2015 IUP excavations at Hanna’s Town

Hanna’s Town is arguably the most important historical site in Westmoreland County. As the first British county seat west of the Allegheny Mountains, a toehold for Anglo American western expansion, and the home of the Hanna’s Town Resolves it played important judicial, economic, social, military, and cultural roles in the formation of western Pennsylvania. Robert Hanna purchased a tract of land along the Forbes Military Road at the head of a branch of Crabtree Creek in 1769. Situated between Fort Pitt and Fort Ligonier, Hanna’s tavern Hanna’s became the county seat when Westmoreland County divided from Bedford County in 1773. Hanna also began selling lots in the town that year and Hanna’s Town quickly took shape. As county seat, Hanna’s Town was the site of the county’s first courts, which were “at least an occasional destination for settlers living throughout the southwestern part of [Pennsylvania]” (Carlisle 2005:1). Due to the necessity of occasionally visiting the court for criminal proceedings or land transactions, as well as the settlement’s position along one of the major overland routes to the Northwest Territory, Hanna’s Town developed into a thriving community with approximately 30 homes, a stockade fort, and multiple taverns. A month after the battles of Lexington and Concord, the inhabitants of Westmoreland County adopted the Hanna’s Town Resolves on May 16, 1775. Signed at Hanna’s Town, this document declared that the citizens were “resolved” to resist the tyranny of Britain. The citizens’ resolve continued throughout the war with local men joining local militias and participating in battles throughout the Northwest Territory. In response to these battles as well as American attacks on Native settlements, Hanna’s Town became the target of one of the final acts of aggression in the American Revolution. On July 13, 1782 a raiding party of Native and British soldiers led by Seneca Chief Sayenqueraght attacked the town, burning its buildings and slaughtering livestock. Hanna’s Town never fully recovered from this attack, and was subsequently abandoned as the state road and county seat shifted to Greensburg. Following its abandonment, the land was farmed until its purchase by Westmoreland County in 1969.

IUP excavations at Hanna’s Town since 2011

IUP entered into an agreement with WCHS in 2011 to provide IUP students and faculty with access to the Hanna’s Town site and associated artifact collections while providing WCHS with new archaeological interpretations and ways to increase awareness of the site’s significance. This is an ongoing relationship with many facets ranging from the creation of a digital artifact catalog and map to consultation regarding ground-disturbing maintenance at the park, but the most important aspect of IUP’s involvement with Hanna’s Town has been hands-on student education through field schools, class projects, theses, and work experience.

Hanna’s Town has also been the subject of seven graduate theses at IUP. These theses cover a range of topics from buttons to geophysics. Two students, Renate Beyer and Stefanie Smith, have completed their theses. Renate reanalyzed the glass and ceramics from the Foreman’s Tavern pits to compare them with a tavern closer to Philadelphia. She found that the Foreman’s were adopting new fashions almost as quickly as their eastern counterparts and that new types of ceramics first appeared in showier pieces such as tea services. Stefanie examined animal bones from the Foreman’s Tavern, Hanna’s Tavern, and Irish House portions of the site to explore variations in diet among the townspeople. Her results showed that most people were eating a mixture of domestic and wild animals, but that the Irish House inhabitants ate significantly more domestic animals than their neighbors. These results suggest that Irish House was inhabited later than the other buildings, an idea supported by the predominance of pearlware, a type of ceramic not introduced to North America until 1780, near this structure. Her research also revealed a substantial number of grey squirrel bones in the Foreman’s Tavern deposits, suggesting that squirrel may have been served in the tavern.

Students excavating at Hanna’s Town in 2013

The other theses are still underway but are showing promising results. Ashley Taylor has used a variety of geophysical techniques to investigate the Hanna’s Town cemetery. The cemetery is of particular importance because it is the last aboveground physical link with the original town. Ashley’s research showed that the cemetery was once larger than the current boundary implies by finding several grave shafts outside of the fence. David Breitkreutz is also applying geophysics to give us a better understanding of the site’s layout (Figure 6). Taking advantage of a large ground-penetrating radar recently acquired by IUP, one of only two in the US, he has surveyed much of the area south of Forbes Trail Road. This survey covers areas never before excavated and will be used to guide our 2017 field school excavations. Three other graduate students are focusing on artifacts from the collection. Jay Taylor is analyzing the metal artifacts to better understand what occupations were practiced in the town. Nichole Keener is studying the buttons and other fasteners to reconstruct the clothing of Hanna’s Town residents. Cheryl Frankum is conducting an elemental analysis of redware from the site. Redware, the Tupperware of the 18^th century, is the most common artifact in the collection and also the least studied. Cheryl’s research is a first attempt at understanding this important type of artifact and may shed light on where the pots, jars, bowls, and other pieces were coming from.

There are also three undergraduate theses about Hanna’s Town in progress. While undergraduates are not required to complete a thesis doing so gives them an advantage in applying for jobs and graduate school because it shows that they can take a research project from plan to completion. James Miller is studying the distribution of expensive ceramics across the site to determine if there was class variation at Hanna’s Town. Kelsey Schneehagen is looking at Hanna’s Town in a regional context to explore relationships with other settlements in western Pennsylvania. Eden VanTries is studying the people who lived at Hanna’s Town before Hanna (or even his predecessor, Jacob Miers). In the course of previous excavations several stone tools have been recovered. Eden is analyzing these artifacts to understand when previous groups lived on the ground that became Hanna’s Town. As these graduate and undergraduate theses are completed copies are filed with the WCHS so that they are available to other researchers.

By Danielle Kiesow

This summer I’m the archaeology intern at the Grand Portage National Monument in the most northern tip of Minnesota along the shores of Lake Superior and it’s been a great experience! Grand Portage National Monument is unique in that it’s located within the Grand Portage Reservation (home of the Grand Portage Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa, Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, also known as the Ojibwe or Anishinaabe) so I have the chance to work alongside the locals and together we can learn more about their past.

I’m accompanied by the Chief of Resources at the Park, Bill Clayton, and Jammi Ladwig, a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota. We’re doing a lot of different things during my summer here including monitoring sites for any looting, helping out with some excavations at Isle Royale National Park just a few miles away in Lake Superior, participating in cultural resource management (CRM) work, archival research, working on my thesis, and even chainsaw training. Definitely the most challenging part of my internship is finding time to do everything!

The reconstructed Great Hall in the North West Company Depot overlooking Lake Superior.

Grand Portage is known for its importance in the fur trade, and in fact it’s named after the 8.3-mile portage from Lake Superior to the Pigeon River that divides Minnesota from Ontario. Through previous archaeology from the 1930s and into the 1970s, Grand Portage National Monument has been able to reconstruct the stockade and some of the buildings of the North West Company’s depot that existed from 1731-1803.

What better way to learn a little bit about the lives of the voyageurs than paddling in a replica Montreal canoe?

Even though the fur trade is the focus of the park here, my thesis work is all about what happened after the fur trade: when the English packed up their things (including a few of the buildings) and moved across the newly designated border to establish Fort William (today Thunder Bay, Ontario). The Hungry Years, as they’re still called by the descendants on the reservation, followed the end of the fur trade and lasted into the beginning of the reservation era, when the U.S. government wrote the Treaty of 1854 that established the Grand Portage Reservation. My thesis is looking at the land use and gardening or farming practices on the reservation from 1854 until 1930 to analyze the relationship between the Ojibwe at Grand Portage and the Indian Agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). This time period has, until recently, been largely ignored by the National Monument and much of the descendent community that can remember what life was like during this period have passed. It’s important for all of us – the National Park Service, the descendent community, and everyone else – to understand the suffering that resulted out of racism and to celebrate the strength and perseverance of the Grand Portage Ojibwe. Knowing that my thesis is one of the first research projects about the Ojibwe perspective during the transition into living on the reservation is definitely the best part of my internship.

I have been conducting research at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul and the National Archives in Chicago for more background into the BIA-Grand Portage relations before I excavate the yard of a former BIA building in August. The most important thing I’ve learned during my research is the resiliency and resourcefulness of the Grand Portage Ojibwe throughout the years. Instances like creating tolls and selling items along the Grand Portage to earn money from the voyageurs, petitioning the Indian Agency and making their voices heard during a time where Indian Agents called them the sons and daughters of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (and treated them as such), and never leaving their land or their fishing economy even though they were without electricity until the 1950s and without plumbing until 1976.

Before and after: a ca. 1920 photograph of the BIA building (top of the photo) with surrounding yard and outbuildings, looking northeast. The foundations of the building are seen in the next photo taken this summer, looking southwest.