An archaeological dig in and around the free-standing privy at the Babson-Alling House at the Cape Ann Museum Green on Friday turned up something fitting for America’s oldest fishing port.
Inside the well-preserved yellow outhouse, among other items, researchers dug up two shards of a porcelain tea cup that fit together showing a schooner, of all things.
A group of undergraduate and graduate students and researchers from the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston were excavating the land in and around the free-standing outhouse to reveal more about the history of the Georgian house and site.
The Babson-Alling House is a familiar landmark for anyone driving to Gloucester as it overlooks Grant Circle just off Route 128.
The home was built by William Allen around 1740, and then came to be owned by the Babson family in the early 1800s, which occupied it for nine generations, the museum says. After acquired the home in 2019, the museum is partway through a project to stabilize the house and the adjacent outhouse.
The archeological dig will help the museum learn more about the history and evolution of the site. The dig also will help with plans for interpretation of the home and outhouse as part of the CAM Green campus, where the museum has transitioned operations for the next 14 months as it renovates its downtown campus.
“We were keen to understand more about the story associated with this house,” museum Director Oliver Barker said. The museum is working with Community Preservation Act funding from the city to stabilize the house and understand its stories, including its age and how it was constructed.
Part of the grant has allowed the museum to engage the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research to dig in and around the privy to ascertain what kinds of items are there, he said. A painting in the museum’s collection from 1863 by landscape painter Fitz Henry Lane of the site shows the privy there at the time, but privies tended to be moved around within the proximity of the house.
The researchers were finding items Friday from the 1910s and 1930s, Barker said.
“As they go further down hopefully we’ll find other items to attest to how long this was used not as a privy, but perhaps as a trash repository, because we didn’t have the sort of weekly pickups of trash,” he said.
The dig inside the privy turned up Listerine jars, crockery and other items.
The privy was probably turned into a trash dump after bathrooms were installed in the house. By digging down, Barker said, the researchers may get to the area where it was used as a privy, and the age of the objects above it will enable researchers to roughly date when the transition was made to internal bathrooms for the home.
The land around the house and privy was mostly left untouched over the years and it may unveil deeper stories about those who lived there throughout the generations.
“We know that this has been here since at least the mid-19th century but since the house has been here since 1740 it could be older,” Fiske Center Research Scientist Christa Beranek said.
The also said they are interested in what’s inside the privy because when it fell out of use, it became a trash receptacle. The surface trash they were digging up shows this may have happened about 1910 to 1930, but they wanted to see if there were older items in there as well.
“We are also testing the landscape around the building to see about the use of these different yards over time,” Beranek said. Many of 18th and 19th century shards have been found in a surface collection just north of the building. This was done over the last couple of years by a retired school teacher, Paula Gray, Barker said.
“We are trying to determine, like, where in this small area of the property things are preserved from what time period,” Beranek said.
The museum says the findings from the digs will be discussed Nov. 23 at 3:30 p.m., as part of a CAMTalk: History Series, Babson House Archeological Dig, with Christa Beranek and Laura Paisley, both of the Fiske Center. They plan to present the first look at the excavation results and discuss how archaeology can be used to document and interpret old houses.
Those who want to check out the archaeological dig can do so Thursday, Oct. 31, from 10 a.m. 2 p.m. Due to limited parking at CAM Green, 13 Poplar St., timed vehicle registrations are required and can be found at https://www.capeannmuseum.org/reservations/.
Ethan Forman may be contacted at 978-675-2714, or at eforman@northofboston.com.