Dig Annapolis! We Revisit the University of Maryland’s Archeology in Annapolis Program

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Step back in time as we revisit the University of Maryland’s Archeology in Annapolis program and several site histories

Dig! Dig! Dig Annapolis! For 30 years, students from the University of Maryland Department of Anthropology did just that. With small hand tools, and even toothbrushes, college archaeology students sifted through dirt and dug Annapolis. 

What began as a simple request in 1981 from Anne St. Clair Wright (major domo of historic preservation and founder of Historic Annapolis, Inc.) would, over the years, thrust Annapolis to the international forefront of archaeology for Colonial America. Because Annapolis never underwent industrialization and has been spared extensive modernization, “it is a perfect place to explore the early years of America’s colonial settlement...there is a lot to discover here,” says Professor Mark Leone, the longtime coordinator of the university’s Archaeology in Annapolis program. 

Annapolis is, after all, a historic town. It retains the earliest mansions of America’s well-to-do. The homes of Maryland’s four signers of the Declaration of Independence are still standing. The Paca House and Carroll House are open to the public and community events. The town was an early maritime shipping center and a slave-selling port. During the Revolutionary War, troops, under the commands of Lafayette and Rochambeau, camped in Eastport and St. John’s College campus. The City was so well-fortified during the War of 1812, that the English avoided invading us. New emigrants arrived to serve the new United States Naval Academy, established in 1845. Later, the City served as a Union military center and troop parole center during the Civil War. All of these happenings provided underground treasures and stories to be told about life, culture, and changes over the 350 years of our settlement. 

On April 4,2008, Professor Leone emailed me: 

“Madame Mayor, we have discovered an early 18th century timber road at the base of Fleet Street. There are a series of six shaped logs lying parallel to each other and four feet down from the current surface, which are well-preserved because they are waterlogged. They are perpendicular to the house fronts and form what is called a corduroy road. They date before 1740.” 

Local historians believe this find is even earlier and is visible as a road on the Stoddert Map of 1684. A University of Maryland press release describes the significance of the timber road as showing how the city was originally laid out and the marshy area that is, today, the paved Market Square. The discovery of the waterlogged road from the late-17th century is unique. There are no other known in Maryland from this date, the press release concluded. 

The City of Annapolis was a grant funding partner with Historic Annapolis and the University of Maryland to support Archaeology in Annapolis, which thrived from 1982 to 2010. This discovery in 2008 of the log road was timely icing on the cake for the City’s 300th Anniversary Charter Celebration.

Several years earlier at a budget hearing, I asked Professor Leone what we could do to showcase the findings from the dozens of digs that students had done over the decades. Leone admitted that their archeological findings—the material remains from garbage pits—did not show very well. So, to showcase Annapolis, the program (as it had from its beginning) invited the public to tour the sites and participate in the digs. Engaging citizens in Unearthing Annapolis was very unique to a science that usually preferred isolation from the public trampling of an exploratory site. “Nobody does (digs) this way,” Leone said at the time. “Our public aspect is unique. This is how we give the town back its archaeology.” Annapolis citizens, he opined, were welcoming, interested, and enthusiastic. 

Nevertheless, the City also pushed for a way to showcase the unearthed relics of crystals, religious articles, clothing, pottery, tools, and items from the garbage pits and archeological treasure sites, to tell the stories of the City’s African roots and European ancestry, both celebrated and mourned throughout our history.  

In 2006, Annapolis received an $80,000 grant from the Presidential First Ladies’ program Save America’s Treasures to preserve and protect American history. It was one of 23 grants awarded in the nation and the only project in Maryland to be selected.

The Annapolis grant and program titled “Annapolis: Three Centuries of Communities” would illustrate: (1.) the role of educated women, such as Anne Catherine Green and Anne St. Clair Wright, in using persistence, voice, and toleration to make a place for themselves, their gender, and their issues; (2.) the role of free African Americans before and after emancipation; and (3.) the celebration of access to the middle class through availability of cheap city land, circa 1690, and artifacts and histories that support this contention.

Included in the program would be brochures, history signs, and five archeological exhibits. Finally, the artifacts from 30 years and dozens of dig sites would be on display in 2008 in the year of our Charter Celebration. The Jonas Green Home, Maynard Burgess House, the Banneker-Douglass Museum, the Calvert House, and Reynolds Tavern were selected as exhibit sites.

There is not room in this article to describe the success and many discoveries of the digs in Annapolis’ Downtown, Parole, and Eastport communities...it would take a book. However, what follows is the abbreviated archaeology stories of Reynolds Tavern and the Calvert House, two of the original exhibit sites that remain accessible for public viewing.  

Reynolds Tavern on Church Circle was purchased by William Reynolds from St. Anne’s Church in 1746. Reynolds was a hatter and tavern keeper. The site near the State Capital, under the sign of “Beaver and Laced Hat,” drew legislators and merchants for food and drink. In the center of town, Reynolds Tavern soon became a meeting place for farmers, merchants, and soldiers as well as gentlemen to conduct business (the Mayor’s Court met here), stable horses, buy theater tickets, or have a game of cards, chess, or backgammon until the family sold it for 1,020 pounds (about $1,500,000 today) in 1796. For more than 100 years, ownership shifted until 1935 when Standard Oil wanted to buy it, tear it down, and construct a filling station. Civic minded people put a halt to that, proposing instead to buy it with money from a trust fund for female orphans to use as the Annapolis public library. And that it was until 1974. 

The library, having outgrown the ancient building, transferred the building to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which then leased Reynolds to Historic Annapolis Foundation who teamed up with entrepreneur Paul Pearson to restore the building to its former use as a tavern and inn. During this time, extensive archaeology was done in the surrounding grounds of the 1747 tavern where a wooden water pipe (the first of its kind) was unearthed, giving evidence that Colonial Annapolis had wooden plumbing. Twelve feet below the surface of a water well, the giant 18-foot hollowed-out waterlogged timber was thought to be used to pump water from the well in the 1700s. A cobblestone driveway, privy, and sites for a stable and smoke house were also discovered. Reynolds, himself, also owned slaves. Religious artifacts found in the basement floor were believed to be caches connected to African belief systems to control the spirits of the dead to redress wrongs or end injustice. Today, these small artifacts are on display in the hallway of Reynolds Tavern, a place where the floor lumber and staircase created in 1747 are still intact, food is served, and a there are beds to rest, just as it had when under the “Beaver and Laced Hat” sign 250 years ago. 

On the other circle, State Circle, the Calvert House was founded in 1695 and home to the Calvert family, and Governor Benedict Leonard Calvert from 1727 to 1731. It is now an elegant hotel—a home away from home for many of Maryland’s state legislators.

Unlike Reynolds Tavern, its original woodwork does not exist. The home at 58 State Circle was destroyed by fire in 1764. Rebuilt as a two-story Georgian dwelling, it was used as a barracks by the State of Maryland until 1784, eventually becoming the home of Mayor Claude and family until purchased by Paul Pearson. Extensively renovated over the years, the home site was converted to a hotel through the efforts of Historic Annapolis’ St. Clair Wright and Pearson. 

Archaeology in Annapolis’ student diggers were very much involved in sifting through dirt that yielded a golden filigree jewelry in the shape of a Hand of Fatima, which was speculated to have belonged to a Muslim African who belonged to the Calverts as a slave. Other artifacts on display—pottery and spoons in good shape—were found in a dry deposit in the front yard. The well was full of artifacts, including two full bottles of wine. One wonders why it was unused.

If one visits the lobby of the hotel today, a sitting room off the lobby is covered with a glass floor. Beneath it is a feature of the original building back in the Calvert days, a hypocaust—a central heating system for a Calvert greenhouse. Hypocausts date to 350 BC in the Temple of Ephesus, though Roman Architect Vitruvius credits the invention to Sergiuis Orate in 80 BC. Basically, it is a pipe through which hot air from a wood furnace circulates under the floor or even in the walls. Expensive to operate, hypocausts fell out of use during the Middle Ages. Though resurrected somewhat in England, it was generally believed from 400 to 1900 that central heating did not exist and hot baths (famous in Rome) were rare for hundreds of years. Thus, the hypocaust in the home and greenhouse of the Calverts was very rare in the early 1700s. The glass floor allows you to see this early central heating feature. The log road mentioned earlier could also be seen by our many visitors interested in this city’s colonial history if it too would be covered with a glass walkway and a sign describing its history. For now, it is buried invisible and unacknowledged. 

During road work on Fleet Street, the discovery of a spirit bundle was reported in the New York Times. Connected to African roots, the discovery in this location is a curiosity. Once the garden of Francis Nicholson in 1694 until subdivided in the mid-1700s for homes and small taverns, one can only speculate on who the bundle to ward off evil and call for goodness belonged too. 

Not long after the discovery of the spirit bundle, Archaeology in Annapolis ceased. New leadership at Historic Annapolis and newly-elected leadership in City government had little interest in the 30-year program that brought people from other states and countries to dig with college students in Annapolis. The program that fostered 20 doctorate graduates and brought Annapolis’ archaeology international fame was no more. Since 2011, the University of Maryland program has continued on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It has uncovered an extensive African American village near the Tidewater Inn in Easton and uncovered more artifacts at the Wye House Plantation, where Frederick Douglass was enslaved as a boy.  

But in Annapolis, where citizens and visitors once joyfully participated in digging in the dirt to find the unseen artifacts that revealed the lives of slave and master, poor and well-to-do, and past cultures ever changing, the partnership of Historic Annapolis, City Hall, and the University of Maryland is no more. Perhaps, the program will be “unearthed” in the near or distant future.