Under the Floor in the South Soldiers’ Barracks

When in Rome, each of us has had the opportunity to look down into the extraordinary area sacra – containing the exposed foundations of 2000-year-old buildings, among them the steps where Julius Caesar was struck down on the Ides of March. Late this past winter, on the anniversary of that event in Roman history, a group of archaeologists (directed by Andrew Stewart of Strata Consulting and Eva MacDonald of Archaeological Services Inc.) excavated part of a room of the South Soldiers’ Barracks near the west gate of Fort York.

Archaeological deposits at the fort, one of Canada’s largest and most significant urban archaeological sites, have great integrity. They provide an unbroken record of cultural deposition, evidence of past buildings and events extending downwards through various layers to the natural ground surface on which the garrison was established in 1793.

The South Soldiers’ Barracks housed generations of soldiers and their families following its construction in the summer of 1815, two years after the garrison had been destroyed by U.S. soldiers. By 1865, the room in which we were digging, the southern of three rooms in this barracks, was a school for the Royal Artillery. (see Fife and Drum, March 2009, p.7)

Our excavations were open only for about five days before the individual squares within this 10 by 6 metre room were buried again, in time for a new floor to be installed in the south room. Five days of digging through broken pottery, glass and rusty nails do not exactly make a new area sacra. The remains of Upper Canada’s first parliament buildings, under a carwash at Front and Parliament Streets, or the foundations of the New Fort under the parking lot around Stanley Barracks, would be our best contenders for that comparison. Nevertheless, every new excavation has the potential to change our understanding of history. Previous knowledge of Fort York’s archaeological evidence is contained in about thirty thick reports on work expertly directed by David Spittal and Catherine Webb over ten years starting in the late 1980s. Near the South Soldiers’ Barracks, their work uncovered hints of a third blockhouse that was being built in 1814 when it may have burned accidently.

Inside the south room of the barracks, excavating nearly a quarter of its floor area, we recorded seventeen layers (or “lots”) to a maximum depth of more than a metre. Some were small, shallow deposits of soil seen in single, 1 by 1 metre excavation squares – perhaps the remains of floor boards. Others are deep, occurring in many squares across the entire room. A thick, extensive layer of organic silty sand (lot 4), rich in artifacts and demolition debris, lay directly below a layer of builder’s sand laid down in the 1930s to support a concrete floor. The presence of children in the fort is attested by stone marbles found in lot 4 in several units. Smoking pipe fragments were common, including a mustachioed human effigy with shoulder epaulets above the bowl spur.

The range of domestic artifacts including animal bone from discarded meals and ceramic sherds indicates that this is a fill layer, originating in a midden or dump (outside the building and brought in for construction) as these things would not have slipped through the original wooden floor when the barracks was in use. The dressmaker’s straight pins and buttons that were found in some units were, however, small enough that they could have been lost during activities inside the room.

We also exposed some large boulders from the original hearth apron in front of one of two fireplaces. The hearth was badly disturbed, the rocks scattered by work in the 1930s in advance of laying the concrete floor. The limited (original) width of the apron suggests that little cooking was done here – most occurred in a separate cookhouse. Bridget Wranich, Senior Domestic Interpreter, and her team of volunteer historic cooks who employ the impressive fireplace and wide hearth in the Officers’ Mess kitchen, were able to lend their expertise and judgement in the interpretation of this feature during the excavation.

Perhaps the most exciting find, at a deeper level, in lot 10, was a rare button from the 89th Regiment which served at York from November 1814 to February 1815, just before construction of the South Soldiers’ Barracks. It is possible that some soldiers from the 89th stayed behind to fill up the ranks of the incoming regiment.

Part of the challenge is in connecting layers across many isolated squares, as this project was too limited in scope to allow the whole room to be excavated. Is a layer of silty clay containing mid-nineteenth century ceramic sherds, iron nails and ash at one end of the room equivalent to a layer of clayey silt containing a slightly wider range of materials (perhaps with brick fragments; perhaps with an earlier average date) at the other end? This is the kind of distinction on which our interpretation of the room’s history turns.