Artifactual Evidence: The Sister's Other Story
Unfortunately, for those who were looking for evidence of Zachary Taylor, none of the artifacts recovered from our excavations could be tied to a pre-1850 date with any certainty.
The vast majority of these artifacts can be attributed to the Sisters of Mercy occupation of the site from 1853 to around 1910. These artifacts, however, do tell the "other" nineteenth-century story of the relocated Irish on the frontier--and they tell it in detail.
Unlike what one would find when excavating a typical house site of the same period, our artifact assemblage is peppered with a number of religious items such as crucifixes and rosary beads.
The large quantity of patent medicine bottles certainly speak to the Sister's long tradition of ministering to the ill--although they certainly chose poorly as many of the bottles recovered once held the very concoctions that caused Samuel Hopkins Adams to write The Great American Fraud exposing the patent medicine industry in 1905.
Among
the patent medicine bottles recovered are items such as Liquizone;
shown here (left) in two bottle sizes recovered from excavations. "Medicines"
such as these could actually be quite harmful….Liquizone was 99% water
and 1% Hydrochloric Acid.
Other illustrative artifacts recovered include: several laundry bluing (whitening) agents, a washboard, a cast iron prayer kneeler, a large assemblage of almost completely undecorated white ironstone, and a .44 Webley cartridge manufactured in the late nineteenth century.
This cartridge would have been fired from a small weapon, known as the "British Bull Dog" (or sometimes, more appropriately in this case, the "Ulster Bulldog"). It was one of Webley's popular series of pocket revolvers-thus not only connected to the Sisters' homeland "across the pond", but the perfect protective sidearm for a woman of the cloth on the frontier.
Coming
soon....Artifact Gallery
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