Ruptured tomatoes oozing at her feet, Randolph College student Sara Woodward dragged a ground-penetrating radar across a recently-ruined garden at the Cabellsville Archaeological Site in Nelson County on Friday afternoon.
She and her colleagues hope to find another ruin hidden beneath the soil.
Cabellsville is the past site of the county seat for Amherst, back before Amherst and Nelson counties split. On what’s now the rural property of Lawrence and Cora Wood Clements, a courthouse, jail and lawyer’s home once stood.
Professional archaeologists from the land surveying and civil engineering firm Hurt & Proffitt are busy with a volunteer excavation of the site, which already has yielded some fascinating finds. Now, Sweet Briar student and Hurt & Proffitt employee Jessica Barry is hunting for the jailhouse, which likely dates back to the 1760s.
Barry said evidence suggests the jail’s inmates included debtors, who would set up shop outside to sell handicrafts on the once-per-month court days in an attempt to raise the money they owed. Others would work as servants in the courthouse.
The archeologists have found a trench of bricks — likely are remains of the jail. They still hope to find the outline of the walls, which documents lead them to suspect fall somewhere in the vicinity of the garden that Lauren Anderson graciously allowed them to tear up Friday morning.
Anderson and her husband live in the house on the land owned by her parents, who now live in Appomattox. The property was first purchased by her great-grandfather, and Anderson remembers finding bits and pieces of the past when she’d visit.
Now she is eager to have the archaeologists discover more history in her backyard.
Potentially saving themselves from fruitless digging, Barry and the other archeologists drafted a team from Randolph College to bring over the school’s ground penetrating radar.
“It’s not my background but I’m always looking for something to do with it,” said physics and environmental science professor Sarah Sojka, who inherited the radar from her predecessor at Randolph.
Woodward and fellow student Hagay Haut had experience using the device as part of a side project related to their experiments this summer building models of eco-friendly houses on the Randolph College campus.
So Woodward, Haut, and professor Sarah Sojka made the trek out from Lynchburg to spend a pleasantly-warm October afternoon with Anderson and the archeologists, looking for clues.
The radar, which looks like a plastic suitcase trailing a single wheel, feeds data directly to a laptop. On each pass, Woodward or Haut sweep a straight line.
The radar detects the density of material beneath their feet. What they are looking for are disruptions or fluctuations in the pattern that occur in roughly the same horizontal position across multiple vertical passes. That could be a wall.
In the field Friday, they saw a few leads, but said they’ll have a better sense when they get back to Randolph and lay out the data across a grid for comparison.
Then they’ll be able to make suggestions to the archeologists about promising places to dig.
“It’s kind of a neat combination of a lot of different people and places working together for something important to Virginia history,” Sojka said.
Courtesy of http://www.newsadvance.com/news/local/randolph-college-students-help-find-buried-nelson-county-history/article_1be7afde-7b86-56d5-8fa5-9d7beed21c87.html#.VhutHyyQIAc.facebook