NEWS

Archaeologists discover remains of mysterious building at UNC-CH

By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC-CH News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- By careful digging, archaeologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered remains of an unusual building on the UNC-CH campus near Franklin Street that dates back to the early 1800s.

What purpose the large building served and why it is not shown on any university maps found so far remain a mystery, according to Dr. Stephen Davis, research archaeologist at UNC-CH's Research Laboratories of Anthropology. Judging from hundreds of pottery shards unearthed, it may have been a boarding house for students and faculty.

Davis, his colleagues and students have been excavating the site, just behind the Battle-Vance-Pettigrew buildings since June 23.

“Last November, I saw a newspaper article saying the Arts and Sciences Foundation was going to move into a new building behind Pettigrew Building,” he said. “That was one of the locations we planned to excavate back during the university's bicentennial in 1993. But since our work at the old Eagle hotel and tavern took so long, and our finds there so rich, we never got around to the other site. We knew that area to be the location of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity house in the late 1880s, just behind a building known as the Central Hotel, later called the Roberson Hotel.”

The archaeologists sought and received permission from Gordon Rutherford, director of facilities planning and design, to conduct a scientific dig before construction started on the new building. Because their crew was small and the area to be examined large, they first excavated three 5-foot-square test pits and then used a backhoe to scrape away the top layer of earth to reveal more significant archaeological deposits deeper in the earth.

“At first we found debris from the destruction of the fraternity house around 1930 and then old shotgun shells and fragments of bottles and plates dating to the late 1800s and early 1900s,” Davis said. “Then we found holes for brick piers the fraternity stood on and finally a rock foundation we first thought to be associated with the frat house. When we started cleaning around the foundation, however, we soon realized we had a building that was much larger than the fraternity.”

Most artifacts found so far at the lower levels date between 1810 and 1830, he said. Most are pieces of pearlware, a form of pottery no longer generally used by around 1830 when it was replaced by whiteware.

The mysterious building measured about 64 feet by 16 feet with a large central room about half that size and smaller rooms at each end, Davis added. Chimneys butted both ends, and because the foundations were so sturdy, the building likely rose two stories.

“The puzzling thing is that we have no written record at all of this building standing,” he said. “It is completely undocumented, while we have records of other houses, stores and hotels nearby.”

The land the building stood on was one of the original plots the university auctioned off in 1793. It belonged to a man named George Johnson for a few years and then sold to James Hogg. In 1920, the university acquired the property, a 60-foot strip of which extended into the park-like sward now known as McCorkle Place.

“For me, one of the neat things this work illustrates is how different Chapel Hill was in character back in the early 1800s and even up into the early 20th century from what it is today,” Davis said.

Dr. Tom Maher, who recently earned his Ph.D. at UNC-CH, is supervising the excavation. Tricia Samford, an anthropology graduate student, continues to research the university archives and deeds in Hillsborough to try to identify the structure. The crew will complete its work by the end of the month.

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Note: Davis can be reached at (919) 962-3845 (w) or 942-0467 (h).

Contact: David Williamson