What’s Brewing in the Wren Yard?

Early this summer we hinted about another excavation taking place simultaneously with the Bray School project. This week we are finishing that excavation. Since mid-May Colonial Williamsburg’s archaeologists have been exposing the foundation of an eighteenth-century building on the College of William and Mary’s Historic Campus. Measuring 18’ x 20’ (with a later addition), this building was likely built in the 1720s or 30s, and was gone by about 1770.

The absence of a fireplace helps to narrow the possibilities for its function; we know it ISN’T a house or a kitchen. A large, circular ash pit near the building’s center offers the most important clue, and raises the tantalizing possibility that this may be the brewhouse constructed by the College early in the 18^th century to provide for its students. Just to the east of the foundation is another visually arresting feature that seems to be completely unrelated. Rectangular in shape, and measuring about 23’ long and 12’ wide (6’8” at the bottom), it appears to be a sawpit. Pits such as this one were used in construction, enabling carpenters to saw long planks. Artifacts retrieved from the ash and clay filling provide dates indicating that the sawpit was no longer in use by about 1720. Large quantities of architectural debris — brick, dressed stone, and window lead for casement windows— recovered from the pit suggest that it may have been used to rebuild the Wren after a devastating fire in 1705. A lack of funds delayed completion of this project until 1718, a date that coincides nicely with the sawpit’s circa 1720 fill date. After this week, when we put away our trowels, analysis will become the primary focus of the Wren Yard project. As artifacts and soil samples yield additional information, what we know about this building, and the pit beside it, will evolve. Dates will be honed, and functions will be reconsidered. The excitement is hardly over; there is plenty more to come. As we reach this transition point, the gallery below recaps some of the summer’s discoveries (click on images to enlarge).

Meredith Poole, Staff Archaeologist