Category: Artifact of the Day

It’s hard to believe that our field school is half over already! It was cold and damp this morning, but we tried to keep as warm as we could by moving some dirt. James ordered everyone pizza for lunch (hooray!!), and we had Dr Jennifer Moore, the Anthropology Department Chair drop by today to see how the excavations are progressing.

After lunch, we started backfilling the two completed units that have been excavated and recorded (elevations taken, planned, and profiled). Many hands make light work and it is always surprising to see how quickly a unit that was painstakingly excavated over days can be filled back up with dirt.

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Jax, Xander, and Amelie finally got to the dark artifact rich layer in their midden unit today, and immediately had some interesting finds, including the find of the day, a timber stamp or brand.

The Timber Marking Act was passed in 1870, requiring all logging firms to register a unique identifying mark and stamp this on the cut logs. Over 2200 timber marks were registered between 1870 and 1990. Failure to mark logs resulted in a $50 fine, and wrongly applying a mark claiming someone else’s logs incurred a fine of up to $100.

In 1874, the Ministry of Agriculture published “The Lumberman’s Timber Mark Guide“, to help lumber companies overcome problems of identification. It included pictures of stamps for all registered lumber companies, and a complete index. The preface concluded that “without a correct book of reference, much trouble and loss must be sustained from ignorance of the Registered Marks by which the timber and lumber can be identified, besides incurring the risk of infringing on those already adopted and registered.”

I found three marks listed, all from 1872 and 1873 for Boyd, Smith, and Co. who purchased the Nassau Mills in September 1872. These are obviously not our mark, but they come from the first version of this company.

I did find another timber mark book, written by Diane Aldred, called Registered timber marks of Eastern Canada from 1870 to 1984. The Trent library has a copy, so I will have to check that out next week and see if we can find our mark reproduced there with its registry date. As I didn’t have immediate access to this book, I decided to poke through the Peterborough newspaper records I have and I found enough mentions that I think I can narrow down the date of this mark a bit.

So as I mentioned above, the sale of the Nassau Mills to Gardiner Boyd, Alexander Smith, and James M. Irwin took place in September 1872. Irwin seems to have been a bit of a silent partner at the outset, but he is listed in the parcel roll as one of the purchasers.

In May 1876 there was a notice published that Alexander Smith of Boyd, Smith & Co. was injured/ill, but expected to be able to attend to business in a few days. There was also an article talking about an insurance payout to Boyd, Smith & Co. for death of a valuable horse [was this the cause of the injury?]; and some ads announcing timber for sale at the Boyd, Smith & Co. lumber yard.

In August 1876 there are ads for lumber yard of Boyd, Smith & Co., and a mention that A. Smith, Esq. of the firm of Boyd, Smith & Co. has been to the Eastern Province and sea side for the benefit of his health, and was expected home the next week. He appears to have left the company some time around then, perhaps due to lingering health issues?

The first specific mention of Irwin & Boyd I could find in the newspapers is September 1879. There is an article detailing the proceedings of police court, where enlarged cases against mill owners for depositing sawdust and mill refuse in the river came up for further hearing. Irwin & Boyd are mentioned as being fined $20 and $2.50 costs for breach of Navigation Laws, and also fined $5.00 and $2.50 costs for depositing sawdust into the river. So at least in 1879, there is mention of Irwin & Boyd as operating the mills, which matches our I & B stamp!

The last mention of Irwin & Boyd I can find in the newspapers is January 1882, newspaper articles and ads only speak of “Irwin’s mill” or “Irwin lumber sale” after this date. Presumably at this point that stamp was retired and discarded as it was no longer current.

So we can narrow this stamp to approximately 1879 to 1882 based on the newspaper records. I am curious to see if the mark is in that timber mark book!

Our lovely new signs are up, welcome to everyone who has stopped by the blog to see what the heck is going on behind the Trent sign!

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Site visitors today included Dr Hugh Elton, Michael Obie and Dan Smith. Michael and Dan make appearances in the 2017 and 2018 and 2023 seasons of our project!

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“Hey, we found a ring!”

We had found one other ring at this site before, so I headed over to the midden crew check it out. Immediately through the dirt I could tell it was silver, with some sort of design on the front and when I turned it over there were some hallmarks suggesting a silver piece as well. A careful wipe down revealed:

The front was fascinating, an icon of a logging saw, the initials A. P., and underneath a felling axe. How cool is that, to have a piece of jewelry that directly reflects the mill activities, located in a domestic context from a house on the property of a major sawmill complex?

So cool!!

I started with the hallmarks, as they usually give you an assay mark (city based), maker’s initials, an assay date (initial letter in a particular font), and a location (city mark) where it was made, and maybe an indication if duty was paid (portrait). But it was puzzling to me, as although I could see three marks, they didn’t fit this model. The lion passant suggested an assay in London, UK, but why were there two of them? The centre mark was covered in dirt, and even when cleaned it was hard to see with the naked eye., and appeared to be two letters instead of a single date code.

I couldn’t wait until the end of the day, when I could finally peek through a microscope and see the initials “J.O”. A couple of British silver hallmark sites on the web suggested this could be a J. Oliver in Clerkenwell, London. But I was still thrown by the weirdness of the hallmark elements. Then James reminded me about pseudo-hallmarks. The Canadian silver market did not create a standardised hallmark systems like the UK one until 1985, however, it is evident that the idea of a silver object needing to have British-style hallmarks to make it “real” did certainly apply. So our marks suggest a domestically-made ring that needed some trappings of British silver.

So this is likely why we have a kind of bizarre set of hallmarks which on first glance seem real, but have no real meaning behind them. I did a quick search to see if there were any 19th century Canadian silversmiths who used the initials J.O and found a couple potential names mentioned (John O’Gorman/Toronto, John O’Donahoe/Quebec, and John Oakes/Montreal) but couldn’t find any more beyond their names — that might be a future research project.

So once that area of investigation has come to an end, the next step was to see if we could figure out who A.P. was! It seemed reasonable to assume that this ring was worn by someone who was involved in the lumber industry in some way. My first thought was to scour the city and county directories but then I remembered as part of the background research for our Nassau Mills report, I had already done a partial listing of census and directory research I had summarised to list possible inhabitants of the parcel of land. At the time we wrote the license report for our excavations, we were excited to maybe link Charles Perry to the beginning of the life of this house, but never did we dream that we would be able to link to someone else in the past!

One name immediately jumped out at me, Albert Parker, who in the 1891 census is 44 years old and listed as living in Smith Township (check) in a wooden 1.5 story 4 room house (seems plausible) with his wife Margaret (34), son William Allan (11), and daughters Ethel I. (8) and Olive R. (5). So the fact that we have some toys in the midden is supported by the census recording children in a household. This is all great so far.

Albert’s occupation is listed as sawmill labourer (check!!). The other families in the 1891 census list that cluster before and after the Parker family also have some members listed as sawmill labourers, and no one else has the initials A.P. We know there were at least four dwelling houses on the parcel, so it is possible that in the 1880s-1890s, our house was occupied by Albert Parker and family, and at some point he lost his silver ring.

I decided to see if I could trace Albert’s life back through the census and if we could learn a little more about him. A brief foray suggests:

In 1881, Albert is 34, Methodist, married to Margaret (25), and they have a son, Allen (1). I found a listing for Varnum in the 1887 Farmers’ and Classified Business Directory as a tenant on Concession 18, Lot 27, Smith.

The 1891 census I have detailed above.

The 1897 Farmer’s and Business Directory suggests that Albert moves away from Nassau Mills in the late 1890s, as his address is listed as freehold at Concession 10, Lot 10 of Smith.

In 1901, Albert was 55, a widower, occupation mill labourer, and living in Ashburnham in a lodging house with William Allen Parker (20), (also listed as mill labourer), Ethel Parker (18) and Olive Parker (15). I found a mention that William Allen Parker married a Lilian Ethel Bartley November 6, 1907. I didn’t check in to what happened to Ethel and Olive, but the last mention in the census for Albert is in 1911. By this point Albert was 65 years old, and living on his own in a rooming house at 186 George St. Peterborough. His religion is listed as Baptist, and he still working as a labourer, but this time for Canadian General Electric ($450 a year)! I wonder if he was incorporated into CGE as they took over the mill property?

I think I found his death notice, which suggests he died in 1914 and is buried in the Lakefield cemetery. It was so cool to find an artifact that we can likely trace back to its owner. I wonder how upset he was to lose this ring, it seems as though it would have been a treasured item.

We were lucky to fit in a couple of hours of excavation today before the threatening rain started pelting down!

We quickly packed up the site and got the equipment back to the trailer and then broke for lunch. After lunch we decided to take the opportunity to start processing the artifacts we have been collecting in our Archaeology Centre wet lab.

It was really great to get a chance to go through the artifacts we have collected to date on the excavation. I chose this dog tag as our artifact of the day. It says “DOG TAX/1907/PETERBORO/361”.

In 1907, General Electric was leasing the property for the first power station on the west bank, however, we know that people were still living on the parcel. Perhaps this tag came from the neighbouring house, which we know was occupied into the late 1950s.

Dog tax seems to have been a contentious issue at this time. An article in the Lindsay Post from 1907 reporting about dog licensing in Kingson calls people “Animaniacs” and suggests that there are twice as many dogs in Kingston enjoying life than are registered with the tax assessor. The writer suggests that the city offer a 25-cent reward to people who correctly report to the assessor that a dog is not on the list. It also states that “All dogs should be taxed or face the policeman’s revolver!”.

Luckily our unknown Prinnie/Pete/Bobbie/Carlos/Fluffy/Fannie [all names referenced in the article] was registered on our assessor rolls, at least in 1907!

Today we finally were down to the cultural layers of interest and started recovering the amount of artifacts we were expecting. Because it is starting to get complicated on site as we work out the order that we should remove contexts, we are trying an experiment where one student in each excavation group is appointed as the team lead for the day. That means they are in charge of keeping track of progress and implementing the excavation strategy, keeping on top of paperwork, and reporting to either me or James if we stop by for an update.

The west wall group worked on taking down the exterior wall deposit further, practiced a little plan drawing, and began finding some glass and ceramics, metal, buttons, charcoal, coal, and nails mixed in to the fill.

The north wall crew continued carefully excavating through several overlapping contexts that fall on the outside of the north wall of the structure. While a lot of it was construction/destruction related debris, they did recover some buttons, ceramic, part of a leather boot, and what looks like a brass lamp base.

We’d been scratching our heads a little why we hadn’t found the same amount of artifacts in excavation areas that are really close to productive units from our last excavations. Today in the midden unit, they placed three exploratory sondages and quickly determined that yes, there is a midden deposit there under some sterile-looking fill. Our usual paper bag recovery system was quickly overwhelmed and we went back to the bin method of artifact collection that we commonly used in 2017 and 2018. Hooray!

A big part of the excavation is making sure we not only know where artifacts came from, but also ensure that that context doesn’t get lost. Each bag/bin gets a number which is associated in the site binder with the context information, date, site, and personnel. That allows us to cross check later during the analysis in case of errors in transcription or attribution.

Looking through some of the artifacts recovered today was like meeting some old friends after a long absence. I recognized some fragments of dishes that we also saw in our 2017 and 2018 midden excavations. Some standout pieces in particular were some flow blue plate fragments, parts of an alphabet border nursery plate, another bone toothbrush, and another J. & M.P. Bell & Co. Blue Willow plate. We also had some new never-before-seen items as well. If we get rained out later this week, it will be fun to do some lab work to get these finds clean so we can begin the analysis.

I think the artifact of the day would have to be this doll’s teacup recovered from the midden. The bowl of the cup was recovered first, and an hour or two later the fragment with the handle popped up. To our delight they refit perfectly! I suspect this is part of the same doll’s set that we recovered some pieces (a lid to a tiny tureen, and another cup) from 2018. It is great to have further evidence (nurseryware, marbles, toy tea sets) that there were children living and playing here.

The summer kitchen exploration continued. There was a little breakthrough in the morning when they were able to locate the stump of a tree which was cut down after we finished excavating in 2018. As this stump was at the original ground surface, this gave us a good indication that we were soon to encounter the cultural layers of interest! This unit has been a bit of a slow burn so far, but I think it will become pretty interesting pretty quickly. One notable find was an old key, complete from bow-barrel-to-bit, which they joked was from the summer kitchen door (or maybe the back door of the house as that was close by too).

Last but not least, we decided to put another unit in where we think the main midden distribution falls. Xander and Emma worked really hard today getting the sod and upper levelling fill contexts off of their unit, and hopefully they will soon be down into the midden layers.

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We were visited today by Dr Michael Eamon, Principal of Traill College. He was last here in May 2018, so it was fun to catch him up with our interpretations from those excavations of Structure 1.

I wasn’t expecting us to have an artifact of the day so early in the excavation, especially since most of the planned excavation work today was digging through already excavated material. While the fill used to level and cap the site after our 2018 excavations has a lot of modern artifacts mixed in like plastic bags, cutlery, straws and the like which I suppose will be future artifacts to someone, they are not yet of archaeological concern!

The crew re-locating the northeast corner of Structure 1 had part of their unit fall in previously unexcavated soil, and as they were cleaning it back, out popped a shell. And not the typical land snail shells we see, or maybe perhaps a freshwater mussel shell or even an oyster shell, but part of a marine shell!

I chose this as artifact of the day because it reminded me of the other shell we found in 2017 on this site. Finding two marine shells is pretty suggestive of someone living here being into Conchology, which was an extremely popular Victorian pastime.

Unlike our previous shell find, this one is a bivalve. My initial brief foray into the literature suggests it is a member of the Veneridae family, but maybe after cleaning it up and looking for diagnostic features we will be able to narrow it down to a particular species. We will never know if this was brought back as a momento by a family member or friend who travelled the oceans, or was special ordered from a shell merchant to add to a cabinet of curiosities, but it gives us another little peek into the life of one of the past inhabitants of this house.