06/22/11

The School House

The historic organization that I am with, was offered the use of a school house that was built in the early 18th century.  Several members visited the site to consider the offer.  While we were there, I brought out my dowsing rod.  I am familiar with the history of the site and knew that there was a log meeting house on the site prior to the building of the school.  They had added a stone addition to the log meeting and thereby provided for the separation of the sexes.  After the log structure burned down, a new stone structure was built in 1812, on another nearby site, that is still in use.  The school, the current meeting house, and the current carriage house are on the National Register of Historic Places.  I was urged to scan the lot adjacent to the school house.

Log structures seem to have two rectangles that are one within the other by about eight inches.  The stone structures are also two rectangle with a separation of about 20 inches.  At first I found the "stone structure" rectangles.  Adjoining were the log structure outlines.  I was then asked: "Where is the path?".  I  then found two lines at about 30 inches apart running toward the school house, but they stopped on the way.  At this point, I found a line perpendicular to the end of the "walkway".

Scanning at the end of the walkway, I found the perpendicular line continued to a corner and then formed an open rectangle with the open side toward the street.  Leading from this open side of the rectangle ("carriage house") are two lines that go out to the street that was once a dirt "Meetinghouse" road.  These lines are a nominal 11 feet apart.  This was getting complex.  We measured the outlines of the "stone and log meeting houses" and I reported the results to the other members present.  They are now getting familiar with my many findings.

"Okay, why isn't there a path to the school?" I was asked.  I went to the other end of the "carriage house" outline and there are two lines about 30 inches and they go to the steps leading to the door on the schoolhouse.

We again scanned the outlines of the original meetinghouses in 2010.  We then scheduled an archaeology project at selected sites where marker stones would be placed along the outline of these old Meetinghouses.  While setting the stones we performed archaeology were the stones were to be set.   We found no artifacts that we could link to the two early structures.  We noted that the doorways were offset to the right.  This finding could be related the placement of benches where one bench faced the others.  We also scanned the outline of the Carriage House, and installed marking stones around the base.  The  limit of the overhang is not detectable.