The Elliot Park Neighborhood Archaeology Project
2007 Project Area

The project area for 2007 was located in the west end of the neighborhood on East Grant Street/14th Street between Portland and Park Avenues. It is currently a gravel parking lot and the corner of the yard around the old Enger Funeral Home, but historical maps show private houses in this area during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The houses were removed in about 1927, to make way for an extension of Grant and 14th Streets through the block. The original and altered configurations of the block are shown on an 1885 map overlaid on a 1938 aerial photo.

Although the houses themselves were either gone or hidden under the city street, we expected that the back yards would be preserved in the gravel parking lot and south yard of the Enger building. The proved to be partly true. We determined that the parking lot had been stripped by the time of the construction of the Modelette Laundry in the early 1950s. This meant that most of the archaeological remains had been removed. As luck would have it, however, we discovered the bottom levels of a deep trash pit, probably dating from the late 1800s. This trash pit provided a good sample of household materials from that era. We also discovered well preserved remains in the yard of the Enger building, although these were difficult to excavate because of the very dry conditions that summer.

One bit of fun: Archaeo-Pysics did a GPR (ground-penetrating radar) survey of the parking lot for us. This image file (1.5 M) displays the results as an animation of a series of depth slices.






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Updated May 27, 2008


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