Archaeology

Red Hill’s archaeology program started in Summer 2023 with an investigation of an area where a servant’s house stood in the early 20^th century. Maps and aerial photographs from Red Hill’s archives were put into a Geographic Information System to help us locate the site of this structure, a few hundred feet northwest of the Henry House. This was one of several houses rented by sharecroppers and their families in the first half of the 20^th century, when Lucy Henry Harrison owned Red Hill. Excavation on this site aimed to uncover any artifacts or building remains that could teach us more about life at Red Hill during that time.

Archaeologists and volunteers dug three 5×5 ft. square test units, with one revealing a deep layer of disturbed soil – an indication that a large feature was dug into the ground and filled back in. Archived letters were discovered later in the excavation which showed that when the building was demolished in 1961, its foundation was also removed and reused in the restoration project. After reaching undisturbed subsoil in the test units, we turned our efforts towards conducting a shovel test pit survey along the western side of the historic grounds, with additional testing around the servant’s house site to discover more about the deep feature in the first unit. A shovel test pit survey involves digging small pits along evenly spaced intervals to give us an idea of what the soil and artifacts look like across a larger area. This will be useful for informing future excavations and continuing to understand the changes in Red Hill’s architectural landscape.

Artifacts from the servant’s house site included bricks, brick fragments, glass, nails, ceramic, some prehistoric lithics, two metal hooks, buttons, a bottle neck with a glass stopper, a sink drain, and several unidentified metal objects. These artifacts were taken to Red Hill’s archaeology lab where staff and volunteers spent the winter and spring cleaning, labeling, and packaging them for storage.

Watch Here: “Archaeology of a Servant’s House” Virtual Lecture

In 2024, Red Hill’s archaeology program began an investigation of the original site of Patrick Henry’s law office. For more than a century, the law office stood in the backyard of the Henry House, which, at the time, faced south toward the Staunton River. The structure may have been built before Henry purchased Red Hill from Richard Marot Booker in 1794, and Henry used it as a multipurpose space for studying his legal cases and providing overflow sleeping space for his sons and guests. When Lucy Gray Henry Harrison took ownership of her great-grandfather’s plantation in the early 20^th century, her renovation plans included transplanting the office further south to stand between the house and the Henry cemetery.

Five decades later, the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation endeavored to relocate the office to its original site, relying on the memory of architect Stanhope Johnson, who had assisted with Mrs. Harrison’s earlier renovations. The plans for a period-accurate placement of the law office were hindered by the existence of a state road that encircled the property, with a right-of-way that fell over the spot which Johnson recorded as the law office’s original location. Unable to get the Highway Department’s permission to build on the right-of-way, the PHMF placed the restored structure as close as possible, about 75 feet south of the original location, where the building sits today. Today, the state road is gone from the landscape, allowing the potential for the office to be moved back to its original location and for archaeological research to reveal more about the structure.

Before any plans could be made to move the law office, an archaeological investigation of its original site was needed to determine whether any features from the first construction, such as foundations or builder’s trenches, still existed and could corroborate Johnson’s record of the original location. The investigation began with a Ground Penetrating Radar survey conducted by Chartrand Geoarchaeological Solutions, which detected several features below the ground surface in the vicinity of the office’s original location. None of these indicated foundations, but one of the smaller features caught our attention for its rectangular shape and orientation similar to that of the other historical buildings. With the help of hard-working volunteers, our team excavated the southern half of the feature, encountering clusters of unlaid brick and charcoal among sandy, mottled soil. The location and shape of the feature led to early conjectures that it could be the remains of the office’s chimney. At about two feet below ground surface, the feature contained layers of bricks arranged roughly in course, indicating a wall that had fallen or been knocked over. The vast majority of artifacts discovered in this feature were bricks and brick fragments, but we also found creamware and whiteware ceramic sherds, bottle glass, windowpane glass, cut nails, and small pieces of mortar.

 To check for any other features, the topsoil in this area was carefully stripped using a mini excavator. The mechanical stripping revealed no traces of the office’s foundations, which means they may have been removed and reused at some point. Later in 2025, our team will finish excavating the possible chimney feature.