The study of history through the excavation of discarded items, exploring people's attics, flying drones, and stuff….
This is the water pitcher and drinking glass which sat on the counsel table in the Jefferson County Courthouse in Charles Town, West Virginia during the 1859 trial of John Brown. It came out of the collection of former governor of West Virginia, William MacCorkle, who had quite a collection of West Virginia artifacts.
In Harrison County, West Virginia, there’s a cave, known as “Indian Cave,” which was explored in the 19th century, inside which there are some interesting petroglyphs, including depictions of figures such as rattlesnakes and fish. They’re even colored red using red ochre. They’re estimated to date to 500-1675 AD. It’s located “on the John McDonald …
This sweet antique pipe tomahawk was up on Cowan’s Auctions website, where it sold a few months back, with detailed photos and a detailed description, so I thought I’d share. Obviously a lot of research went into the description, and the photos are great. Truly a great example of a presentation-grade pipe tomahawk. And it …
Much of the fun of metal detecting – especially at an historic site – is cleaning up the items, preserving them, and then comparing them to everything else you’ve found. Together, they tell you a story of what happened there long ago.
There are plenty of books out there on swords, powder horns, and other objects. But surprisingly, there’s not a whole lot out there on antique American knives. In his 1984 book, Madison Grant wrote one of the definitive books on antique knives, with pictures of many examples, albeit in black and white, and with a …
Read more#FixedBladeFriday – Who doesn’t love pics of antique knives?
We found some some ladle, or skillet, handles in the yard at Byrnside’s Fort. They’re blacksmith made, wrought iron forged, each with a little rat tail style curl on the end for hanging around the fireplace. I finally got around to doing some preservation work on the handles in the past few days, and they …
It’s important for us – especially Kentuckians – to remember that Daniel Boone moved to (what is now) West Virginia in the later part of the 18th century, I believe around 1788, from Kentucky, staying there until around 1797, at which point he reluctantly returned to Kentucky, before remembering why he didn’t like Kentucky anymore. And then he moved to Missouri around 1799. West Virginia gets no credit for its period of Boone residence. In the words of Rodney Dangerfield, “we get no respect – no respect at all.”
I spent an entire summer with my three brothers, and some friends doing all the demo work and plaster removal, etc., off of this old house. You couldn’t tell before we started, but there were logs hidden inside the old plaster walls . . . .
This spike tomahawk head was found, in the ground, by metal detector by Robert Bennett, in the vicinity of Harbor Springs, Michigan at the site of L’ Arbre Croche, a series of Ottawa Villages existing in the mid 1700s, and otherwise a highly traveled spot near Fort Michilimackinac at the Straits of Mackinac……
“More than one hundred men sailed across the Atlantic in 1606 to found the Jamestown colony in Virginia. The roster for the expedition lists fifty-nine of them as “gentlemen.” One of those gentlemen, Captain John Smith, wasn’t born with his title. He earned it beheading three Turkish soldiers in a series of single combat duels. Suffice it to say, Smith was not your average English gentleman. Before he sailed for the Virginia wilderness and had his famous encounter with Pocahontas, Smith had been a mercenary, a pirate, a slave, and a mutineer.”