Nails

Kendra Tamar

During my time at the Trent Peterborough BcGn-15 field school one of my favourite things to find in the dirt while sifting were the old nails, particularly the machine cut nails that typically had more of a rectangular like shape to them. They struck my interest as they looked distinctly different from the other nails. I’m used to seeing the nails used commonly nowadays, which are wire, and I found it fascinating to see this kind of nail, especially at the rate in which I was finding them.

Through a bit of research I found out that the wire nail was actually patented in France in 1806 and by 1819 it was being produced in and in more localized quantities (Adams, 2002, p. 69). In the 1790s, the machine cut nail was created instead of using the older blacksmithing method of individually creating each nail through a process of hammering and manoeuvring. Machine nails were made out of a flat sheet of metal where small strips were cut out of it in order to create the nail shaft, which is an issue of sorts as it made these nails cross grained making them weaker as the sheets of metal were rolled out in one direction, then being cut in another going against the grain that was originally created when rolling it (Adams, 2002, p. 67).  I found this really fascinating, as on site there was a presence of both wire and machine cut nails. Which could either indicate that the previous residents of the area use both kinds of nails or that they had originally used a certain type of nail, then switched over to another after period of time which then shows the presence of globalization as mentioned before, wire nails were invented in France, but our site is an Ontario Canada which is extremely mind blowing to think about. All in all, my experience with site BcGn-15 has been nothing short of amazing and I’m happy to walk away from it with the knowledge that I do now.

References

Adams, W. H. (2002). Machine cut nails and wire nails: American production and use for dating 19th-century and early-20th-century sites. Historical Archaeology, 36(4), 66–88. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf03374370