Who’s Got the Button?

This is turning into archeology week at Boston 1775, but here’s another story about a recent find. The Williamsburg Yorktown Daily reports that young teen Finney Lynch found a button with the markings of the 85ème Regiment Saintonge, one of the French units that served in the siege of Yorktown:

The rain on June 24 did more than just water the plants. It likely loosed a Revolutionary War-era button from a bank of land after more than 230 years, planting it in full view of an eighth-grade archaeology camper.

As Finney Lynch, an eighth-grade student at The Covenant School in Charlottesville, walked the path from the Archer Cottage next to Cornwallis’ Cave at Yorktown to the Watermen’s Museum on June 25, she spotted a button in the muddy ground.

“I picked it up and didn’t think it was anything at all,” Lynch said.

She gave the button to the Watermen’s Museum Archaeology Camp leader Jason Lunze, and he knew what she had found: an 18th-century button made of copper alloy, like bronze, from the Revolutionary War. . . .

“I have buttons in my own dresser that do not look as good as this button does in person,” said the Watermen’s Museum Executive Director Dr. David Niebuhr.

The article goes on to explain how the button will be preserved for study and display.

I’m surprised that a button survived in such good shape after more than two hundred years “in close proximity to the water” and was spotted simply lying on the muddy ground—by someone at an archeology camp, yet. Rain can unearth artifacts like those flints in Concord, but I’m used to thinking of metal buttons appearing in more concerted digs like this one at Colonial Williamsburg.

I can’t help but wonder if members of Massachusetts’s own Regiment Saintonge reenactors have been in that area.