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:
Here’s another interesting item I found in the Cowan’s auction records, which pertains to local history here in the Greenbrier Valley: a fugitive slave “broadside,” dated 1829 seeking the return of an escaped slave, and giving a detailed description of the individual. Here’s the information from Cowan’s:
This is Part 2 on the Virginia New River Lead Mines. Check out Part 1, if you missed it…. These blog posts are excerpts of the materials provided to me by my good friend, Jim Webb, a lifelong resident of the New River area of Virginia, mixed in with some of my editing, commentary, and scavenging experience. One little spot in Virginia, now completely abandoned and mostly lost to history, played an amazing part in American history. During the 18th century on the Virginia frontier, this little known spot was the center of activity, and possibly made the difference between life and death….
This is the best way I’ve found so far to clean the interior side of the original (extremely hard) white oak hand hewn logs. This is the Northwest second floor corner. Since this was eventually turned into a formal entry way, long before the plaster was installed over the logs, they were given various coats of whitewash white paint, in order to make the walls look like they were plaster, rather than logs. Such was the trend, since there was nothing glamorous about having a log plantation house.
While Thomas Jefferson became Vice President of the United States in 1797, he also became President of the American Philosophical Society – a position once held by Benjamin Franklin, who founded the society in 1743. When Jefferson arrived in DC to assume these positions, he had with him some massive bones which came out of a cave in the Greenbrier Valley.
This weekend we went and picked up the old dinner bell from the old Sweet Chalybeate Springs resort, or as it was also called, Red Sweet Springs. We also picked up a load of antique handmade bricks from the remnants of the old Crow’s Tavern, in Crows, Virginia – which was just down the road from Sweet Chalybeate.