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Archaeological field study team breaks ground near Gardner Cabin

Dickinson County News - Staff Photo - Create Article
Photo by Seth Boyes

By Seth Boyes - News Editor

 

Inch by inch and yard by yard, students from all three of Iowa's public universities are sifting through soil in search of local history.

A field study is being conducted on the Abbie Gardner Historical Site in Arnolds Park in preparation for potential improvements. Organizers with the Friends of the Abbie Gardner Historic Site hope to expand and enhance the indoor museum space as well as preserve and maintain the lot's original pioneer cabin. The Friends group asked state officials to study the property before starting the improvements and potentially disturbing any buried artifacts.

 

Copyright Dickinson County News 2022
Seth Johnson, a graduating senior at Iowa State University, examined an area where previous data showed a notable change in soil density. (Photo by Seth Boyes)

 

State Archeologist John Doershuk is leading the field study. Students began work early last week, and the dig is expected to continue into mid-July.

The Gardner Cabin was part of a pioneer claim staked by Rowland Gardner at a time when settlers were just starting to move into northwest Iowa. Nearly every member of the Gardner family was killed by the Sioux war chief Inkpaduta and his band about eight months after arriving on the shores of West Lake Okoboji.

The museum's founder, Abbie Gardner Sharp — only 13-years-old when her family was killed — was one of four women taken captive during the attacks. And she would be one of only two women who survived long enough to be ransomed. She returned to the Lakes Area in 1891 to establish her family's former pioneer cabin as a museum and tourist attraction. Within a handful of years, she also successfully petitioned the state legislature to fund a towering granite obelisk to the south of the cabin as a memorial to the tragic events — state lawmakers appropriated $5,000 for the 55-foot monument in 1894.

Doershuk indicated the students participating in the field study can better contextualize their findings — whether they're from before or after settlers first met natives in the region — after having heard Abbie Gardner's story.

"It's giving them a broader perspective on Iowa history and, by extension the precontact period as well, and that interplay between Native Americans and the Europeans who eventually became Iowans — their own ancestors," Doershuk said.

A small team from Luther College gathered preliminary data earlier this month for the field study.

Ground-penetrating radar and other instruments helped mark areas of possible interest, and the students used both data and local history to choose where to begin digging — Doershuk previously estimated digging would take place on only about 5 percent of the acre-sized lot. Students involved in the field study are carefully examining soil in several small areas, looking at changes in the dirt itself and using wire screens, brushes or simply their hands to sift out any small artifacts.

 

Copyright Dickinson County News 2022
University of Iowa senior Pearl Tyler scraped up another trowel-full of earth as students carefully examined three sites near the Abbie Gardner Cabin and Museum. (Photo by Seth Boyes)

 

The process yielded some results within the first few days.

University of Iowa senior Pearl Tyler and Iowa State University senior Emily Bettey found a number of what they called fire-cracked stone a few yards west of the pioneer cabin. The data collected ahead of the dig indicated previous burning might have taken place there, and postcards from the time when Gardner herself was still operating the cabin museum show a tent standing near where the students are currently digging. The two students found a number of bricks beneath the soil as well.

Tyler said she joined Doershuk during previous studies in the Minnewaukon area, and she was intrigued by the opportunity to study a site which likely contained items from both before and after native people had contact with settlers. She said artifacts from those abutting eras can be as different as night and day — stone arrow heads versus coins and nails — and she said, as Europeans expanded westward, there were sometimes observable changes in aspects of native cultures, such as changes in pottery making.

"It's interesting to see the evolution of a culture once contact with Europeans came into play," she said.

Tyler said, in addition to some remnants of native pottery, she and Bettey had unearthed shards of what she called green transferware — a type of pottery typically decorated with a detailed image or pattern. Tyler said such china sets were made around the 1750s.

 

Copyright Dickinson County News 2022
Remnants of green transferware were found a few yards west of the Gardner Cabin, near where vintage postcards from the cabin museum's heyday show a tent once stood. The patterned china likely would have been manufactured before the Gardners arrived in the Lakes Area, but many settlers brought such pieces with them on their journey west. (Photo by Seth Boyes)

 

"It would have been something that settlers would have brought with them," Tyler said. "With some settlers, it would have been a wedding gift to them, others it would be grandparents or mothers — something like that, but it is something they would have brought with them."

At least one shard had a visible maker's mark, which Tyler said she plans to research further.

And while some of the students are unearthing pieces of former keepsakes, others are hoping to find things which were probably discarded without much thought — trash.

Adam Frasher, an incoming senior at the University of Northern Iowa, and Maverick Meimann, an incoming sophomore at the University of Iowa, are seeing what they can find near the base of the granite monument south of cabin. Doershuk said a builder's trench would have likely been dug in preparation for the monument, and it may have unintentionally become a time capsule from 1894.

 

Copyright Dickinson County News 2022
University of Iowa sophomore Maverick Meimann (left) and University of Northern Iowa senior Adam Frasher (right) examined a shard of the broken glass found near the base of the granite monument. (Photo by Seth Boyes)

 

"Often times when you do construction like this, you have to have a bigger trench to fit the stones into, leaving a narrow gap," Doershuk said. "And the natural thing is for people to just toss their garbage in there."

The students uncovered several shards of broken glass and pull tabs similar to those found on more modern aluminum cans. The students' initial theory was that the items might have been dropped by early construction crews, but Frasher said the items might have also been left by more recent visitors — Frasher noted they did discover a penny minted in the year 2000.

"That kind of threw a wrench in our original theory, but I think that lends a tiny bit of credence to the new one," Frasher said.

Other students are digging just to the west of the monument, examining what an anomaly there could potentially tell them about the property's history. Seth Johnson, a graduating senior at Iowa State University, said radar data showed "a massive disturbance" in the soil density, running relatively deep into the ground. University of Iowa sophomore Annabel Hendrickson said the data prompts questions as to whether there was once a walkway or other structure near the monument. Johnson said, in addition to the walkway theory, the anomaly could have possibly been made by gravel which crews laid down in preparation for construction on the monument.

"We want to know what the whole area was like when the monument was built — if there was other stuff to it that we don't know about today," Hendrickson said.

A number of the students noted that what little archaeological work has been done on the Gardner Cabin site has largely been concentrated near the cabin itself — likely leaving most of the property as it was hundreds of years ago.

"That gives us a lot of opportunities to find stuff that belonged to the Gardners or stuff that belonged to visitors when Abbie made it a tourist destination for 30 years," Frasher said. "The possibilities are endless, and that's so cool to me."

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