The Eastern Collection

Map of Saints’ Rest excavations

Here you can see parts of two large stoves. Students had to excavate carefully around these, and then draw detailed maps. Boy, were they glad when they finally got to remove them from the ground!

Crew members lifting a VERY heavy stove out of an excavation unit

A later crew, with some of the same members, removing another large stove. These stoves were made of cast iron, and full of rubble, so it took four people to remove them carefully.

In the southeastern part of our excavation area we found a lot of different kinds of materials, some from the basement, and some things that fell in when the building burned. After excavating through the brick rubble we started finding parts of heating stoves. The next thing you knew, we had excavated large portions of at least three wood burning stoves. These were used in the dorm to heat rooms.

When we looked at photos of Saints’ Rest, we saw that all of these stoves were coming out of the ground close to where the chimneys had been. It could be that they were placed in the part of each room closest to the chimney, so the least amount of stovepipe would be needed to attach and vent them, and that's why they all ended up together in the ground.

Underneath the stoves we found parts of a toiletry set, including a pitcher, a toothbrush holder, and a shaving cup. Most of these objects were completely burned on the outside, but were still bright white where they had cracked, so they probably broke after they fell and after the fire was cooling off. They must not have fallen very far – perhaps they had belonged to the housemaster who lived on the first floor?

Joe excavating a pitcher from the wall of an excavation unit

Barrels as they first appeared during excavation

Staging area

Beneath the stoves and the toiletry set we found things that had been on the basement floor at the time the building burned. At first, we were not sure what we were finding – there were lots of pieces of bent iron sticking out of the unit walls. As we excavated more units, and excavated deeper, we realized these pieces of metal were barrel hoops. The wooden barrels had rotted away over the years, but the metal, though rusty, was still there.

Barrel bases

Once we got all the way to the bottom of the barrels we found that the wooden bases were still there, along with a few inches of wood going up the barrels. Some of this wood did not even seem charred. Since the wood didn't burn, water or another liquid was probably in the barrels when the building burned down.

Alongside the barrels we found some lime or plaster. There wasn't much of it there, but it was inside a big bin, and the wooden boards from the bottom of the bin were still there. Just north of that we found sand, which looked like it had been piled against the bin. After we found we had water, sand and lime, we realized that this might have been a staging area for the repairs that were going on at the time Saints’ Rest burned.