The study of history through the excavation of discarded items, exploring people's attics, flying drones, and stuff….
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:
Our good friend Bill Burns found this cluster of fired lead roundballs, which I presume to have been fired by rifles of different calibers. None of them are musket-sized. The arrow shows exactly where they were found. They were clustered about 20 feet on the other side of that fence.
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.
This is an old log cabin located in the vicinity of Pickaway, Monroe County, West Virginia, on the site of what is believed to have been called “Thompson’s Fort,” on an early large plantation. This is on the “Pickaway Plains” of the Greenbrier Valley – so named by the 18th century frontiersmen who fought in …
Read moreOld log cabin preservation project from the site of “Thompson’s Fort”
It’s not easy restoring old log cabins. Fortunately, we only have the inside to deal with, since the outside got to keep its board and baten siding, and it now mostly finished. Once the old pre-Civil War plaster comes down off the walls inside, it’s a big mess. Even after it’s cleaned up, it’s still a mess.