Copyright Charleston Post and Courier
CHARLESTON — Watch your step at Drayton Hall, where archaeologists are re-excavating a 17th-century well and unearthing historical odds and ends. Keep your head up, too, at the house, where curators are also removing and restoring a deteriorating plaster ceiling that threatens to collapse. The parallel projects in West Ashley, both taking place in full view of visitors, promise to reveal plenty more information about the historic landmark on the Ashley River. The old well is already yielding objects that provide clues about European settlers’ activity on the site during Colonial days, before the Drayton family began building their homestead around 1738. Meanwhile the imminent removal of the ceiling in the Grand Hall is expected to expose some of the original construction techniques of the brick home while also eliminating the potential safety hazard of falling chunks of plaster. The archaeology and ceiling repairs add up to a lot of activity for a site that is known for its careful, usually sparing approach to preservation. When the National Trust for Historic Preservation purchased the property in 1974, it declined to modernize or restore the house, which had never been electrified or plumbed. Instead Drayton Hall was stabilized and more or less left alone, allowing visitors to encounter the house as it had been used by its owners and other tenants, complete with faded and chipped interior paint. Its unrestored features also serve as a time capsule, allowing scholars and students to study original building materials and designs. The Draytons' considerable wealth was enabled by enslaved laborers who once toiled on more than 100 family-owned plantations spread over 76,000 acres.. The recent projects have contributed to an air of excitement amid the serene and pastoral setting of Drayton Hall, which sits at the end of an allée of live oaks, surrounded by lawns, on a slight bit of high ground overlooking the Ashley River. Digging started in May. And already archaeologists have found a few items in the well worthy of excitement, including fragments of English stoneware and Dutch decorative tiles; a piece of brick featuring a finger impression from its enslaved maker; glass European beads used for trade with Native Americans; and agricultural tools and artifacts, such as hacked cow and chicken bones. This evidence shows that 17th-century Charleston was no sleepy backwater but rather a dynamic hub in colonial America. “That’s the cool thing about working in Charleston, you’re going to find things that you don’t find in any other North American excavations,” said Luke Pecoraro, the historic site’s director of archaeology and collections. “It’s all coalescing at a place like this, Drayton Hall.” Digging a hole Nicole Houck doesn’t report to an office lately, but rather a hole in the ground nearly 5 feet deep. Like any archaeologist, she never knows exactly what she might find when she starts digging. Case in point: When she showed up to work one morning in October, she encountered a rat snake in the semi-excavated well, chilled from the cold and lying still. She gently placed the snake in her dustpan and set him above ground until he could warm up and slither away. Houck is far from the first person to displace dirt on this spot of earth. The well was likely dug in the late 17th century, during the English occupation of Charleston when the property was used to grow crops and raise livestock for trade with Barbados, another English colony. As her fellow archaeologist Pecoraro said of South Carolina’s early agricultural heritage: “It’s not just rice and indigo. Cattle is big business for these planters.” Excavations of the well have revealed that hundreds of years before providing water, the same patch of ground was the site of an oval-shaped Native American longhouse, with disturbed areas of soil indicating where framing timbers once stood in the ground. Then another structure was built near this site during early European occupation before the Drayton family built the main house and assorted outbuildings. Other archaeologists excavated 5 feet of the well in 1981 but stopped digging when they encountered groundwater. Now Houck and her colleagues have started to delve deeper, using a trowel to scrape away layers of dirt and uncover a hodgepodge of artifacts. Among them is what seems to be a piece of Elers stoneware featuring applique of an acanthus leaf, a vine and a bird. The discovery spurred Houck to learning more about the stoneware, which was first made about 1690 in England by Dutch silversmith brothers trying to mimic Chinese ceramics. “It was a fun rabbit hole,” Houck said. Pecoraro was similarly enthused. “When Nicole found this, it’s like, 'No way, you don’t find it in North America,' ” he said. Another fascinating find from the well is a small sherd that Pecoraro suspects is a piece of black Delft. Six fragments of this rare type of Dutch earthenware were found during archaeological excavations in 1981 and 2008 at the site of Drayton Hall’s former north flanker building, which is close to the recently excavated well. The fragments are believed to be part of a small teapot that imitated Chinese lacquerware. The production of black Delft was very tedious and short-lived, though it resulted in stunning earthenware with eye-catching and highly contrasting colors of tin glaze. The earthenware is so rare that Drayton Hall’s staff didn’t recognize what they had likely found until years later, when a scholar remembered an old journal article from the 1960s that discussed black Delft. Everything Houck collects from the well is placed in a blue, 5-gallon Lowe’s bucket and is then screened, bagged, labeled and brought to Drayton Hall’s Stephen J. Wood Conservation Lab. Eventually the items fall into the hands of someone like Lea Werling, a volunteer who carefully washes the objects and affixes a tiny label. Werling was gently scrubbing pieces with a toothbrush and water early one October day while Houck dug outside a few hundred yards away. The objects were from previous excavations at the site of the adjacent north flanker building. They included what Pecoraro believed to be a cow’s tooth, a piece of etched glass from a firing glass (an old version of a shot glass used in toasts), a brass tip from a parasol, a button made of bone and a fragment of a ceramic platter known as a milk pan that was used in dairy work. Filling an artifact tray, too, were numerous 18th-century pipe stems. To the uninitiated, they all look similar, save for a few decorative pieces. But to the expert eyes of Carter C. Hudgins, executive director and CEO of Drayton Hall, each told its own story — you just need to know what to look for. Years ago Hudgins used a set of drill bits and duct tape to make a gauge that can help assess when a white ball clay pipe stem was made and imported from England or the Netherlands. “The rule of thumb is the bigger the bore the older it is,” said Hudgins, who will insert drill bits into the hollow stem until he finds a fit, which translates to a particular time period. All these objects, from commonplace pipe stems to rare pieces of black Delft, are then interpreted together to create a detailed picture of the past. Archaeology digs of the well and adjoining flanker building site, said Pecoraro, help answer a critical question: “What does the plantation look like before the Draytons take over?” The fragile ceiling While her archeology colleagues train their gaze downward, Trish Lowe Smith has been peering upward inside of Drayton Hall. After years of research, tests and preparation, Drayton Hall’s director of preservation is about to start overseeing the replacement of the plaster ceiling above the main building’s Great Hall. Smith would have preferred to leave the delicate plaster ceiling and its precast ornaments in place, but she and her colleagues fear that the plaster is losing its adhesion to the wood behind it and that the ceiling could one day collapse. They believe the plaster is stressed by sagging wooden beams above the Great Hall that support the second floor. In the words of Craig Bennett, a structural engineer in Charleston who has consulted for Drayton Hall, the plaster ceiling is “like a sheet of glass sitting under a trampoline.” Without an intervention, Smith worries someone could get hurt and Drayton Hall might suffer damage. She noted the April 2024 collapse of the ceiling above the library at Boscobel House and Gardens in New York’s Hudson Valley, which prompted a 17-month long emergency restoration that closed the mansion to visitors. As part of its investigations into the stability of Drayton Hall’s ceiling, Smith assembled a multi-talented team of experts. This included carpenters who conducted soundings by projecting a grid on the ceiling and then tapping on areas of the plaster, which led to the creation of what Smith called a “color-coded crack map.” When tapping against sections of the plaster produced a hollow sound, it indicated an area that may have separated from its backing. Smith also arranged for the Great Hall to be heated with a propane burner brought into the building, all while a firefighter stood by clutching a gas meter and a fire extinguisher in case anything went awry. “He really babysat that thing all day long,” said Smith. “I was terrified, but we learned a lot.” The temperature within the Great Hall had reached into the 80s, said Smith. A thermal imaging camera revealed where some of this warm air seeped through cracks in the plaster and filled ceiling cavities. Some of these compromised areas of the plaster appeared unblemished and were not previously suspected of being unsound. But Smith had a coring, or sample, taken from the ceiling, which did not inspire confidence the plaster was firmly in place. Ultimately, the ceiling had too many red flags to ignore. “We have enough evidence to suggest it would not be wise to wait," Smith said. She considered alternatives to removing the ceiling, such as injecting epoxy into the plaster. That approach only buys so much time, though, and was shot down by English plasterwork expert Richard Ireland, who visited Charleston in mid-October to lecture and provide a quick assessment of the ceiling of the Great Hall. Ireland advised against using new, synthetic materials with old plaster, as the new products can turn brittle and crack. Soon Smith will use a Dremel tool to carefully cut away the plaster ornaments affixed to the ceiling, including molded stars and flowers, and store them away. Then the remaining plaster ceiling bed will be removed and carpenters will analyze the ceiling joists and decide how to install steel posts and beams around and above the Great Hall. During this step of the process, some wall panels may need to be temporarily removed, which Smith said provides a chance to look for rat nests within the walls. The materials scavenged by rats to build their nests, such as seeds and husks, can provide clues as to what foods and decorative plants were once grown in gardens at Drayton Hall. If animal nests are found within the walls, said Smith, they’ll be sent to the lab of Chantel White, an archaeobotanist at the University of Pennsylvania who has also performed research at the Nathaniel Russell House in Charleston relating to the culinary traditions of enslaved people. When the dust finally settles in the Great Hall, craftsmen will have removed the original ceiling, installed steel beams, replaced the wall panels, applied a new bed of plaster to the ceiling and reattached the plaster ornaments in the same spots they occupied before. It’s a lot of work, and the ceiling replacement is more aggressive a job than Smith would prefer, but the assorted opinions she’s solicited from experts give her the confidence to conclude that a fix is needed.
