![]() This technique was used in ten different locations around the academy to search for remains of Scott Street, an eighteenth-century road old officers' quarters along Porter Road a temporary barracks in the middle of the Ellipse and a canal dug in the early twentieth century to move building supplies into the campus. "We had never done this kind of search before, so it was quite a thrill to find the governor's mansion sitting out there where the computer said it would be," Bodor says. A trench dug there uncovered the foundation almost immediately. Using measurements from the map overlay, archaeologist Thomas Bodor measured the distance from the two landmarks (a tree and the corner of a nearby building) and pinpointed where the foundation of the governor's mansion should be. The map indicated that the location of the mid-eighteenth-century governor's mansion was a now a grassy area between two sidewalks in front of Dahlgren Hall. This created a single map showing the precise locations of old city and academy structures in relation to existing landmarks, Fort Severn, and the 1845 and modern shorelines. Various nineteenth-century gateposts and monuments at the academy showed up on several of the maps, allowing the archaeologists to overlay modern maps of the academy with historic maps of the city and the school at its inception and during its 1906 rebuilding. Using a computer-aided design (CAD) program, historic and modern maps can be superimposed and aligned as long as they share two or more points or landmarks. Most of the latter were Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, found in the Library of Congress, which are known for their accuracy and the information they contain about street layouts and widths and the physical characteristics of individual buildings. ![]() The test units yielded few remains.Īrchival research was more fruitful, yielding property deeds and dozens of historic maps. As this area was slated for construction, we dug test pits at several locations, which according to the old maps indicated earlier buildings. The search for archaeological remains began with digging 100 one-foot-square shovel test pits in front of the academy's chapel and Pebble Hall, along Porter Road, and in a parking lot next to Halsey Field House, where the Hell Point neighborhood once stood. The assessment of archaeological and cultural resources at the Naval Academy, cosponsored by the Historic Annapolis Foundation and funded by the Department of Defense's Legacy Program, included a conventional program of test pits, an innovative combination of archival research and computerized mapping techniques developed by University of Maryland anthropologist John Seidel, and an oral history project. As the academy grew, many of these buildings were razed to make way for more modern facilities, with much of that work happening during a 1906 reconstruction. The Naval School at Annapolis, as it was called, then had only a handful of buildings with names like Rowdy Row, Brandywine Cottage, Apollo Row, and the Gas House, which it used for teaching and student housing. ![]() It began encroaching on Annapolis almost immediately, starting in 1847 with the purchase of three properties totaling six acres between Fort Severn and the original shoreline now several hundred feet inland. The academy opened in 1845 on fewer than ten acres of land on the site of old Fort Severn, built during the revolutionary era to protect Annapolis' waterfront. Using digital mapping to predict the location of historic remains, Leone and his team found, to everyone's surprise, a rich storehouse of remains, including foundations of the state's eighteenth-century governor's mansion, which was used as the academy's library for much of the nineteenth century, and remains of two neighborhoods, Hell Point and Lockwoodville, demolished before World War II to make room for the expanding academy. The Navy had hired University of Maryland anthropologist Mark Leone to investigate areas of the campus to be affected by new development projects, in compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act. Because the academy has undergone construction, demolition, and rebuilding almost continuously since its founding in 1845, it was assumed that any remnants of the eighteenth-century town of Annapolis or the original nineteenth-century academy had long ago been destroyed. When archaeologists came to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1992 to see what might lie beneath its parking lots and lawns, they had little hope of finding anything of historical significance. The United States Naval Academy and City Dock: aerial view of Hell Point area in 1939, two years before it was demolished (Maryland State Archives)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |