Were these Washington’s wine bottles? Broken glass from a Cambridge cellar

When General George Washington set up his first major headquarters of the American Revolution in 1775, he chose a large Georgian mansion on the Charles River in Cambridge. The house later became the home of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and it is full of its later owners' Victorian furniture. Under its cellar floor, archeologists found broken wine bottles and kitchen waste, and one question: could they have been Washington's?

This bottle neck with cork was excavated from the cellar intact. It is dated to about 1760 to 1770. NPS photo.

The dig

In 2001 the basement was renovated to make more room for curatorial space. The brick floor came up, and National Park Service archeologists were called to excavate two unusual deposits of historical artifacts and well-preserved biological material, all held together in a mortar and sand mixture. Part of the feature runs under a wall built around 1791. It was most likely put there to level and stabilize a depressed section of dirt floor before that wall was built, and the depression may have been an earlier trash pit for kitchen scraps and rubbish. The basement was built in 1759, so architectural analysis gives a 32-year window for the deposit.

Archeologists excavated two deposits found under the brick floor of a basement room. NPS photo.

Counting bottles

The two features held 1,546 items, and glass wine bottle fragments make up 80 percent of them. Because each fragment need not come from a different vessel, archeologists work out a minimum vessel count. Here the clue was the necks: a bottle has only one, and there were twenty, so at least twenty bottles had to be reconstructed.

The neck of one vessel, rebuilt from six glass fragments. Its cylindrical neck and V-shaped lip date it to about 1770 to 1780. NPS photo.

The bases and necks match styles of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, though the range the bottles' features suggest runs from about 1730 to 1810. In that era wine and spirits were both kept in dark olive-green glass bottles. The size of the fragments and the corks still in the necks suggest the bottles were stored in the basement and probably had contents before they broke.

A feature more than a foot long, held together with mortar, was removed intact from beneath the cellar floor. NPS photo.

Whose trash?

Between 1759 and 1791 the house was home to several families. The Vassall family (1759 to 1774) and the Craigie family (from 1791) were both interested in botany and horticulture and bought many plants for the yard. Washington and his officers used it as headquarters from July 1775 to April 1776. His steward, Ebenezer Austin, kept meticulous account books for food, drink and household goods, listing mutton, fowl, butter, eggs, fish, smoking pipes, a sugar pot and an earthen platter. Washington ate in the ground-floor room to the right of the entrance, and entertained numerous visitors.

Seeds, shells and cherry stones

The deposit also held seeds, eggshell fragments, oyster shells and animal bones, from fish, goat, chicken, rabbit and rock dove. Seeds of a muskmelon or cucumber, an apple or pear, and three cherry stones turned up. Fruits like these appear in the accounts as bought during Washington's time, and Austin recorded payment for cherries on at least two days in August 1775. Half an olive pit was found too. Austin lists no olives, though records from 1772 and 1783 show Washington ordered olives for Mount Vernon.

The remains are typical of upper-class eighteenth-century diets. They would have rotted quickly, so they were fresh when mixed into the mortar. Sap beetles and a mourning cloak butterfly wing point to mid to late summer into fall, though cherries and olives can be preserved year-round.

The verdict

So, were they Washington's wine bottles? The answer is that nobody can be sure. No evidence confirms that the deposit dates from the nine months Washington occupied the house. But the 32-year window, the date range of the reconstructed bottles and Austin's detailed accounts all support the connection.

Sources

• National Park Service, Longfellow House Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site, "Were These Washington's Wine Bottles?" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/were-these-washington-s-wine-bottles.htm), by Alicia Paresi, Curator of Archeology Collections at the Northeast Museum Services Center, first published on the center's archeology blog; a photograph of a staff member at work is left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.