Over the course of today's work, investigations along the modern fenceline revealed clear evidence of the remains of a former building.

As shown in the photograph below, early in the day this excavation unit seemed little more than a "bunch of dirt."

As work progressed, however, large limestone blocks and a dense cluster of limestone construction debris began to appear...

Further into the early afternoon, more and more debris from a former building had emerged as students worked to remove the dense hard-packed clay.

By the close of work today, a pattern had begun to emerge from the soil... The limestone blocks and debris (intermingled with brick rubble and fragments or mortar) appear to be clustered in a roughly square area that may well represent the upper disturbed portions of a former limestone chimney base. More work on Friday will be needed to test this interpretation, but we are excited by the possibilities!

In another part of the site, students are working to locate a "lost" fenceline that once surrounded the yard of the Sam Davis Home. The current fencelines were created sometime between the 1940s and 1970s -- and don't offer an accurate picture of how the yard and other buildings were once situated. Determining where the fencelines were in the mid-1800s is critical to our understanding of the buildings we are investigating. While not very visible in this reproduction, the 1920s photograph of the Sam Davis Home shows a fenceline at the right "running" into the "office" and "overseer's residence." Other versions of this fenceline are shown in two other photographs from the early 1900s.

We re-created this historic photograph as shown below to get an idea of where to look for postholes from this long-lost fenceline.

On Wednesday, we started an excavation unit at this location to try to find a posthole in this fenceline.

By the close of business on Thursday, we were almost 40 centimeters (15 inches) deep. Despite some heavy disturbance from the roots of the nearby magnolia tree, we have found at least three possible postholes (marked in yellow in the photograph below). Given that the historic photographs show at least three versions of this "yard fence," we expected a rather complicated pattern of different fenceposts and fencelines. We'll begin to investigate these possible postholes on Friday. Hopefully, by the end of our field season, we will be able to establish where this fence began, and identify the location of gates leading from the yard to the slave quarter.

Given how little we knew only three days ago about "possible locations" for some of the slave residences, we have made some tremendous progress in narrowing our search area. Archaeology is slow and tedious work -- but has already begun to provide many new clues about the past buildings, landscape, and peoples of the Sam Davis Home.