Buried history being uncovered in St. Davids
Parslow Heritage Consultancy exploring grounds of Paxton House for unique historical artifacts
Digging through the dirt to find buried history isn’t much different during a pandemic for Carla Parslow and her team in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
“Archeologists are natural social distancers,” Parslow jokes. “We’re always working a couple metres away from each other.”
The group from Parslow Heritage Consultancy kept its numbers to a small half-dozen to maintain that social distancing as they worked outside the Paxton House in St. Davids last week. They’ll be back today for more excavation.
Parslow said they’ve found hundreds of fragments of architectural materials such as window glass, brick and nails. There have also been some intact artifacts including a clay pipe used for smoking tobacco that could
range from the early 1800s to 1870 and a thimble likely owned by a woman in the house who did sewing.
“We’ve been collecting lots of historical artifacts and what it’s doing is sort of telling a story of how the people lived in that household 150 to 200 year ago,” Parslow said.
The two-storey home, designated under the Ontario Heritage Act, was built by the community’s namesake David Secord, a relative of early settler Peter Secord who was granted the property through a 1798 Crown Patent.
David Secord purchased the land in 1799 and lived there until 1844, according to the Town of Niagara-on-the-Lake. Oral history has it that Laura Secord rested at the house during her historic trek to Beaverdams to warn Lieut. Fitzgibbon about the impending American attack during the War of 1812.
The house is one of two in the area that survived the American attack on the village in 1814. The surrounding land of 1.84 hectares is going to be developed into an approved planned subdivision and has been the focus of archeological digs over several years.
“The whole property is quite rich with cultural material,” Parslow said. “We have Indigenous people who’ve been living on that land a lot earlier than our Canadian settlements have been around. It’s quite a rich history in that area.”
Prior digs on other parts of the property away from the house have found a lot of Indigenous materials such as pottery and beads that Parslow said date from 3,000 years ago to upwards of 300 years ago. Flakes of stone created when making sharp edges on stone tools have also been found.
Parslow’s team started digging on the property of the house last Monday. The hope is to find a root cellar or the location of a privy, otherwise known as an outhouse. Parslow said people used to put their garbage inside the hole of the outhouse before capping it and digging a new one. That could be a treasure trove for archaeologists.
The dig has been done by hand and will be followed up with mechanical topsoil removal to see if it can be found. Once done at the site later this week, the group will have to clean all the artifacts and then fine tune their dates.
“Right now, what I have is I’ve got bags of very dirty artifacts that need to be cleaned,” Par- slow said. “Then we’ve got to look at them and we catalogue them.”
Steven Megannety of Niagara Luminaire Inc., a consultant for the numbered property owner, said the owners have spent $1.8 million on archeology since 2014, the result being a finding of 90,000 artifacts, but no gravesites or structures.
The next step will be to determine how to preserve and what to do with the house itself, which is in rough shape and is creating a challenge. The owner is hoping to save the 63-squaremetre building for some type of community use, but it will require $1.2 million to bring it back to current standards.
“Inside its been neglected for 30 years. There’s trees growing out of the roof. It’s just in deplorable state, so we’re trying to figure out how to deal with it.”
The artifacts found on the property will be held by Parslow, a licensed archeologist, for the Crown. She said they’ll likely be put in a storage area at University of Western Ontario or McMaster University.
Ideally a museum would take them, but she said they usually want the “really good stuff,” not window glass and old nails.
“That’s the way it is. You don’t go to the museum to see the ugly side, the not-so-pretty side of archeology.”
There are lessons to be learned from the buried fragments though, like the social class of early settlers from objects, what they farmed or ate from bones and if they were unwell from prescription bottle fragments.
Parslow said it’s likely many of the neighbourhood homes are hiding similar buried artifacts in their yards. “Most definitely the whole area is quite historical, so I wouldn’t be surprised if anybody’s backyards has pretty much what we are finding.”