Wayne State archaeology team studies Hamtramck history

HAMTRAMCK, Mich.—Over there by the telephone pole? That was a bar called the Nut House.

Toward the back of the big building? That’s where the Wayne State archaeology team found a bullet, and it was exciting for a minute— but then they remembered oh, yeah, that was the police department.

The big building was the Hamtramck village hall. It’s been gone since the early ’80s. The Nut House survived Prohibition—or really, ignored it—but it’s gone, too, along with everything else that used to be upright in the short block along Jos. Campau.

What’s left is harder to see, but in a truly groundbreaking excavation, a professor and her 15 students have spent the semester digging it out from beneath the gravel. On site every Monday in the city’s first comprehensive archaeology project, Krysta Ryzewski’s class is using hand tools, imagination and analysis to uncover history, mystery and modern connections, The Detroit News reported .

And beer bottles. As archaeological sites go, it’s not Pompeii. It’s just the short block between Grayling and Alice streets, in the shadow of a railroad viaduct built to keep Roaring ’20s auto workers from getting pulverized by trains as they sprinted to punch in.

But Pompeii doesn’t have Polish restaurants left over from the old days, or Bangladeshi restaurants greeting the new. Or an excited grad student from Ann Arbor named Stacy Markel earning academic credit as she trots over to show her teacher a piece of glass.

The bottle has raised lettering that says “Detroit,” she points out. It might say “brewery.” And like the bullet casings, it came from beneath the old cop shop.

Significant? Too soon to say. But it’s interesting—and everything is a potential clue.

“It’s one of the challenges for us,” said Ryzewski, to take fragments from the ground, match them with what’s known or what’s legend or what’s seen on old maps, “and learn how people built and lived in the city.”

What’s now Hamtramck was mostly farmland and mostly French well into the 1800s. Next came the Germans. The Dodge Main auto plant opened in 1911, and throngs of Poles arrived to work there or at more than 20 factories that emerged near it. Among them, on a site that will presumably go unexplored, was the Acme White Lead Paint Co.