2026 Dig season begins at Ferry Farm, Boyhood Home of George Washington 

/ ferryfarmandkenmore

Beginning on Monday, April 27th and continuing for the next 11 weeks, archaeologists will once again be outside working onsite at Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home. Our current excavations are centered on an eighteenth-century kitchen located on the north side of the work yard approximately 50 feet from the main house.  This wood-framed building, 16’ by 16’ in plan with an Aquia stone foundation and full cellar, would have been a hub of activity on the farm landscape and understanding its place within this landscape is important to our interpretation of life on the Washington farm.  

Figure 1. Our kitchen site is located beneath the blue tarp just northeast of the main house.

We began last year’s excavation season by uncovering and exposing the entirety of the site, which had been sealed 28 years ago with a protective layer of sand. Exposed was a 16’ square stone foundation to a cellar filled with burnt household and architectural debris. For our excavation plan, we divided the cellar fill into four quadrants and were able to excavate two of them down to the level of the cellar floor over the course of our season. One of the quadrants had previously been excavated in the 1990s, leaving one more quadrant to dig this summer.  

Figure 2. The eighteenth-century kitchen stone wall foundation, intruded upon by twentieth- century concrete foundations.

From the burned fill came an unexpected bounty of artifacts. Hundreds of fragments of glass wine bottles and ceramic storage containers were sifted through our screens, along with buckets of burned architectural debris such as plaster, mortar, and wrought nails of all sizes.  A smaller number of more delicate artifacts also surprisingly survived, such as straight pins, animal bones, leaded tableware glass, buttons, box hinges, small copper drawer pulls, and even a concentrated deposit of eggshells! 

Figure 3. A large wine bottle base being excavated out of the kitchen cellar fill. 

Excavation also continued outside of and around the kitchen foundation as we searched for additional clues to the architectural footprint of the building. From these units we found artifacts ranging in age from 6500 BC to modern day. Native American projectile points and flint-knapping debitage, colonial-era ceramics, Civil War bullets, and twentieth-century household remains were all dug up in the various soil layers covering this part of the site.      

Our archaeology lab has been very busy for the last nine months cleaning and sorting all the artifacts that were found last summer.  Understanding the types of artifacts found will aid in our interpretation of how the building was used, its construction details, its role in the farm landscape, and, hopefully, the date it burned down! 

Figure 4. Glass wine bottles and stoneware crocks are washed and dried in the lab before being sorted and catalogued. 

Our field crew will be on site weekdays from April 27th to July 10th.  Once again students from the University of Southern Florida will be here to learn the basics of archaeology field work during the months of May and June. We welcome all visitors to ask questions and enjoy the opportunity to help us sift for artifacts!  

Judy Jobrack and Danielle Arens

GWF Archaeologists