Quiet Repose

Retired technology professor John Martin loves construction, and while he might not have thought about it at the time, he was a builder of what became Georgia Southern’s School of Technology, now part of the Allen E. Paulson College of Science and Technology.

Something catastrophic happened to one of the buildings at Mont Repose.

For nine years archaeologist Sue Moore and successive teams of students have been peeling back the layers of history at Mont Repose, a rice and cotton plantation near present-day Ridgeland, S.C. What they have found is remnants of plantation life in the Low Country from the mid-1700s to the start of the Civil War when it and the nearby village of Coosawhatchie were abandoned.

The railroad running through Coosawhatchie connected Charleston and Savannah and was a point of contention between Union and Confederate forces, said Moore. Local residents fled the area as the fighting intensified. After the war, the property changed hands several times, but its days as an agricultural center were done.

Georgia Southern’s involvement with Mont Repose began by invitation from Martha Black, owner of the Old Town plantation near Louisville, Ga. Moore and her students have conducted extensive excavation and study at Old Town, and when Black purchased 4,000-acre Mont Repose, she asked Moore to examine the plantation’s history. “Very graciously, just like in Old Town, she lets us do our research there,” said Moore. “She’s been really interested in it and has been a good steward of the resources.”

Moore’s team has found plenty of household items – soup tureens, plates, bottles, forks and knives – and at least three structures. They have documented rice fields, rice canals, a system of trunks to flood the fields, and large machinery pieces believed to have been used in rice processing. The researchers also located what appears to be the family cemetery, but named markers have long since vanished.

Who owned and operated the plantation was one of the initial mysteries to be solved – not with spade and trowel – but through hours of sifting through public records. The plantation was originally part of a different county, said Moore, and that county’s courthouse burned, destroying records of property transfers, births, deaths and marriages.

“In this case it has been painstaking to get documentary work on Mont Repose,” Moore said. “We found a plat map, finally, from the 1700s that we know is Mont Repose. So, we can name a person owning Mont Repose in the 1700s. The people who we most associate with Mont Repose is a family by the name of Gillison,” she said. “Derry Gillison came into South Carolina before the Revolutionary War and stayed there. He established a tannery at the village of Coosawhatchie, and we actually think we’ve located the tannery. His was the central family of the community.”

While it’s possible Gillison owned the land and someone else lived there, it’s most likely the residents were Derry and his descendants. “We’re still not sure that this person actually lived there and this is his stuff,” said Moore. “There’s more research we’ll have to do, but we’ve done just an awful lot of background research trying to put and piece together this history. I think we’re beginning to get a pretty good handle on it.
“One of the things we’ve discovered after nine years of doing this is you to just have to be persistent,” she said. “Things that you couldn’t find maybe a year ago may be online now that you can find. On the other hand, the archaeology is phenomenal. We have lots of artifacts and I can tell a lot about what was going on there.”

What was going on was a life of relative comfort, dining on white pearlware plates edged in bright green. Bone fragments show that the family kept cattle and supplemented their diet with fresh game like deer and fish. Other dinnerware included blue teacups and saucers rimmed in gold, likely imported from England.

In one structure, Moore’s team has unearthed the items of everyday living: knives, forks, toothbrushes, sewing needles, buttons and assorted glass and clay vessels – all interesting and telling, but not out of the ordinary for excavations of this type. What is unusual is how some items came to be so well-preserved.

“The structure itself had a catastrophic failure,” Moore said. “We can’t tell you for sure what that failure was, but we’ve been able to tell from the archaeology that something happened: tornado, hurricane, bad luck with a tree, I don’t know, but it literally crushed the building. We have artifacts that were crushed right where they had obviously been sitting and we could put them back together. It’s very unusual for us to get most of an artifact that we can glue back together, and the fact that it was all in one place tells me that something happened,” she said. “And, for whatever reason, they didn’t rebuild it.
“It was like they just covered the place up and moved on.”

There were some hurricanes during the years the plantation was operating, said Moore. “In fact, there was one really bad one in the early 1820s. I talked to some colleagues of mine who work in South Carolina to see if any of them had worked on a site destroyed by a hurricane, and one of them had. We’ve compared notes and we think that’s what might have happened. If the structure was in bad shape anyway, they might have just chosen to go ahead and abandon it and move and build something new.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what happened, but it’s really hard without documents to say that for certain,” Moore said. “I can only put the pieces together and say that something bad happened to this structure to crush it and for them to just leave it.”

On par with the thrill of discovery for Moore is how the experience benefits her students. “There’s lots and lots of teaching and research going on simultaneously,” she said. “My role is teacher and coordinator of the research. What we’ve done for professional conferences is go as a group, I do the overview poster and they present whatever their research is. People say, ‘Gee that’s a really great way of doing both the research and teaching about what you’re doing at the same time.'”

Surveying the possibilities

University acquires cutting-edge topographical imaging system

Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington all started out as surveyors. If they had access to the incredible capabilities of Georgia Southern’s new fused imagery technology system they might never have changed careers.

Funded by a $300,000 National Science Foundation grant, Georgia Southern has acquired a Leica HDS6100 high definition scanning system, SmartStation2 robotic total station and GPS system, and ISI InteliCamera, a combination referred to as fused imagery. The equipment moves far beyond traditional land surveying to include measuring surface and subsurface characteristics. It combines rapid laser scanning and global positioning to create photographic color information while documenting each surface point’s precise location.

It can do in minutes what would take days or weeks using traditional surveyor’s gear.

Incredibly detailed three dimensional images provide a detailed topographical picture of the area to be studied. The images allow for the creation of computer models of structures, topographical and geologic features, and archaeological excavations.

Georgia Southern’s equipment will be used to train students and conduct research and public service in areas including construction management, civil engineering technology, archaeology and geology/geography.

“The diverse disciplines included in the work reflect the breadth of impact and resulting benefits to society in multiple fields,” said construction management professor Gustavo Maldonado, the principal investigator for the grant. “The instruments will expose and familiarize numerous researchers and students with this powerful technology, their capabilities, limitations and possibilities.

“In particular,” Maldonado said, “the equipment will provide faculty members excellent opportunities to expand current research and initiate new areas of scientific and engineering investigation. Students associated with these activities will benefit greatly by being exposed to the most advanced technologies in laser scanning and surveying.”

Teaching will also be enhanced as a byproduct of having this equipment available to faculty researchers in the three departments, said Maldonado.