The study of history through the excavation of discarded items, exploring people's attics, flying drones, and stuff….
Check out some of the footage from the beginning to present in our restoration progress at Byrnside’s Fort / Willowbrook Plantation. Beginning in April of 2019, we knocked the very first hole in the 1850’s plaster in order to see if the original fort logs were inside the walls….
We brought in some 18th century furniture for this 18th century room, built circa 1770. This is an old tavern table out of the Joseph Bunger house at Bunger’s Mill, Greenbrier County, West Virginia, along with some original ladder back chairs and an old bench.
Here’s the old parlor at Willowbrook/Byrnside’s Fort as of September of 2021. And here’s the journey since beginning on it in April of 2019:
Here’s a long-overdue update on the Byrnside’s Fort preservation project. Almost all the plaster is off the log walls and ceilings. The logs, as well as the downstairs ceilings, were cleaned by pressure washer. It’s been a few days of drying since these photos were taken, and it has turned out nicely.
Check out the current progress on the Byrnside’s Fort preservation project. Almost all of the pre-Civil War plaster has been removed from the logs, which are covered in the remnants of old whitewash paint. Also a new fence, and one which may go bye-bye:
The attack on Quebec was a failure. They encountered bad weather, which delayed their arrival until mid-October. By this time, None of the forces ever came within a kilometer of the city walls. Several of the ships were damaged by cannon fire from the city. They Count Frontenac, the Governor General of New France, had assembled around 2,700 defenders. The fleet suffered brutal cold weather and smallpox had broken out. Accomplishing nothing, they gave up and headed home, up the St. Lawrence and out to sea. But their misfortunes continued. They encountered storms, separating the fleet and blowing some off-course as far as the West Indies. Four of the ships were wrecked, with two companies of men completely lost.
“Spontoon” style pipe tomahawks are perhaps the earliest style of pipe tomahawk, which itself is a truly North American invention arising from the clash of cultures and power converging in 18th century colonial America. Early europeans arriving in the new world commonly carried pole-arms with them, which were relics-themselves from European battlefields and the old manners of waging war.
Believed to have borrowed the name of the French city of Bayonne, the bayonet rose to prominence as a vital military weapon during the last half of the 17th c. Arriving in Virginia in the 1670s, the first of the type are referred to as “plug” bayonets, being little more than daggers with tapered handles which were “plugged” into the muzzles of the muskets. Earlier iron-mounted examples were quickly replaced by cast-brass hilted bayonets by the late 1680s, and all were obsolete shortly thereafter.
This is another highly unusual and interesting knife with no discernible markings or origin story. It’s a well-made old dagger with a wooden grip and a rare wooden bolster. As with the treen scoop I recently posted, you can see evidence of oils from human hands on the wooden grip.
This is an interesting old blacksmith-forged knife with what appears to be an effigy carving of some sort on the end of the grip, which appears to be made of either whale tooth, or walrus tusk – I’m not sure how you tell the difference. This was collected by Keith Collis in Pennsylvania.