Spoons found at Byrnside’s Fort. Almost all of the spoons found so far have been made of pewter. There is one that seems to have been forged of iron. None found have been later nickel or silver plated. They’ve exclusively been 18th and early 19th century molded spoon. One mystery so far is why we would be finding pewter spoons in the ground in the first place. Pewter was a valuable and reusable resource. All one had to do was to melt it and repour it to make a new spoon, or other item. One possibility is that the spot where many of these were found was the old cellar of James Byrnside’s log cabin which was burned by the Shawnee in 1763 on the same site as the existing fort (built in 1770).
