<\/p>\n
Al Luckenbach is taking a break from the September heat at a dig in rural Maryland to ponder the mystery that has obsessed him for nearly a decade. Dropping onto a hay bale and pulling out a cigarette, the archaeologist considers why a Puritan tobacco farmer on the edge of the frontier set out more than three centuries ago to make artistically unique clay pipes influenced by Dutch, English, and Native American designs.<\/p>\n
Luckenbach, a burly man with a casual air, sits and smokes amid the remains of a 17th-century settlement called Providence. The town, along with a host of the area\u2019s other small towns along the rivers and creeks of tidewater Maryland, eventually was abandoned as nearby Annapolis, and then Baltimore, grew in prominence. His work is part of the Lost Towns Project, an archaeological research and public education program sponsored by Anne Arundel County and other organizations. The project, which began in 1991, is an innovative effort to locate and explore these early Colonial sites bordering the western fringe of the Chesapeake Bay before they vanish under new roads and tract houses.<\/p>\n
With the help of students, volunteers, and a handful of paid excavators, Luckenbach has worked for 14 seasons at Providence, which has proved one of the richest and most interesting excavations in the project. In addition to thousands of artifacts that show that many colonists in the period imported surprisingly fine European goods, Luckenbach has stumbled upon the oldest evidence for a pipe-making factory in Colonial America.<\/p>\n
Providence was a modest settlement in the 1650s and 1660s, a collection of individual home sites\u2014\u201cmore of a hamlet than a town,\u201d Luckenbach says. It was unusual in its Puritan makeup smack in the center of a colony formed by Lord Baltimore as a refuge for English Catholics. Fearful of being dispossessed when King Charles was slain and Oliver Cromwell came to power in the 1640s, Lord Baltimore invited a group of Puritans then living in today\u2019s Virginia Beach, Virginia, to move north, hoping this would appease Cromwell, who disliked Catholics. Colonial records show that more than 300 people made the journey in 1649\u2014more than double the number who lived in St. Mary\u2019s, Maryland\u2019s only significant town at the time. The result was far from peaceful coexistence. The two sides clashed bitterly\u2014Puritans executed several Catholics after a skirmish, a mini-civil war thousands of miles from England. But Baltimore kept his colony.<\/p>\n
The Puritan settlers eventually dispersed, and their documents vanished, so little was known of this community until Luckenbach examined the area in the early 1990s in advance of a suburban housing development. Passing a gully on the way back to his car, he spotted colonial clay pipes and pottery jutting from the dirt. Further work uncovered a large building with two cellar holes\u2014and in one of the latter, excavators found a tin-glazed plate with the crest of the Lloyd family. Since Edward Lloyd was Providence\u2019s commander, the plate was convincing evidence that this was the site of the lost town.<\/p>\n
When a local collector showed up with artifacts dating to the 1650s from a nearby field, Luckenbach began to expand his search. Annapolis historian Tony Lindauer paged through county archival material and discovered that a Robert and Elizabeth Burle\u2014the former having been the surveyor of Providence\u2014first patented the land. Digging revealed two substantial buildings anchored with wooden posts in the ground\u2014a technique called \u201cearthfast\u201d that was often used in the region during that period. But the excavators were stunned by the quality of materials that adorned both the exterior and interior of the structure. Floor tiles glazed in green and yellow lead, casement windows, and imported yellow brick suggested a surprising prosperity on what was still very much frontier. Scale weights, several pairs of scissors, and other material associated with the making of clothes, and a clipped coin\u2014a 17th-century approach to making change\u2014suggested that goods may have been made and sold on the property.<\/p>\n
Eventually, Luckenbach and his team of both professional and volunteer diggers turned to an area called Swan Cove, near the Burle site. Historical documents show that a man named Emanuel Drue settled here by 1660 until his death in 1669. Evidence of both pipes and pipe making were everywhere.<\/p>\n
Clay pipes crop up regularly in excavations up and down the Atlantic seaboard, but there is surprisingly little known about their local manufacture, sale, and use. Since they have a short shelf life and their style changes subtly but noticeably\u2014the diameter of the bore, the shape of the bowl\u2014\u201cpipes are one of the favorite dating tools in the Chesapeake,\u201d Luckenbach says.<\/p>\n
That is because pipes were made domestically for only a few decades in commercial quantities. By the 1670s, despite the ready availability of clay, most pipes were imported from England as more merchants began to make the laborious sail between continents. \u201cThe little cottage industries disappeared, overwhelmed by cheaper English products,\u201d Luckenbach says. Tobacco pressed into hogsheads and bound for English markets typically filled the holds of ships that departed from the creeks and rivers of Virginia and Maryland in that era, bringing finished goods in return. But archaeologists have searched in vain for evidence of pipe kilns prior to this time.<\/p>\n
With Drue, Luckenbach has both archaeological and historical evidence, a rarity for this early time. When Drue died, he left behind \u201cone payer of pype moulds, brasse\u00a0and materials belonging to them,\u201d according to his will. Though the brass molds themselves have not surfaced, Luckenbach has found more than 200 pounds of kiln-related objects known as muffles. These muffles resemble large, crude pots, and unfired pipes were placed inside to protect them from direct contact with a kiln\u2019s fire. At Swan Cove, Drue made them from rings of clay and broken pipe stems. The team found a variety of imprints that indicate that a set of at least eight tools\u2014including a decorative stamp, the only one found in the New World\u2014were used to make the pipes.<\/p>\n
So far, the excavators have found no direct evidence of a kiln foundation, which may have succumbed to the plowing or erosion endemic to the area. But Luckenbach\u00a0has found river cobbles that have been exposed to high heat, as well as rounded clay objects shaped like bread loaves fired on one side. Both he and Lindauer speculate that the kiln may have been built of cobbles. There are hints as to the location of a kiln. A concentration of kiln related material is on the western edge of the site, while domestic goods appear to be concentrated in the east. But there is intermingling of the material, which may indicate a home business adjoined to living and eating spaces.<\/p>\n
As Luckenbach talks, his colleague Jane Cox is kneeling under an awning nearby, examining a cellar pit with cobbles, pig jaws, and saw blades, the remains of what may have lain under a kitchen exposed by a crew of volunteers. This was probably a typical structure, she says, its size at least 18 feet by 20 feet. The trash went under the floorboards into the cellar, leaving it undisturbed by later plowing.<\/p>\n
Though the site was occupied into the 18th century, the pipes and North Devon ware, a type of ceramic found in 17th-century archaeological contexts, make it relatively simple to date the levels of occupation of Drue and his children who survived him. Drue\u2019s pipes, which have been found throughout the various sites in Providence, were made in the two predominant styles of Colonial America\u2014 the Native American variety with a bent neck and the English kind with a belly-shaped bowl. The colors are striking. Most 17th- and 18th-century pipes were stark white. But Drue\u2019s pipes run the gamut from green to grey to yellow to pink, often with a swirl of colors.<\/p>\n
Searching for the clay\u2019s origin, Cox and underwater archaeologist Steve Bilicki took a boat about 13 miles upriver, where they found a pink and white cliff. That clay bank on the Severn River had mottled with similar colors that they believe Drue used. And the pipe maker did more than simply use colored clay. He experimented, mixing colors and creating patterns of stripes or spirals through different color use. \u201cNo one else\u201d \u2014on either side of the Atlantic\u2014\u201cdid this,\u201d says Luckenbach. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a guy with an artistic bent.\u201d<\/p>\n
But there are hints that Drue was not alone in his artistry. \u201cThere was only one other guy we know who swirled clay,\u201d he adds. Pipes found in Virginia Beach, near the ancient Algonquin town of Chesopean, for which the Chesapeake Bay is named, reveal some similar decorations, though not the variety of colors. The fact that the people of Providence colony came from that area may offer an intriguing but maddeningly vague clue to his background and influences.<\/p>\n
Drue also made horn-shaped pipes unique to Colonial America with elaborate decorations. This variety of pipe, Luckenbach learned from a Sri Lankan scholar via the Internet, has only one known cousin, which is dated circa 1650 and housed at a pipe museum in Amsterdam. How and whether Drue was influenced by a Dutch design is a mystery. During that era, trade with the Netherlands was forbidden by Parliament, although Dutch merchants and Colonial farmers and traders regularly ignored that law; English Puritans also had strong ties to their Dutch brethren. But the historical record on Drue\u2019s past before he arrived in Providence is silent.<\/p>\n
Lacking documents, historian Lindauer set out to build a kiln similar to Drue\u2019s in order to do some of his own experimenting. A tall bearded man with long hair, Lindauer works at nearby London Town, an 18th-century village on the South River where volunteers and staff are recreating by hand the structures and gardens of a Colonial village based on careful archaeological work. Lindauer set out to make his own kiln three years ago. Using cobbles and oyster-shell mortar, he assembled a beehive-shaped structure on the London Town grounds in less than a month. \u201cThis is not rocket science, but there is a lot of science involved,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
It was trial and error. During his first attempt, some cobbles exploded and the heat was hard to control. He learned to search for cobbles that had a particular ring when struck. He also experimented with firing pipes in his Weber grill using bellows, \u201cand I almost melted the bottom right out of the grill.\u201d<\/p>\n
What he found was that the Severn River clay was too brittle\u2014the pipes \u201cfelt like sandpaper\u201d after firing. Arduous rinsing of the clay to remove grit helped, and he even took a baseball bat to it to change the clay\u2019s texture, but \u201cI still have not duplicated his pipes exactly.\u201d Lindauer continues to experiment, but says he\u2019s not yet found the precise procedures. \u201cThis requires skills in basic engineering, thermal dynamics\u2014and you have to be a sculptor,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n
Lindauer\u2019s hands-on approach to Colonial history is evident in the rest of London Town, a 23-acre park that contains the town of London. London Town is part of the Lost Towns project. A 20-minute drive from Swan Cove through traffic lights and shopping malls, London Town was first settled in 1683 and served as a ferry terminus, growing to include nearly 50 lots with houses, taverns, and shops. A wealthy mason constructed a magnificent 18 thcentury mansion, but the port declined and the mansion became the county\u2019s poorhouse until the 1960s. Now, a new museum is going up, while archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a half-dozen structures.<\/p>\n
Under the direction of master carpenter Russ Steele, and with neighborly donations of trees felled by storms, Lindauer and colleagues, and a large pool of volunteers, are laboriously hewing wood using traditional methods to build similar buildings. The site also includes a 12-foot-square cellar hole that provides a lesson in stratigraphy for school children who arrive regularly on weekday mornings. There is little of the fussiness that afflicts so many Colonial sites; here, black tarps covering excavations compete with the Georgian house and a straggly Colonial-era garden that includes a tobacco strain used in the 17th century.<\/p>\n
In his devotion to history and pragmatism, Lindauer has tried the leaf in one of his pipes. It\u2019s a far cry from a modern cigarette, he says. \u201cThat stuff makes you start singing in the middle of the night.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Though clay pipes are routinely found during Atlantic seaboard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-archaeology"],"yoast_head":"\n