“By dawn on June 18, 1775, nothing was left standing”

The current issue of Archaeology magazine includes a dispatch about the City of Boston’s Archaeology Department recent work in Charlestown, filed by a journalist with the almost-too-good-to-be-true named of Jason Urbanus.

Urbanus writes:

In early 1775, Charlestown was already almost 150 years old. It was a bustling settlement of between 1,500 and 2,000 people representing all walks of life—farmers, artisans, merchants, and mariners, including both free and enslaved Black people.

There were large landholders, such as 53-year-old distiller David Cheever, who owned multiple properties across the peninsula, and those who were less well-off, such as widow Elizabeth Moore, who rented a simple room in a neighborhood tavern. The town’s diverse population also included Margaret Thomas, who bought a humble home in 1773, likely making her the first free Black woman to own property in Charlestown. Among the wide array of craftspeople were goldsmith Nathaniel Austin, chaise maker James Frothingham, and Cato Hanker, a shoemaker. Hundreds of houses, workshops, and other buildings lined the town’s streets and wharves.

By dawn on June 18, 1775, nothing was left standing and everyone was gone. Less than 24 hours earlier, a brutal engagement, known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, had raged across the Charlestown Peninsula. . . . Townspeople were sent fleeing, and many never returned. Nearly all lost everything they owned. . . .

Many of Charlestown’s inhabitants had departed over the previous month amid increasing unrest, but those who remained were jolted from their homes. A widow named Relief Ellery and her 20-year-old daughter of the same name were among those who narrowly escaped the bombardment. The younger woman pocketed two valuable silver tablespoons from the kitchen table—the only things she had time to grab. When the pair returned to Charlestown, none of their property remained. “We have records of British troops coming back the next day and setting fire to any building that still stood,” says [City Archaeologist Joe] Bagley. “It was vindictive.” In a matter of hours, one of the oldest settlements in Massachusetts had ceased to exist. . . .

At the urging of a committee of Charlestown residents, more than 450 families submitted inventories of their lost possessions after the battle in hopes of receiving restitution. . . . Usually, when archaeologists excavate a residence, they record the artifacts that they uncover during the process. In this instance, they already have a list of everything that was in a house before beginning excavations. They know exactly what they might expect to find buried in dozens of backyards and basements.

Or, rather, buried underneath a dense modern city, or perhaps already dug up and tossed aside in construction projects over the past two and a half centuries. It seems unlikely that we’ll see a confluence of household inventory and newly dug artifacts. Still, the written record provides a lot for scholars of domestic material culture to work with.

No doubt Archaeology readers love ceramics, and another section of the article discusses Charlestown early pottery industry, which can also be dated with finality:

No commercial sector was hit as hard as Charlestown’s once-thriving ceramics industry. Although not well-known today, Charlestown had been among the largest pottery production centers in the northeast. That all changed on the day of the battle. With their workshops burned to the ground, Charlestown’s potters scattered throughout New England. “They lost everything—their kilns, all of their work tools—everything was gone,” says Bagley. “None of them came back.”

Pictured above is a milk pan from the site of the Parker-Harris Pottery, excavated during the Big Dig highway project a generation ago.