“Nobody knew anything was here before Hertzler.”
— Jeff Carskadden, excavation team member
When he moved his garden five years ago, Bud Jividen was looking for a better place to grow turnips. But what he turned up is rewriting a chapter of the pioneer history of historic George Rogers Clark Park.
An archaeological dig started last fall and finished this summer on the garden site has established that a cabin was built there in the 1820s, 30 years before the Hertzler House.
“Nobody knew anything was here before Hertzler,” said Jeff Carskadden, a member of the excavation team.
Over the Labor Day weekend, visitors to the Fair at New Boston had a chance to see the most obvious evidence the diggers found west of the Hertzler House: An arrangement of stones those on the study say served as the cabin’s hearth.
The investigation started when Jividen, who lived at the Hertzler House during his 17 years as park ranger, kept “finding these pieces” of material while tilling and tending his relocated garden.
“I showed (park volunteer) Randy Young, and Randy Young showed Jeff (Carskadden) and Jeff got a hold of Bob Morris,” retired professor of geology at Wittenberg University and the man who curated the archaeological material at the Clark County Heritage Center.
Morris said what Jividen passed on were “bits and pieces of chert (a kind of rock often used for making early tools, such as arrowheads) and historic pottery.”
With that information in hand, the group got permission from the Clark County Park District to start a preliminary dig under the condition that anything found would remain park district property.
One plot of excavation led to another, and running the dirt through a metal sieve, the team turned up more and more material.
Among the crucial finds was cream ware, a type of pottery “they quit making by the 1820s,” said Carskadden, who describes himself as “a professionally trained avocational archaeologist.”
Because “this stuff doesn’t have more than a 20-year shelf life,” he said, it stands to reason that it had been bought, broken and tossed in the earth “before the Hertzlers ever got to this property.”
By 1854, when their home was built, the Hertzlers “would have had ironstone, which is real thick white stuff,” he said. “They would have had spatter ware, sponge ware (and) flow blue,” a kind of plate that featured color patterns.
With the rare find of cream ware in hand (“You don’t see any of it,” Carskadden added), he contacted Jarrod Burks of Ohio Valley Archaeology. This spring, Burks surveyed an acre-plus around the garden with a magnetometer and ground-penetrating radar.
He found seven sites of interest, Young said.
The most interesting seemed to show rocks at right angle patterns to one another, what eventually was found to be the hearth, around which a display is now built.
Other spots of interest held evidence of a smokehouse (with related bones), two trash pits and the outlines of what the team suspects were a root cellar and barn.
To locate the names of people who might have lived there, the team turned to Cyndie Gerken, a longtime local historian and genealogist.
Poring through the files in the Clark County Auditor’s office, she discovered the cabin belonged to John Keifer, a cousin of Civil War General J. Warren Keifer and the son of George Keifer, who owned hundreds of acres in the area with his brother, Joseph.
The best guess is the cabin was built in 1824, the year John Keifer married Elizabeth Donnel.
“That’s the Donnel connection,” said Carskadden, and the apparent reason for rumors that Jonathan Donnel, founder of Donnelsville, might have had a cabin there. That’s thought not to be the case because Donnel killed himself in 1815, nearly a decade before the cabin is thought to have been built.
Court records indicate John Keifer sold the property in 1830 to Frederick Mennert, who at the same time bought the old Leffel Mill just across the Mad River, Carskadden said.
The team suspects the presence of the more well-to-do Mennerts — there until their bankruptcy in 1835 — explains the presence of broken pieces of more expensive and colorful plates and serving vessels.
“The pottery types overlap,” Carskadden said.
Carskadden also said there is “strong circumstantial evidence” that the building was a log cabin. Although the digs unearthed both flooring and roofing nails, no framing nail were found, nor are any needed to build a log cabin.
Team members also say they saw no evidence of a historic fort on the site, aligning with established thought that the Piqua battlefield and fort were on land now occupied by the Shawnee Hills subdivision.
Morris added that while there was no evidence that Shawnee or other historic American Indians lived there, 457 pieces of chert establish “this hill obviously was occupied by archaic people up through the Woodland Indians.
“We found one complete and one nearly complete projectile point,” along with “several end scrapers, oval scrapers and flake knives.”
Distinctive Wyandotte chert was the most common, followed by chert from Flint Ridge east of Columbus and Delaware and Muskingum chert.
Broken bits of glass found on the site are now being analyzed by a man in New Orleans, and team members suspect that other remains of the cabin have been relocated nearby.
“We found lots of bricks,” Morris said, “and we’ve kind of speculated that when the cabin fell into disrepair, a lot of the original stone and other materials were scavenged and used in the Hertzler House.”
Jim Campbell, executive director and chief ranger for the park district, said the district hopes to mount a display on the dig this fall at its Davidson Interpretive Center. A report detailing the dig and research is being assembled, and discussions have been opened about a future display at the Clark County Heritage Center.
“So far, there’s been no expense to the park district for this project,” Campbell said.
But there have been benefits from the estimated 1,000 hours of volunteer labor.
“There was so much interest (in the display) during the Fair at New Boston,” Gerken said. “It was well received and people read the signs. They actually were standing there and reading them.”
The material that bubbled up among Bud Jividen’s turnips seems to have caused an upturned interest in local history.
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