Digging a Powder Magazine
- Travis
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Since the last update, the weather has warmed dramatically, we've started and concluded our 2026 Field School in Historical Archaeology, and we've closed excavation on a major feature of St. Mary's Fort (for now...).
We have spent the last several months digging an intriguing pit near the mouth of the west bastion in St. Mary's Fort and we've arrived at some answers. After documenting and carefully removing the remnants of white oak boards from the pit, we learned a few key details. First, the "boards" are not exactly boards. Instead they resemble a veneer of charred wood.
This suggests that at some point these boards burned, but not enough to char them completely. The un-charred portions decayed away, as wood typically does quickly when buried in the ground, while the charred surfaces remained for us to discover.
The second and most significant detail discovered after removing the charred boards was the presence of a narrow trench lining the floor of the pit. Approximately nine inches wide, the trench forms half of a box at the base of the feature. The trench runs into the unexcavated eastern half of the pit, so presumably the other half of the box can be found there. While this find was interesting in and of itself, more exciting was the realization that the narrow trench held the charred stubs of boards that had been placed vertically within the trench. These boards were likely part of a wooden wall built to keep the sandy soils of the pit from collapsing inwards. This also reveals that the boards found previously, which appeared to be laid like floorboards, were instead also part of one of the walls that collapsed, perhaps as a result of the fire that charred them.
Artifacts found in the lowest levels of the pit form a unique assemblage, one that defies definitive dating, but that in some ways resembles many of those that we find in early Fort-period features. Near the trench, fragments of a large circular spouted earthenware pan were found. Nearby, portions of two white-tailed deer legs were discovered. Throughout the bottom layers, the team identified more than 100 copper-alloy tacks, numerous tiny (roughly 2.5mm in diameter!) white glass beads, and sherds of a beautifully decorated Potomac Creek vessel.
When we examine the evidence in sum, it seems clear that the pit feature was constructed while St. Mary's Fort was still in use. The orientation of the trench within the pit matches the orientation of the fort's walls. The artifact assemblage from the lowest layers of fill include objects commonly associated with the early colonial period (e.g., white-tailed deer, Woodland-period Indigenous ceramics) and the overall assemblage is both sparse in terms of artifact type diversity and bereft of diagnostic materials from the latter half of the 17th century. All of these criteria are suggestive of the early Fort-period.
So if this feature was constructed in the first decade of St. Mary's City's colonial settlement, what was its function? The most likely interpretation is that the pit served as a powder magazine for the Fort. Designed to store gunpowder and ammunition for armament used on the nearby west bastion's firing platform, the powder magazine would have been a crucial component of St. Mary's Fort's defenses. Its discovery offers further insights into how the Maryland colonizers constructed the fortification to counter perceived threats.
While the western half of the magazine was backfilled to permit the continued reconstruction of the west bastion and firing platform, the eastern half remains unexcavated for a future phase of work. We look forward to digging into it to learn more about the magazine's construction. We especially hope to discover more about its entrance/egress.
Until then, continue to check back for more updates from excavations at St. Mary's Fort!