In the early years of this century, the U.S. Naval Academy decided to tear down what it had spent the previous 60 years creating. Its mission remained firmly in place. The facilities were what needed updating. So the campus was rebuilt, such that today, nothing of the original remains.
Or so we thought.
With only a year to go before the U.S. Naval Academy’s 150th anniversary, the discovery of archaeological remains of the original campus and the neighborhoods that once stood on its grounds could not have come at a better time.
It used to be all we knew about the original school came from old books, photographs, and maps. But after contracting archaeologists from the University of Maryland in College Park to conduct an archaeological survey of the Academy grounds, and thanks to that team’s innovative, if not groundbreaking, use of computer technology, the Navy has learned that more exists below the surface of the school than virtually anyone thought possible.
“Much of the Academy is filled land, and the school has been altered so many times that I assumed there would be very little archaeological remains of the 18th- century city or the 19th-century Academy left,” said Mark P. Leone, a professor of anthropology at the University and the project’s principal investigator. “I was quite wrong.”
By the time Leone and his colleagues and students had finished their survey, which began in October 1992 and concluded in August 1993, they had discovered rich, intact archaeological remains of the original Academy. These include the foundations of the 18th-century governor’s mansion—later renovated and expanded to become the Academy’s library—and the old midshipmen’s barracks, the predecessor to the monolithic Bancroft Hall that now dominates the campus. They also found remnants of an ethnically varied neighborhood called Hell Point, a long-buried and forgotten 19th-century street, and a large collection of artifacts, including pieces of pottery, a fragment of a toothbrush with Navy markings on it, and a lead Civil War-era bullet.
Though these discoveries came as something of a surprise to Academy officials and to the archaeologists, who have been excavating sites in Annapolis for more than a decade, it was a pleasant one that not only will provide valuable information to the Navy, but may help to rewrite the textbooks on urban archaeology. Leone and his crew tested the application of a computer process developed for archaeology by his colleague, Assistant Professor of Anthropology John Seidel, called digital mapping, in which computerized maps of the old and current Academy were overlayed to help predict where the most significant historical remains lay. If the tests were successful, the scientists agreed, they would prove the technique viable in virtually any historical environment where old and new maps exist and where significant remains might be buried under new developments or structures. Such environments would include military installations such as the Academy and, for that matter, pretty much any city in the United States, or anywhere else.
Leone proudly proclaims the tests to have been tremendously successful. “We used digital mapping in different locations throughout the campus to find places where we thought things would be, and we were right every time,” he says.
When the Naval Academy was established in 1845 at the site of old Fort Severn, it then sat on only 9K acres and was called the Naval School at Annapolis. Maps from that era show buildings on campus with such names as Rowdy Row, Brandywine Cottage, and the Gas House. As the Academy grew and acquired more land from the city around it, all of these original buildings were razed to make way for larger, more modem facilities, with much of that being done during the 1906 rebuilding of the Academy. Today, the stately, 338-acre campus retains almost none of the physical elements of the original school. Even the shoreline has been extended several hundred feet into Spa Creek. Were the original still there, it would cut right through several wings of Bancroft Hall.
The archaeological reconnaissance was requested to determine what, if any, historical archaeological remains exist on Academy grounds. It was, says Leone, the first time any systematic archaeological work has been done on the campus. The multifaceted project also included interviews with former residents of Hell Point and complete chain- of-title searches, back to 1700, of the properties the Navy purchased during its expansion. The information is to be used by the Academy in future master-planning decisions and, depending on what advice the archaeologists give, possible further excavations, says Commander Tim Equels, the Academy’s assistant public works officer. He added that many of the artifacts found might also end up in the Naval Academy Museum.
The $50,000 in funding for the reconnaissance came through the Legacy Program, a Department of Defense fund that supports the conservation of the natural and cultural environment on department property. (In the past, the program has funded the restoration of the Academy Chapel’s exterior dome and its Tiffany stained-glass windows, as well as the restoration of the floors and ceiling in Memorial Hall.) The laws of the Historic Preservation Act, which originally prompted the Academy to seek the assistance of the University of Maryland, say that federal agencies have a responsibility to identify the most significant archaeological and historical sites on their properties. Once those sites are identified, construction can be steered around them for their protection, or the remains can be removed or at least analyzed before anything is done to them.
But beyond all that, Commander Equels says the survey gives the Navy a better understanding of its own physical evolution. “This project entailed two items. One was the digital mapping and the other was for them to go through and see if they could find anything in the area,” he says. “Part of that was to do a complete title search as far back as they could go to find out who owned the property. Before, we knew the general areas, the property boundaries, but we didn’t know how it was put together entirely. This gives us a much more detailed look at how the Academy came into being, section by section.” Though the computer technology is not new—the Navy itself uses digital mapping in a variety of settings—its application as a predictive model in urban archaeology is in its infancy. At the Naval Academy, however, it moved quickly from infancy to near-maturity, and what began as an experiment suddenly became a highly successful demonstration.
While some of the researchers conducted the first stage of the reconnaissance, a more- or-less blind strategic-aligned sampling process in which they dug more than 100 1-foot-by-l-foot test pits throughout the campus, others in the project were acquiring maps and conducting documentary research to be used in the second stage—digital mapping. Using a program called AutoCAD, a master’s candidate in applied anthropology, Gilda Anroman, painstakingly digitized old maps of the Naval Academy and surrounding neighborhoods, taking anywhere from 5 to 15 hours to do a single map.
The Navy then provided its own already digitized map of the campus, and Anroman was able to place that map on top of the older ones on the computer. What resulted was a single map, a computerized overlay that showed, once the two maps were properly aligned, precisely where the old Academy buildings once stood in relation to the new.
On the university’s archaeology lab computer, the digital overlays are colorful—if at first chaotic-looking—images of two schools meshed onto one screen. Outlined in red and blue, the modern Academy is by far more dominant. But a ghostly green image of the 1845 Naval School at Annapolis hovers just beneath the straight lines and right angles of the new school. By dragging out a box of any dimension on the screen, Anroman can zoom into any part of the map, and plot it out on the printer or give it to the field school. In theory, students could then take this map to the Academy and, using precise measurements supplied by the computer, know exactly where to dig.
The procedure does have risks, Anroman cautions. “This program, this technology, is only as good as that old map,” she says. “If that map is off by five feet, then the building will be off by five feet. So this program is also a great way of seeing how accurate those old maps are.”
Fortunately, the Sanborn Insurance maps the researchers had acquired proved extremely accurate, and when site supervisor Thomas Bodor took plotted copies and the computer measurements onto the campus, he was able very easily to stake out a dig site. “All it consisted of was taking those measurements and walking the distance with steel tape from various points,” says Bodor, also in pursuit of his Master’s degree in applied anthropology. “Where those two tapes met at a given distance, that’s where you were supposed to dig.”
Bodor and his field-school students (19 mostly undergraduates) did just that, digging small pits and discovering the foundations of the very buildings outlined on the map. “It was very interesting, using a computer program to find these resources. We had never done that before, so it was quite a thrill to find the Governor’s Mansion out there,” Bodor says. He explains that when they discovered the structural remains—composed of brick, mortar, and some wood—of both the old Academy and the surrounding neighborhoods, they also uncovered some fragments of 18th-century Chinese porcelain, nails, window glass, and animal bone fragments, remains of food that literally fell through the cracks. Scott Street, an 18th-century road buried during the 1906 rebuild, was discovered running right in front of the Academy Chapel.
As fast and efficiently as these discoveries were made with the predictive help of digital mapping, the method also proved less expensive, and it made for a much cleaner dig. Once the work was done, the test pits were filled back up and the ground returned to normal. This, Leone says, was no small matter, especially at the Academy. “A large pit looks impressive, but it’s very expensive. A small pit is very cheap, and with educated eyes, which I think we have, you can find out immediately if there’s anything there,” he says. “They didn’t want a big archaeological mess, we didn’t want to make one, and our method enhanced the desire of the Academy to keep its campus neat.”
Oral history interviews with former Hell Point residents —conducted at the Navy’s request to provide context for artifacts or information that may have been acquired from the survey—revealed that the predominantly working-class neighborhood was once a vibrant and ethnically mixed community.
Hannah Kaiser, a Ph.D. candidate from the City College of New York who is writing her anthropology dissertation on Annapolis, organized the interviews with the help of Hell Point Association president Doris DeLucia. Kaiser says they were looking primarily for the history of the neighborhood, what life was like there, and what relationship existed between the former neighborhood and the Academy. But one of the first things they wanted to know was why the neighborhood, which extended by varying accounts to Dock Street in Annapolis, was called Hell Point.
“We found a variety of responses,” Kaiser says. “Some thought that maybe it was a rough neighborhood, but they were by and large not that way. It’s possible that it came from the name of the original owner, and was once called Hill’s Point. Another theory is that the name may have referred to an area farther along toward the Naval Academy, where it was difficult to navigate ships.”
Since the properties were acquired and bulldozed during World War II, most of the people interviewed were children at the time. They spoke about how much the Academy had been a part of their lives. Kaiser learned that it was a source of income for the children, who would sell programs for the games or park cars, and many of the adults worked at the school.
“It was also where families would go for social events or concerts, or to watch the parade,” Kaiser explains. “So on the one hand it was a source of support or entertainment, but it also ultimately destroyed the homes of families that lived there.”
Hell Point eventually became the site of the current Halsey Field House. Kaiser says responses were mixed on how the residents were affected by the loss of their homes. “For some it was quite a hardship, but others were planning to move anyway, and they moved into bigger houses,” she says. “And for some, it just meant they no longer had a place to play.”
The interviews were included with the university’s final report. The archaeologists also submitted the digitized predictive maps—showing the Academy’s own archaeological history—some of the first ever to be produced on computer. These, says Leone, and chain-of-title searches showing what properties were historically significant, may spur the Academy to conduct more investigations into its own underground history. “If we can tell in advance that a part of the Academy was owned in some past century, we now know that there’s a great likelihood that something from the previous owner is going to be in the ground, and by law, it has to be dealt with.”
Until the Navy decides to investigate the underground Academy further, or until it again alters its surface, most of what lies below will remain there, comfortably preserved and well-protected by this formidable institution. Perhaps of more significance, however, is the fact that the Naval Academy and the existence of its own archaeological history as revealed through digital mapping may in the end be viewed as a springboard by which other institutions and cities may discover and preserve their own histories.