second house on the property.

[14:38] And um, Governor Shirley pretty much immediately demolished the existing house on the property and started to build his new mansion house, which we know of today is Shirley Place.

[14:49] So Governor Shirley became uh governor of Massachusetts, royal, Governor of Massachusetts in 1741.
So he’d already been governor for about four or five years before he bought the property.
He began, uh, working on the house soon after buying it and finished sometime between 1747 and 1749.
The building itself is massive by anyone’s standards. It has a massive uh central um uh turret like structure on the top.
Um It also has a grand entrance and staircases facing both the west and the east.
So from the west, you would enter the property from the land and you would have this grand facade, the view that you see here.
Um And then also from the east, when you would both see the property from the sea and approach it from the sea, you would have an almost identical view with a slightly different entrance facing in that direction.
So it really has two front doors and for all intents and purposes.
Um Another thing that we’re going to come back to. So please remember this.
Uh There’s a really important structure on the ends of the property called the Piazza, which is really just a fancy name for saying, a covered porch with a basement.
Um this is going to play a major role in some of our interpretation of the archaeology of the house.
But you can see how the foundations of the building itself actually extends out beyond the footprint of the main house under the Piazza.
And then the Piazza itself is built on top of that. So you would have had a covered space to exit the house onto a um essentially a porch and uh but not on the second floor.

[16:17] And below that, a full basement. So um when we’re digging on archaeological sites, we typically will find uh cellars and basements as holes in the ground.
But you can see in this image, it’s pretty clear that the basement itself is not actually that subterranean, it’s really just a slightly submerged area in the ground with the house built on top of it.
And this is for a couple of reasons. One, it allowed for staff including many, many enslaved people to enter into the building directly from the outside without having to go through first floor building, first floor entrances.
Um It also allowed for the house to be physically higher um in the landscape and, and certainly this house was made to impress um in all ways.
And so building it up on top of essentially stilts just made it bigger and grander.
So it was certainly part of the motivations for building on top of the property.
But that daylight basement also made for um extremely functional space on the basement level for the enslaved service that lived in the property when it was first built.

[17:16] So the property itself is primarily a summer home. Um we know of several people that were living on the property itself when it was first occupied.
Uh There was Governor Shirley, his wife Francis, um uh uh William and Francis had five sons and five daughters, but only two of the sons and three of the daughters survived infancy.
And it’s a little bit difficult to tell from the historic records.
But essentially, we only really know of one child that would have been born around the time of the completion of the house who is definitely living in the house.
Um But most of the daughters and the sons were in their twenties around the time that the house is complete.
So I’m sure she Susie can correct me, but we’re not.
Um there’s not a lot of evidence of the older Children living in the house itself.
Um However, one of the daughters Elizabeth married a man named Eli Kim Hutchinson, who’s a Boston judge, um who he’ll be coming back um as part of the story in a second.
So in 1764 Governor Shirley left the estate and sold it to like Kim.
So then it passed down to his daughter um to Governor Shirley’s daughter, Elizabeth, and they own the property from 1764 until 1775.
When two things kind of happened. At the same time, the war started, which created chaos amongst the family because they were loyalists and they had to flee.
But also Eliakim himself died in the same time um in June of 1775.

[18:39] Uh what that meant was that um lien’s wife Elizabeth fled as a loyalist from the property, abandoning, essentially leaving behind one of their enslaved people, Thomas Scipio.
Um and the property was then taken over.

[18:55] The pause for a second to recognize the enslaved people that we’ve been mentioning a couple of times so far.
So we know quite a few people that lived in the property but also were enslaved by the Shirleys and Hutchinson’s both before and after their occupation in the house.
So the folks at the Shirley Eustace house have done a great job um documenting these folks and this is directly from their website.
So we know of Jack Jane, Nanny David Thomas Scipio, a woman who’s not had do not have her name recorded Caesar Afy and Chloe, um of these folks were confident that Jane who was baptized in 1746 right around the time that the property was finished, um was likely to have lived in the house for as long as she was alive.
Um And she may have died at a young age. We’re not completely certain of her, of her whereabouts after her baptism because unfortunately, enslaved people are very poorly documented.
Um This is a quote taken from Abi Alibi, Alibi about Jane’s life and it’s, I think it just captures um kind of some of the, the, the violence of, of enslavement, especially for young people.
So Jane was likely torn from her parents either given away to Shirley for free by an owner who viewed her as an economic burden or given to him as a gift, enslaved Children in New England.
In the words of Massachusetts historical society founder Jeremy Belknap, quote were given away like puppies.

[20:20] And just to kind of drive that point home, here’s a period um advertisement in 1765 giving away uh a young black girl.
Um It was not uncommon for black girls especially to be given away.
Um as and they were seen essentially as um burdens to the, to the enslavers um for much of their young adult or for much of their young life.
The um boy Children um were often uh sold um and not given away.
Um but either way Children uh were essentially another mouth to be fed in the household of enslaved people.

[20:59] Um Other folks that we know of in the house were Thomas Scipio, Caesar Afy and their mother and most likely very many others.
Let’s talk more about who the others may be in a second.
So Thomas Scipio was one of the people that was actually um stayed back after um the Hutchinson’s fled and he was there when the property was taken over by the um the American forces, the, the uh rebels.
Um But he was ultimately sold to John Powell uh as a as remaining enslaved to Ludlow Massachusetts.

[21:35] We know Cesar Afy and their mother were listed in the 1775 probate of um Eliakim Hutchinson.
And it’s likely that they lived in the property as well.
And it’s even possible that their mother may have been Jane, who was baptized by um Eli’s wife’s mother.
So his mother in law, um, we’re not certain about that. Um, but it’s certainly possible.
Um, another little piece of the puzzle that I was seeing while researching for this talk was that um Li Hutchinson and um and Elizabeth, their first daughter married into the Apthorpe family who um became an Apthorpe.
Um But she would have been uh joining the family of the, essentially the number two enslavers in the, in the uh commonwealth uh right behind Peter Fanuel and, there’s a, a Caesar and um that was enslaved in the Apthorpe family which the dates still quite a line.
I was wondering if that actually might have been that after the Hutchinson’s fled, perhaps enslaved people moved into the h the Apthorpe family.
But I can’t, I can’t prove that.

[22:42] So during the war, the house was confiscated and was used for many purposes including barracks headquarters in hospital.
So I went essentially from a summer playhouse to a barracks headquarters in the hospital.
That was a relatively brief period and then it enters into the 19th century.
Um After that, when many owners own the property, I’m not going to get into huge details on everybody, but a significant owner is William and Caroline Eustace who owned the property.
They were noted abolitionists. William was the governor.
Um and they, they took over the property making it the only house, at least in Massachusetts.
It might be in the country that is owned by both a colonial, I’m sorry. Um, a royal governor and an elected governor.
Um the same house, which is why it has the name Shirley Eustace House.
Um William passed away and um pretty soon after they purchased the property and then Caroline took over the ownership of the property.
And I think it was really an under untold story of Caroline’s ownership just because she was the longest owner of the property she was living and owned the property from 1825 to 1867.
So over 50 years, I’m sorry, over 40 years, she lived in the property, um took care of it and also ensured that it um it maintained itself, it was a massive property that took a lot of labor to continue.
Um And she did a lot of good things for the community, but also fortunately um was a leading a, a noted abolitionist in the community.

[24:07] When she passed away in 1867 the Eustace family took ownership of it.
Um But it was essentially a lot of land in a neighborhood that was rapidly transforming from these rural grand estates to an industrial immigrant neighborhood.
Um And at that point, they saw the value of the property less than this massive mansion with a lot of land around it that they weren’t able to take care of because they didn’t live there, the family, the descendants.
And so what they saw the next best prop uh next best option for the property was to divide it.
So it’s a little bit of a fuzzy image, but this is from an 1867 plan of the Eustace estate, 15 acres of land.
And you can still see the, the clay pit on the little pond on the left side of the map.

[24:47] What they did is they laid out a series of streets in a partial grid.
They broke up the lot into 53 individual house lots and then began to sell off those lots to developers.
Unfortunately, this also meant that Shirley Street, which is the street laid out in this plan that is the street still present next to the property, went through the house and that’s really the most we went through the house.
The exact details of how it went through the house were not certain.
Um So the property was at risk of being demolished because it was in the way.
Fortunately, the owners of the property, the developers really picked up the house and moved it to two nearby lots, filling two lots and um essentially treated the property like a large apartment building.
The rest of the property was rented. I was um rest of the properties in this map were sold off for individual buildings.

[25:36] And this is a map from 1933 almost 60 years after when that original plan was drawn to show you just how infilled the property became.

[25:46] So at its peak, there were 23 other structures within the Shirley Eustace property, they likely contain dozens of apartments.
Hundreds of people likely lived in this neighborhood, this kind of mini neighborhood that popped up when the property was sold and developed.

[26:00] Um But uh today, um it’s not experienced quite like this because in the, um in the early 19 hundreds, uh the property was purchased to turn it into essentially a historic property.
Um And more of a house museum.
And over the next couple of decades, the lots surrounding the property were purchased and then the buildings on those lots were demolished to create an open space, essentially recreating some of the original um rural landscape that would have originally been surrounding the property.
Although the house now is slightly differently located, it would have been at the time jumping back just a little bit the first leases of the house, um which is one of my favorite stories about this property with the house of the Good shepherd.
So they were a convent group. Um a Catholic convent group dedicated to the reformation of prostitutes and quote Wayward and, and, and fallen women.
Um These were women that were brought to the property um as part of the nuns kind of outreach.
And um they were, they were referred to as inmates and then kept under constant labor, including sewing and tailoring to keep them busy and also train them in some marketable skills in the late 18 hundreds.
Um They were briefly occupying the property from about 1868 to 1871.
Very helpfully put them in the census record which you’ll see in a second.
Um But then they moved on to a new purpose built property in Roxbury.

[27:24] And here in 1870 the US census shows um the ladies who were living in the property, you have Carolyn and I’m sorry, Anne Carlton and Bridget Stokes who were essentially um managing the property and then list of the women down below.
Um We know from later records of the new property that they built and moved into that.
It was approximately half and half between Catholic nuns and the quote unquote fallen women living together in the property.
But the census here doesn’t exactly differentiate between who were the former prostitutes and who were the nuns.
Um But amongst these women, you would have had both.
Um But notice that the 18 sixties uh sorry, the 18 seventies census also indicates quite clearly the um the uh ethnic makeup of Roxbury at the time, which was predominantly almost exclusively Irish immigrants coming to America following the industrial revolution, when Roxbury really became an industrial neighborhood around Stony Brook.
And almost everybody, not almost everybody, everybody on this list is either a born in Ireland or is a first generation New Englander of Irish origin.

[28:37] After the good shepherd left became a rental property and the house is broken up into multiple apartment buildings, apartment um rooms and, and uh rented out, this is a late 19th century image showing a group of girls sitting on this e steps of the house.
And you can see also there’s some Children up in the window and the small shed like structure below the stairs, which may or may not be a privy.
We’re not going to dwell too much on that because I don’t want to really focus on the 18th century.
But that’s also a piece of the property that I’m interested in. Archaeologically.
This chart shows the population of the house.
And I think this is important because um this is counting the census every 10 years.
You can see in the late 17 hundreds and early 18 hundreds, the occupation of the property by the Eustace family.
And then upon Eustace, William Eustace’s death, the property became much less occupied uh year round, not year round, um much less occupied by folks in the prop in the house.
Um When the property began to uh decrease its need for agriculture and became more of a large home.
Um What you see in the 17 nineties map, sorry, in the 17 nineties component of the chart is.

[29:49] About 10 people and this would have been a time when um the property was an active agricultural pursuit, needing to grow food in order to support the people in the house and it goes up to about 15 people by 1800.
And this gives you a really good idea of how many people would have been in the property in the 18th century.
Um in order to keep this place functioning because you had the the three or four people that actually lived in the house that owned it and then everybody around them supporting the lives of the people that were living in the house, who are rich, extremely rich and very well connected.
Um both uh feeding, cleaning, preparing for events, um taking care of the property itself, repairing the property, driving individuals around the property and out and uh to and from the property.
You would have also had a large agricultural estate at this point.
This is about a 30 acre property that would have been growing food for both the people living in the property.
But also um essentially keeping an open space that would have been actively used for profit um by the things that were being grown and sold.
So there was a large need for people on this property.
And even though we only know of three or four people that we, that are documented as being enslaved in the property.
It is likely that there’s at least seven plus people um that are essentially invisible in the historic record that were likely living on the property, working on the property and most likely enslaved by the family that was there.
They just don’t turn up in the records.

[31:17] So that’s where we come in for the archaeology side of things.

House Museum and Historical Property

 

[31:21] So today, the property is a house museum.
And in 2018, uh we were approached about the area to the northeast of the house, which was in need of improvement.
So you can see the Shirley Place in that red kind of block marks an area that we were asked to take a look at archaeologically.
Here’s what the property looked like or that component that red area looked like.
In 2018, you can see the the stones on the ground are really uneven.
Um Essentially the the needs were to be able to cross that space without tripping, which was um tall order because of the stones that were there.

[31:53] Um So what they wanted to do is to lift the stones, fix the sand underneath the stones and then replace them.
But we had talked about the need for potential archaeology there, given that the property has such a shallow basement.
We weren’t sure if, if even going down a few inches could potentially disturb the former basement of the existing house.
Um There’s been a long standing um legacy of where exactly the property was located prior to being moved.
And you can see in this, um, hypothesized uh, area of where the house was, the former house would have been located in Shirley Street.
Um, but the, the western half of the northern half of it, um, and the southern half of it very thoroughly being in this kind of paved stone area that was going to be restored.
Um The idea was that the property was picked up and moved 60 ft from its former location with a near overlap of one component of the corner of the house.
That was what we believed in 2018.
So we entered the property with that in mind.

[32:54] And um the other reason why we really thought it was significant was that uh the basement had some really good records that indicated where people would have been, um not just living but also uh working.
And so you can see in this image it’s a little bit crowded with text apologize.
But on the far left side, there’s a bedroom from a man and a housekeeper sitting room, which likely would have been um enslaved people’s housing in the 18th century. If that function continued.
Um, back uh to the 18th century, there was two very large um, fireplaces.
You can see those kind of in those rectangles on either side of the house of a summer kitchen and a winter kitchen.
The biggest difference was that the summer kitchen was that property that or that window you could see in the 18 sixties um view, which would have allowed you to open the windows and let the heat out.
Whereas the winter kitchen was a little bit more subterranean, which would have helped keep the heat into the property which folks working down there needed badly.
Um There’s also many sellers for various fruit products, vegetable products, wine products, and there’s even stories of one of the fruit, I believe it was the wine cellar being used as a dungeon back in the day.
Um Either way, this is a hotbed of use of the property for the enslaved people that would have been living in the property, working in the property.
We would have had their personal space in their bedrooms and also their workspace in the kitchens especially.

[34:13] This is where the drawing kind of comes from. There’s a a historic kind of record of what the property look like above. Much more simplified version of it below.
So it’s more or less the same map you just saw. But um a series of storage rooms on the on the northern end of the property, really the eastern end of the property.
What amounts to a large hallway down the middle? It’s kind of hard to envision how that would have been experienced, but it was a large open space in the middle of the property um abutting the chimney spaces and then the kitchens on the kind of west southwest corner or edge of the house facing the road.
So with that in mind, we looked at the um potential for archaeology in that part parcel, that part of the property by doing a series of trenches.
So you can see on the lower map.
Um There’s a, this is the outline of the building I should use more gray.
Um This is the building itself. This is the kind of uh paved area we did a series of trenches kind of scattered throughout that area to try to see if we could find any evidence of the basement of the house.
But what we really wanted to do was find both the basement floor and the edge of the foundation because from that, we could read, we could kind of extrapolate outwards to other parts of the property.

[35:26] Um We also were really interested in ensuring that the local neighborhood kids were able to come out to see the dig.
Um We set up a really amazing uh travel lab into the carriage house.
Um We had a great groups of kids coming out to the property.
Sarah who’s in the middle of the photo on the right, had a beautiful uh mobile lab set up in the in the carriage house, but unfortunately, we basically didn’t find anything uh in the area under the steps.
We took a look at that, that shed structure which you can see underneath the girls on the stairs just because we, I thought it might have been a privy.
I wasn’t quite sure it’s obviously a door into it, which could have been a storage shed, but in the 18 sixties, there was no running water on the property.
So they would have had to have an outhouse somewhere and the way all the drawings and the photographs show this property, there’s really not a spot kind of in the distance beside the house or in the distance of the house where an outhouse would have obviously gone.
So my thought was that this little kind of shed could have been the outhouse for the entire property.

[36:24] So we put a trench across that area. This is a little bit hard to kind of visualize where we are.
But I’m on top of the steps, looking down at the ground beneath the steps.
Um And on the left, that kind of pebbly area is a, is a drip line for the rain and then on the right side of the image, um So the right image shows the same excavation area down about a foot and a half deep.
And what you can see in this area here is a stone wall coming out from the side of the, the uh stairs, which we were absolutely expecting going back.
That was essentially this wall here.

[36:58] That had just been cut off at the top when they got rid of the shed because it’s very much not there today.
And this was the area that we were really interested in. Because if this was a privy, then this would have been the vault of the privy, the place where the, poo and all this trash, hopefully that they threw in the proud house would have gone.
Um So we excavated, focusing mainly on the inside of that structure is another photograph of us excavating from above during the process.
And on the left image, you can see a photograph when we stop digging.
And on the right, you can see um the drawing version of that.

[37:32] So essentially what we were able to find is that there was a lot of fill on one side of the proper, on one side of the wall, which is actually on the outside of the wall and on the inside of the wall, we weren’t able to go that far down into, but we started to find layers of fill.
Um And what that indicated to us was that there was a deeper portion of that property of that feature that had been filled up somewhat.
Um I’m interpreting that to mean the potential for the privy is there.
But the part of what we wanted to do for this project and the 4244 dig was we wanted to document the presence of something but not necessarily blast it open with a hole um and dig through it all in these little trenches.
We wanted to open it up and that would have been a larger survey which we were not doing at that fate time.
So really our goal was to document the presence of important features and then potentially come back to do a bigger dig, a much more concentrated dig on the most important parts.

[38:26] But to be honest, the other thing is that this portion of the property is not under a great threat of change.
And so the best thing we can do for it is to just leave it alone because the best thing you can do for any archaeological site is to leave it alone.
And so for now, it’s gonna stay untouched unless something like a repair to the foundation needs to be done or other excavations are needed in this area, we know that it could be the privy. We don’t know for certain that it is the privy.
But for now it’s best just to leave it there, artifacts wise, it wasn’t a lot there.
So we excavated over the course of 11 days we found just over 2000 artifacts.
A third of those were architectural. So glass brick nails, not very exciting.

[39:04] Um 2000 sounds like a lot of things, but on a site this big uh downtown, for instance, we would have easily pulled out 10, 15,000 artifacts.
It’s really not a lot of stuff. Um We did find an amazing assemblage of 19 fifties clothes pins which were not terribly significant.
Um We found every color that they made and I believe that this was a major portion, a major area where they did all their clothes hanging.
Uh We also found a good preservation of animal bone. This is probably a chicken bone or chicken thigh bone um of a small animal um at the very least, and uh that was inside of the privy vault or potential privy vault.
And that’s one of the reasons why we stopped excavating. There was because we started to find more things.
And ironically when you’re not digging in the, in a more concentrated area with the, the right.
We were just doing these kind of test trenches and not kind of uh a more thorough testing.
When you start hitting uh important deposit with a test trench, you stop because you want to open up the area much larger. And that wasn’t part of the phase of the work that we were doing.

[40:04] Back in the um main portion of the area with the cobbles.
Um We excavated this really long trench. I think it’s 44 or 5 m long.
This is a pretty, pretty big trench for us. Um Although we did bigger ones in 4244 my team did amazing job moving these incredibly heavy stones with uh simple levers.
Uh We’ve learned a lot of uh techniques on nova and put them all to use.
You can see here in this photo, we had just excavated out the sand that was essentially the underlayment of the stone and we’re just getting into that first deposit and we were really concerned that the basement of the house could be just under the surface. So we’re taking it very carefully at this point.

[40:42] However, we dug through um some really nasty soil.
So what you can see in this image is um the really nice sand that goes across the uh pit where the uh which was essentially the underlayment for the stone.
And then immediately you get this rocky, rocky, rocky soil that has a slightly greenish tinge this olive color as soon as we hit that rocky soil.
We found nothing and I truly mean nothing, not a single artifact.
So I was really hoping that this would have been fill on top of something really important.
So I made my poor team, keep digging and digging and digging and this is extremely compact, clay ridden.
And then eventually we said, no, we need to not dig down the whole thing.
Let’s just take a test pit in the middle of it.
So we sunk this test pit on um on one area of the property and it just kept going and towards the bottom, we started to get um I call it banding, but essentially, it’s, it’s layers of sand and silt and sand and silt.
And you don’t get that when someone’s filling an area, you get that when there’s a glacier sitting on top of a property letting go of, of Stilton sand over many, many hundreds of years.

[41:49] Um And what this basically said was that from the moment we got below that sand level, we were in a glacial till.
Um which means that we went from early 19 hundreds to 15,000 years in a millimeter.
Um And I was very disappointing because that meant that we didn’t find the basement.
Um What it meant was that the property did not have that historic uh basement behind it.

Disappointment and Loss of Site

 

[42:14] Um We were quite dejected. One of my volunteers actually found a news story that said after they moved the house, they took down the hill.
So at that point in 2018, we were convinced that the original Shirley Place foundations were located in that area where we dug.
But after the house was moved, that area lost the height of its soil down below the bottom of the foundations.
And essentially the site was taken away and the site was gone.
So that was very um unfortunate to say the least. So we packed up our bags, we took our artifacts and we watched them and cataloged them.
But essentially, we were, we were sad to say that the site was no longer there.

[42:54] And then 4244 Shirley Street came along. So, um there had been uh really for centuries, an oral history of this property being um a place of enslavement, related to Shirley Place.
Um When we were digging across the street, we were talking about the fact that this property could have been an outbuilding.
It doesn’t scream 18th century architecture and it never really was meant to scream anything. It was really just an outbuilding.
Um But then in the summer of um 2019, actually, before I talk more about that, I, I want to show the location of it.
So here’s Shirley place today, we were digging essentially in where these trees are and then across the street pretty close to it.
But across the street is 4244 Shirley Street.
And it’s a little bit hard to tell from this photo, but it’s got a decent yard and the house itself is just slightly cockeyed to the grid of the whole property which really kind of rings an alarm bell for this could be a much older property because it doesn’t really relate to the grid that was established in 1860 suggesting that it predates 1860.
And the only thing that was there before 1860 was Shirley Place.

[44:05] So, um in addition to that, that map, that or that drawing that I showed you at the beginning, um you can very clearly see that there is a small outbuilding on one side of the property is another one on the opposite side that’s long gone. We’re not going to talk about that one.
And then on early plans of the property, you have this long outbuilding with a circular road in front of it.
Strongly suggesting that this is a carriage house where you would have brought your horse and buggy up to the house, did a loop to drop off all the people that were there to for the parties and the owners and then the enslaved people would drive the carriage over to the carriage house where they would store the carriage.
But also the second story would have been living quarters for the folks that worked on the property, potentially the people taking care of the horses and the carriage and the drivers.
Um But also just generally speaking, housing um on the second floor.

[44:54] So in summer 2022 the current owner of the property filed to demolish this building and that set off every red flag or every alarm in the store preservation world, including especially the she releases place managers.
Um The property had been considered as a potential landmark and that meant that um my team and the historic preservation team of the city of Boston were very much involved in this.
So Joe Cornish from the Landmarks Commission and I met with the owner in the summer of 2022 and I brought up the fact that we could potentially do archaeology on the site.
And he thought it was a very good idea because it meant that when the property sold or whatever happened to it um that we would at least know what was there. So it wasn’t an unknown.

Preservation Efforts and Archaeological Survey

 

[45:40] Um At that point, the property, the demolition had been prevented, um which was good, but the owner was still planning on renovating the property in order to turn it into housing, uh which it had been for many, many centuries.
Yeah. So this would have been a preempted dig essentially just to get an idea of what was there.
So we started, I started getting work on the research and that’s when some of the more interesting things that we hadn’t considered when we first did the dig for the main part of the building came up.
So just to kind of reiterate some of the landscape layout, we have youth displays going up to the building, you have a stable to the north and a mansion to the south.
The key thing being that the road approaches the property from the down the middle of the property.

[46:22] Here’s the same property in 1855. You see Eustace place going up to the property.
You have the long stable on the north, you have the mansion house to the south and the property cuts.
I’m sorry, the road goes right to the middle and then here we are in the 1873 map.
So what has happened at this point is the mansion has been moved to its new location and it drives me crazy that all these houses are being moved around in the 19th century at the Blake House in Dorchester.
This house, many other houses, no one took a picture. Cameras are around.
Nobody takes a picture of these things. It would have been so interesting.
I can’t believe that nobody took a picture of these things.
Anyway, nobody took a picture of this being moved and we don’t know exactly where the mansion house was.
So um on this 1873 map, we know the mansion house has been moved and we have what we believe to be the stable.
But then as I was looking at it, there was a thing that kind of caught my eye, which I hadn’t noticed before and it’s this dotted line here.
This is indicating an unimproved road which I had never noticed before in the research that I had done for the property.

[47:24] If that was used as place, it kind of indicates an old arrangement of the property.
But as you can see that stable use this place, mansion pattern really breaks down in this particular image.
So to double check what it was looking like, I went and found that 1855 map again and I overlaid on top of it, the 1873 Hopkins map.
And you can see that what happens is the two things really line up beautifully.
If you look on the right, there’s Dorchester Brook, which at this point was turned into essentially a Grand Canal.
Um You get the bend in the river and then the stream to the southern end of it, I guess western end at this point, those overlap really well and Eustace place overlaps really well.
And so from this, what I believe is happening, um you have Eustace place showing up clear as day and then you have all of the other buildings that were there prior to the move. But the layout is kind of gone.
This building is 4244. This is the mansion, what it suggests from those maps is that both the mansion house, and 4244 were moved because if they hadn’t been, then the um, carriage house should be located to the north of Eustace place, which clearly isn’t at this point.

[48:44] So what we wanted to do was um when we had the opportunity to dig on the property was to test a lot of these ideas.
So first thing what we did is we entered onto the property um and we dug in the garden.
So what you can see on the right side of the image is 4244 Shirley Street.
We are digging just to the west of it in um what’s now a garden.
Um Because the idea is that if the carriage house is actually in its original location, if 4244 is in its original location, we’re missing half of it.
And as Susie said that the other half may have actually been moved across the street to the front of the mansion house.
Um But what should be still in the ground is the foundations of the western half of 4244.
So the first trench that we open, which we call trench. One was this 2 m by half meter trench directly in line with where the foundations would have gone.
One of the things that we found fairly quickly, which was a big surprise to us. Was that in this field deposit, there was a lot of native creations.
So what we have here is a piece of Massachusetts pottery on the top and at the bottom is a flake which is a piece of stone that breaks off while making stone tools.

Uncovering Native Presence

 

[49:52] We can’t date the rock on the bottom because we don’t know what tool was being made.
However, the pottery at the top um dates to sometime between 3000 years and 400 years ago because that was a time period during which the native people were making pottery.
In the northeast, the stone could be from an entirely different century, we don’t know or millennia.
Um But the other problem with this particular deposit was that it was a field deposit, which means the soils have all been disturbed.
So we don’t have this intact native site, but we have really strong evidence of the presence of native people on the property in this field deposit.
And pottery especially is a really fragile item from that time period.
So it was really shocking really to see any turn up on the site.
The other thing that we found in this first trench was a really important artifact.
Um a cry shell. So um Cowie shells would have been a really key um CRE artifact in the enslaved um community’s worldview uh in Western Africa, cowries are used as identity markers, but also as money in some cases.
And um we see them associated with sites of enslavement in America and the colonies.

[51:01] Uh They’re not always indications of enslavement.
In fact, we know that they were used in some cases for packaging peanuts, which were to produce a lot of them.
However, we have only found cry shells on Boston sites where enslaved people were present.
So we have a pretty strong correlation.
So we were really shocked, excited, it’s added in many ways to find um a cower shell in this particular property.
Um Unfortunately, it was in a disturbed context, but uh it being present on the site was really um and uh exciting kind of voice from the past of the enslaved people that would have been on this property.
It’s backless, which means the back of it has been carefully removed, um which would have allowed it to be worn into clothing, worn in hair.
But it’s also very likely that these were not visible on the people that own them or with the people that own them because um due to uh the Puritan nature of, of New England, many of the people that were brought over from afar and the indigenous people, the of the colonies were forced to abandon visibly their uh traditional practices.
So native people and enslaved Africans and free Africans and free native people were oftentimes not able to carry on their culture visibly.
And it may have been more of a clandestine object that would have been a personal object but not necessarily in the view of enslavers.

[52:24] So here you can see trench one in correlation to the property at 4244.
So here’s the corner of the foundation.
If the foundations were to have continued, they would have gone straight through this trench.
So not finding any foundations in the trench, we were able to say that we don’t believe that the western half of 4244 was located on this property or in its current location, which also supports the fact that or the idea that 4244 was moved around the same time as the main mansion house onto its current place.

[53:01] Here, you can see the profile of that same trench. Um You can see some layering.
You see this dark brown soil at the top, you see this dry soil and the darker soil slightly below. This was um 2018 was that kind of drought year?
So this is basically dust bowl dirt. And the only reason why we have differences in colors from here to here is moisture.
Um But if this was a natural soil, this is 4 ft down, it’s really hard to see in this photo. I have a drawing coming up.
Um If this was a natural soil, we would have run out essentially of, of, of cultural material by the 1st 2 ft or so.
And this is still going all the way down. We actually had to stop due to ocean regulations, which means we can’t dig beyond 4 ft without shoring up the walls.
Um But it was filled all the way down. That also means that at some point there was a hole there that was at least 4 ft deep or it was a low space that was down more than 4 ft from its current location that had been built up over time. We’re not sure. Still.
Here’s a profile. It’s a really boring profile. You have the surface here, you have an A soil which is our kind of garden soil.
And then this big amorphous fill, it was made up of A B and C soils.
And that just means that we have topsoil mid soil and subsoil all mixed together.
So all the dirt that we excavated through was from some other place churned up and then dumped onto the site.

[54:20] So from there, we moved into the main yard itself, we started excavating a series of trenches.
Um There’s two ways that we really do what’s called a phase one and phase one surveys are really just, is there a site here?
Yes or no, they’re not the big open hole where we’re trying to find everything.
We’re just trying to figure out what’s the fastest and most efficient way.
We can survey this site to answer as many questions as possible and cause as little disturbance to the site as possible.
So even though there’s um it has a nice kind of order to the 90 degrees and everything, essentially what we’ve been doing is working from known to unknown.
So our first trenches are always unknowns. We have no idea what’s going to happen.
So in this particular trench, you can see at the lower part here, this is the second trench that we opened following trenched one.
And then from that, we extend outward in a 90 degree direction and just try to see what can we find.
And then if we find something that confuses us, we work in another 90 degrees.
So we’re really chasing the site across the landscape through these trenches and extending them towards unknowns, hoping to kind of maintain a constant tra trajectory of going from a place that we understand into a place that we don’t understand.
And when we see changes, then we know something new is happening.

[55:34] So what does that look like? Um Overall, so this is what the excavations of 4244 and 2022 look like trench one up here on the side.
It’s kind of a stand alone in the garden that really just had a one and done purpose of is the extension of 4244 continuing.
No, it’s not trench three. There’s a fence here. So we kind of skip to trench three that started here and then we had multiple trenches extending off into all different directions to cover as much of the yard that we could while digging as little as possible.
We also had a couple of challenges which were um a series of um utility lines.
We had a gas line and a water line cutting rates in the middle of both sides of the site.
Um And so we had to kind of work to avoid that because it’s not usually um uh celebrated when you blow up the site because you broke through the gas line.
Um And it’s not great for your volunteers either.

[56:25] This is a map that we created. It’s, it’s a 90 degree turn.
If you turn this map 90 degrees to the right with north on the right.
This is a map of the front yard of 4244. You can see the building here.
We created this using our phone, um just a 3d, lighter, lighter scan of the whole property.
And we, we didn’t quite kind of know when we did it was that you can actually, when you’re done, first of all, turn it in 3D and I can’t do it here in the presentation, unfortunately.
But when you rotate it to the top and then zoom up, you create an aerial photograph which you couldn’t have gotten on the ground or we were able to get it from the ground, but we didn’t actually go up in the air if that makes any sense.
So by doing this record, we could kind of zoom up into an area that we couldn’t physically go to and see the site from above, which we can’t do in real life.
But we were able to do with the film and you can see a couple of different things happening here.
Um We have a series of trenches as you know, already, we have a series of test pits.
You can see one here, you can see one here and then there’s two in the middle here. These are just the little pokes that go down a little bit deeper.
You have this really light soil happening down here and then the very obvious series of cobbles in the top and we’re gonna talk about all of those next.

[57:39] Ok. So in trench three, we first encountered the cobbles and you can see here that there’s a very distinct edge to these things.
You have a straight line stone and then un cobbled in one area very thoroughly, cobbled in the other.
Um This is actually shown up here in the top part of the site is the closest to trench one.
And what you’re actually looking at in this orange soil is intact soils from the native landscape, meaning that that is soil that was deposited by the glacier.
Um It has never been dug into it until we got to it.
We actually paused at this point because everything below that point would be a native site and we didn’t want to dig into the native site unless we had to.
But we’re able to establish the edge of the cobbles. It also means that the cobbles themselves are not terribly deep uh into the site, which means that we’re really looking at the last story that happened on here and on this property, um which to us means that we’re looking at something to do with Shirley Place.
So the cobbles were a complete surprise. We had no idea they would be there.

[58:37] So we chased those cobbles everywhere. Um And you can see they’re very clearly laid deliberately.
There’s a, there’s a track, there’s a um angular track to them.
They are perpendicular to our trenches and that’s good.
Um We really wanted to dig our, our trenches were actually deliberately angled 45 degrees to the grid of the site.
And that’s because what we didn’t want to do is um what we did want to do is cut across things.
So if there was a wall, we wanted to cut across it, what we didn’t want to do is end up right next to it for 30 ft and miss it entirely for that 30 ft and not realize it was just next to that.
But by cutting at it at a 45 degree angle, we were more likely to just cut through features and see them um to be able to find more information.
So this is the zoomed in version of that aerial image and you can see there’s a continuous edge to the stone.
I think it’s safe to extrapolate underneath this dirt here that it continues on beyond there.
Um But there’s also a clear edge on this side of the stone and this is uh s um, 7 ft across from one edge to the other going down the property.

[59:46] So this is a kind of simplified version of our feature plan.
We have this cobble pavement that cuts across the site across the front of 4244.
And then we have a gas line that cuts across this way, which caused a whole bunch of problems for our digging because it just was a big hole that we saw everywhere.
And then on this side of the property, there was a water line.
We also had another, um uh it was electric.
Yeah, it was an electrical line that actually was located right here, which we didn’t even dig above because that’s even more risky than the gas line.
The gas line unfortunately was not marked by dig safe.
So we didn’t know it was there until we found it, um did over for the water line.
But the, the electrical line we very clearly knew was there, dig safe, marked it and we avoided it, which is also why we have not as much excavations in that area.

Discovering the Basement Floor

 

[1:00:29] So within that kind of crisscrossed area, you saw that lighter soil and you can see it here.
This is actually what I think is the most important part of the site overall.
Uh It’s, it’s hard to explain unless you’re physically touching it and standing on it.
But essentially, as we’re digging down to these soils, it you can see in the profile, it’s, it’s kind of a consistent fine soil.
There’s not a lot in it. Uh There’s not a lot of rocks and then it comes down pretty abruptly on this Cobby surface.
Um You can feel it with the trial as you come down to it because you’re kind of digging loose, loose, loose and it’s just firm.
And when you’re digging down to that surface, it doesn’t feel so much like you’re digging down, it feels more like you’re cleaning off that flat area and it came down on each one of these trenches at the same depth.
But um relative to itself, meaning that if the trench sloped down, the, the floor was flat.
So at that point, we got excited because we’re thinking this has to be the basement floor because it’s the only reason why you would have this large expanse of firm compacted solid surface that was essentially cleanable.

[1:01:37] Now, it’s not um sometimes we find like compact of surfaces that are like like perfectly smooth.
This is not like that. This is more of like a cobbled surface.
It would not be a good thing to walk on regularly. So it suggests to me that this surface may have had a covering at one point, but that covering had been thoroughly pushed down into the soil and compacted that soil and then removed or decomposed.
We didn’t find any evidence of a brick floor.
We didn’t find any evidence of a plank floor.
Um Just this kind of level ground about a foot and a half down.

[1:02:10] So here’s the site from a profile. So the same thing that we can do by going up into the sky with the 3D images, we can actually turn the camera directly to the side and look at the edge of the site as though we were standing in the ground looking sideways, which you can’t do in real life.
Um It’s, it’s not the crisp image, but basically what you have on the far left is the cobbled surface.
Then you have a completely level surface and that’s the main structure of the basement.
And then in this area, it’s a little bit more undulating, it’s a little bit hard to tell.
And then we dug down in our test pits in two areas. Um They ended up being really filled with rocks, but also bricks and other um artifacts from the mid 18th century, which um we only wanted to test in the very small areas because going into the project, we made a commitment that digging below the floor was essentially minimal if at all, because.

[1:03:03] In other parts of the world, especially in the Mid Atlantic, um when you have the basements of kitchens, especially where you have enslaved people.
There’s often uh ritual practices that happen when people are alone in the kitchen with the uh with their community about ritual and interment of objects, sometimes even um deceased members of the family, like Children.
And what we didn’t want to do was to go below that ground because if there was something like a ritual cache of, of, of meaningful creations or meaningful objects or God forbid a burial, we did not want to disturb that.
We did choose to do it in one these two spots here just to get a tiny little slice to confirm that there is something underneath the floor.
What we did find in these two areas was that the site continued down.
There was 18th century exclusive artifacts below that surface.
Um And we weren’t able to dig past that because there was quite a few rocks in the way, but it never stopped. There’s something down there.
Um We don’t really know what, I’m sorry, I’m pointing the wrong one that’s the water pipe. This is the pit that we dug down deeper to see if there’s anything.
And as it kind of sloped down, we started to find more bricks in that area as well.

[1:04:14] We did a couple of other trenches and this is what we found.
There’s this kind of jumbled fill. It’s not terribly well compacted, there’s not a lot in it.
And then we hit this red soil and red soil in, in New England is symbol uh signifies what we call bee soil.
It’s a kind of a iron rich soil. Bee soils are really important because they have um they indicate an intact uh glacial deposit, which means that this is undeveloped. Roxbury dirt.
Nobody has dug there except us. When we dug through it, we dug through it in this one spot continued all the way down into complete subsoil.
This is glacial deposits 20 plus 1000 years ago.
Um We could confirm that this portion of the site which is really the eastern portion of for the front yard is completely intact, undeveloped.
Nobody has put a foundation there ever before.

[1:04:59] So from that, we’ve been able to kind of reconstruct three main zones of the property.
This is where trench one was, which is just west of 4244. And for some reason, we still don’t know why there’s at least 4 ft of fill in that area.
It means that it was either already originally much lower and then built up 4 ft or someone had dug down 4 ft and then filled it back up again. We can’t tell yet.
There’s a buried surface here which is firm flat and only a couple of feet down, which has all the hallmarks of the basement and then just outside of it in this area here, we have completely natural soils.
So from that, we have concluded that this red area in some way represents the original footprint of Shirley Place.
We can say with pretty good confidence that we have found the original footprint of Shirley place.

[1:05:50] Next question is ok. So where exactly is in? So from there, we have these four layouts and this is kind of as close as I’m gonna get to.
Where was the house? It’s one of these, I think.
So we have a couple of different ideas.
One of the biggest things we were debating throughout the entire time we were excavating was, was the cobbles that we found in the house or outside of the house.
So if they were in the house, the most likely place that they would have been located was in that Piazza.
So that place that’s not in the basement, but it is just outside of the basement underneath the um underneath the kind of covered porch, why it was coupled, I’m not sure, but that is a option.
So here is the alignment of the property.
If you put that cobbled surface in the Piazza.

[1:06:35] Option B is that the covered, I’m sorry, the cobbled surface is just outside of the house, which would make a lot of sense because cobbled surfaces are usually put into a place to make the ground more durable and more easy to walk across or ride across if you’re in a horse.
So if that’s just outside of the um outside of the Piazza, the net puts the house here, which is more in the road.
So I don’t really want that one to be the case because then it’s, it’s, there’s less of it left, then there’s two other ideas that we have, which is why is 4244 where it is and why is it kind of cockeyed to the road?
So if they moved the house, there would have been a foundation that we’ve already seen in all the photographs of the original house, they didn’t take that with.
So if that was the case, why wouldn’t they have reused? At least some of that for 4244 when they moved it over?
If that’s the case, then 44 40 42 44 would be located somewhere on the actual existing foundations of Shirley place.
And this half of the house actually is about the exact width of Shirley Place itself.
So if they reused, um the what direction are we going in here?
The southern foundation wall for 4244 then the house would be located in this location.
And if they reuse the northern portion of the foundation, then that ships the house all the way up.
So these are our four potential locations of where Shirley Place was um in the 17 forties and I don’t know yet which one that is.

[1:08:05] But here’s some of the other things that supports this, this conclusion of, of one of these four potentially a um when we did the overlay, we place 4244 here.
And the original footprint of Shirley Place is located just in front of the building and you can see how option a really aligns pretty well with that overlay.
Now, the overlay is not perfect, but this is a pretty good match. Um.

[1:08:35] The biggest issue with that idea is the cobbles are actually significantly uh narrower than the actual width.
The Piazza and we can’t think of a single good reason why they would only cobble the bottom two thirds of the Piazza.
It could be that the Piazza is actually shallow than we believe, but that’s unlikely because the measurements are pretty precise from all of the other measurements.
Um And so this actually maybe suggests that the Piazza was um this part of the Piazza which has the housekeeping room and the bedroom for the man may have actually been just south of here. We’re still not entirely sure.

[1:09:09] But with option A, the one thing that was really shocking when we started to align everything was this kind of wider soil, really this corner here that we found really perfectly aligned with the wine cellars edges um in a way that was kind of it felt meaningful, but it may not be.
Um but this is one of the ones that were like option a checks off the most boxes, although it’s still not perfect, but the nice thing is about it is that we can still test it.
So here’s the thing about all the options is that the historic documentation that we have for the property has two big features.
There’s a pump which is another name for a well and there’s the base of, of a chimney which no matter how much you do to get rid of all those bricks, there’s gonna be something left behind.
So option A actually places that chimney just outside of where we dug, which is frustrating, but we didn’t know it at the time and it puts our pump in the middle of the corner of one of the uh the paved areas either way, wherever you place that house.

[1:10:11] If it’s not completely under 4244 which I hope it’s not. But I don’t know yet.
What we could do is with additional testing, we could try to see if we can find the pump, if we can find the pump or the footing for the fireplace, especially in this location, which I show here, which is testable because we know exactly what grids we where to dig.
If we find the pump in the, in the chimney, it locks the house into an into a precise location.
And from that, we can extrapolate the entire landscape which would be really exciting to do.

[1:10:41] All right. So here’s what we know and they’re not conclusive, conclusive. By the way, this is the key part of all of this is that typically when we’re doing archaeology, it’s all about the stuff. We get a lot of information on the artifacts.
We didn’t find that much on either of these properties. So we’re really doing most of our interpretation based on the dirt itself.
So we know that there’s no evidence of foundations west of 4244.
The, the current building, we know that there’s a cobbled surface that aligns with the original orientation of 4244.
And the Shirley Place is a compacted surface that aligns with um the cobbles and it’s shallow.
There’s an undeveloped soil on the eastern half of 4244 Shirley Street, which I, I believe to mean that there’s nothing there, um, from buildings wise, at least.

Speculations and Unanswered Questions

 

[1:11:23] Um, our preliminary conclusion is that the mansion was in 4244 Shirley Street.
We’re not sure exactly where its location is based on what you saw and that the carriage house was likely relocated to its current position based on all the alignments that we have from some of those little maps. We still have a ton of questions.
Why was Trent ones filled? What was, what was it filled? Was it filled up?
Was it filled? Was it dug down and then filled back up?
Is it possible that there was a foundation there? And when they moved the western half of the property, they took the foundation out of the ground and that’s why we have this big hole.
That’s also possible as well. Can we find the pump and chimney?
Why the cobbles narrower than the Piazza? Is that because it’s not where the Piazza is? Or is there some other reason?
Um What was the floor of the basement? This was a very uneven floor that we found doesn’t seem like an ideal place to walk?
So was there something covering it related to that?

[1:12:15] Is this actually the top of a fill that people added to the soil in order to fill in that shallow foundation that if we dug down further, we would actually get down to the real basement of the building.
And that this is just a very compacted fill to fill in that low lying area before they built the 40 or before they moved 4244.
We don’t know because again, we’re really concerned about digging down in that area and disturbing potentially, um culturally sensitive areas um relate to the next question. And is it even OK to dig in the floor?
And that’s, I think a really big question going forward if this is a potential sacred space to the enslaved people that lived on this property that have a ritual interments of, of goods or people even?
Is it OK for us as archaeologists to dig into it or is, or is the best thing that we can do is advocate for it being preserved and there’s many other questions, but those are the key ones.
So that’s where I’m at now. Um We’re gonna have a full report still.
It’s been slow in the making.
Um, but I think this covers just about everything that we know and I’m gonna end with our backfield units and I haven’t seen it in a little while, but I think it’s doing pretty well.
I think the grass is really enjoying the uh aeration that we put into the soil from digging it up.

Jake:
[1:13:25] Well, that about wraps it up for this week to learn more about the Shirley Eustace House and the people who were enslaved there.
Check out this week’s show notes at hubor.com/two 97.
I’ll have a link to an online exhibit about enslaved lives in the Shirley household.
Links to our past episodes about Lafayette’s visit to the Shirley Eustace House and our interview with Joe Bagley about his second book.
I’ll also link to information about how you can support efforts to uncover and interpret the stories of the many people who are enslaved at Shirley Place.
If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email podcast at hubor.com.
We are hub history on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and most active on Twitter.
If you’re on Mastodon, you can find me as at Hubor at Better dot Boston, but I’ll warn you, I haven’t been very active on Mastodon lately and in fact, not very active on social media at all.
I just don’t have time right now.

[1:14:29] If you happen to work for a history organization in or around Boston that has some job openings, please feel free to get in touch with me the easiest way to do that is to go to hubor.com and click on the contact us link, while you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link and be sure that you never miss an episode.
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That’s all for now. Stay safe out there listeners.

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