Crews search Illinois' Fort Johnson site

WARSAW - Jenny Goldman ran her gloved hand over the screen, carefully separating a flat disk from the surrounding soil.

"A button," Goldman said. "Usually we'll find lots of roots, but we hope for artifacts."

Likely a regimental button with a detailed maker's mark on the underside, it's another sign of the past life of the Warsaw site that was home to Fort Johnson and Cantonment Davis.

Not far away, Jada Zook carefully logged artifacts found at the site to ensure each one can be found later in the lab.

"We had a lot of limestone, some bone and lead shot. We have a piece of metal, mystery metal," Zook said. "When you find an item, you're like, 'No one's touched this in 200 years.' That's just a really cool feeling. I've always really liked that."

The sense of history infuses the site where earlier digs discovered the long-lost fort dating to the War of 1812 era.

Work on the fort began about Sept. 7, 1814. It was burned to the ground just weeks later before U.S. troops, under the command of Zachary Taylor, a brevet major and later president of the United States, left for the safety of St. Louis after provisions ran short and ongoing harassment by the British and Sauk Indians. About 1,500 troops returned to the site in 1815 for Cantonment Davis, which housed soldiers who built a series of military trading posts, including Fort Edwards in Warsaw.

"We're up here to commemorate the bicentennial of the founding and destruction of the fort. We're here essentially to walk in their footsteps at the same time they were here, trying to re-create some of the things they built," said Dave Nolan, Western Illinois Field Station Coordinator for the Illinois State Archaeological Survey Prairie Research Institute.

"When you think of the War of 1812, you think of the East Coast, the Great Lakes or the Atlantic. It doesn't immediately spring to mind to think about the Mississippi River, but it was a theater in the War of 1812. You're essentially out on the frontier, so the stories of the men and the battles, and the native people as well, those are not well-known. One of the reasons we're here is to try to illuminate their lives and their stories, bring it alive again, make living history."

Tempered expectations

Crews from three State Archaeological Survey offices, headed by Nolan, opened an 8-by-12-meter area encompassing earlier small test holes to tell more of the site's story.

"A lot of times in archaeology, you're looking at something they walked away from. (In this case), they intentionally dismantled the fort. It's not going to be pristine. It's not going to look like you'd hope it would look. We've got to temper our expectations of what's here," Nolan said. "Digging small holes, it's easy to make a lot of assumptions."

Lauren Fitts from the survey office in Jacksonville wielded a shovel nearby to clear another layer of soil from a small area.

"Yesterday we found part of a gun part, an iron flintlock. We found part of a hat plate, metal with an impression of an eagle, gun flints, different military buttons," Fitts said. "You can read about it in articles or in books, but to actually pick up something they wore at that time, that's really neat."

After removing an initial sandy layer over the site and working to expose some features, "the actual digging is slowing down," Nolan said. "A lot of recording is going on, making detailed scaled maps."

The work, and the maps, hope to clarify what belonged with the fort and the later cantonment, or temporary troop quarters.

"We have these two things overlapping one another, so close in date that we can't separate them archaeologically because the artifacts are the same," said Mark Branstner, State Archaeological Survey senior historical archaeologist. "Are we looking at the fort, the later cantonment, a combination of both? The more obvious answer is a little of both. They would have been reusing the same space ... because the land had been cleared for the fort."

A key feature of the site, a stone fireplace footing, likely was part of the fort, Nolan said, because cantonments typically were organized tent cities with no permanent installations.

Another find, two British military buttons, "was the first kind of oddball thing we found that didn't really fit our expectations," Branstner said.

The buttons came from the New Brunswick Regiment in northeastern Canada, which also served in the Lake Erie area during the War of 1182.

"It's conceivable some guys here might have been serving up there, because we know that the 104th shouldn't have been in this region," Branstner said. "They might have picked it up as a souvenir. They might have picked it up as a button. It may have traded hands a couple of times before it got here."

Early globalism

It also highlights the idea of a global economy, often considered new in modern times but already thriving in the early 1800s.

"We have Spanish-related items, English, American, native," Nolan said. "It was a global economy at the time. Some porcelain could have come from China."

The fort itself was small -- historians believe it was 100 feet by 100 feet -- with small buildings and "pretty tight quarters" for the 100 men behind its walls, said Rob Hickson with the State Archaeological Survey .

"So little is known about the War of 1812 in Illinois on the western frontier," Hickson said. "This contributes to the understanding of what was going on in the pioneer days of Illinois. Our work here is contributing to the history of Illinois in a great way."

The fort itself had cabins, a commissary where the soldiers ate, sleeping quarters, and a storage site for ammunition.

"We're just trying to find them all, map them in," Jim Pisell with the survey office in Jacksonville said. "Artifacts are nice. We know they're here, but we just want to know what it really was like."

Initial work to find the fort dates to 1983. Work at the site began in 2003, spurred by the efforts of Joe Bartholomew of Warsaw and Steve Tieken of Quincy.

Findings from initial probes and electrical resistivity trials have been layered on a map with real-world findings from digs. The cumulative work helps point researchers in the right direction -- and also gives the more directions to follow.

"Every time we open a hole in the ground, it probably raises as many questions as it answers," Nolan said. "There's still plenty of area out here to look at. There might be other questions to ask."

One advantage is that the site was undisturbed for many years.

"There's really not much evidence for any later historic use of this area. There is some prehistoric native use, but this was not the scene of something happening in later historic times," Nolan said.

The sole drawing of the fort, done by James Callaway, who captained the 50 Missouri rangers stationed in Warsaw, sparks debate over whether it was Callaway's romanticized version to send home to his wife or actually what stood at the site.

The ongoing work hopes to set the record straight.

"That's archaeology -- fixing historical documents, just making things accurate," Goldman said.

Crews studied a "linear anomaly," a fairly faint change in soil color in one area, which possibly could be a ditch tied to the fort's perimeter walls.

"A British spy said there were 12-foot-high oak pickets around the perimeter of the fort. How did they set them in? What perspective did he look at the fort from -- one side and assume the rest was the same? We don't know," Nolan said.

But there's no doubt the site itself is "old" for this part of Illinois.

"You had St. Louis and little dots around here, and that was all we had in this region," Pisell said. "You're talking about a time frame when they didn't have any steam out on the rivers yet. That was all walking and canoeing. That was a rough way to travel in Illinois in those times."