Hi everyone! For the past few days we’ve been settling into our work routine at the Sarah Boston Farmstead Site. Sarah Boston was a well known Nipmuc woman who lived on Keith Hill in Grafton in the late 18th and early 19th century. She inherited the land through 4 generations of women in her family, and was known to have lived in this home with her mother, Sarah Burnee Phillips. Four years ago we located the dry laid stone foundation of her house set into the eastern slope of Keith Hill, and we’ve been working to excavate the cellar feature ever since. The foundation itself was bulldozed and collapsed during the cleanup efforts of the Hurricane of 1938. It has been further filled with even more rocks in the remainder of the 20th century. This is what the foundation looked like when we first uncovered it, in the summer of 2008:

Since then, we’ve spent the better part of four field seasons carefully excavating the debris out of the cellar feature in an effort to find the bottom. We wanted to know how the house was constructed, how the cellar was used, when the structure was first built, and if and when it underwent renovations. We finally reached the bottom levels of the cellar in a few places last summer. This summer we hope to reach the bottom of the cellar feature in a few more places, and we’d also like to know a little more about the surrounding landscape. For instance, can we identify some activity areas, or outbuildings, like a barn or dairy? More on that soon!

Field school students have been busy learning the detail oriented and recording intensive excavation procedures involved in a large scale excavation such as this one: