Upcoming and Recent Events
2024 Summer Plans
From mid-June to early July this year, we will be back in Fenner working with the community on a couple of projects. We are planning to do cemetery work and workshops on how to properly preserve grave monuments. And, we may be doing some more landscape and artifact analysis at the Cook Farmstead, across from the town building.
2023 Fenner Bicentennial Celebration
On August 12th, 2023, the Town of Fenner turned 200! We participated in the Town of Fenner Bicentennial Celebration with posters from our research and displays of 19th century artifacts. The Town of Fenner website for has details and photos from the event.
Current Community Partnerships
Settlement Ecology of Early Rural America - Town of Fenner, NY
They say you can never go home again. Well, in 2018, Dr. Jones took his archaeology home, to the Town of Fenner, NY. He has been working with his family and former neighbors to start telling the story of the early years of family farming in upstate New York and how it relates to the rise, dominance, and eventual decline of this mode of agriculture in the U.S. Surface surveys at the John and Betsy Allen farm (c. 1830s-1875) and Ransom and Samantha Cook farm (c. 1840s-1890s) identified house and barn foundations, potential locations of outbuildings, orchards, and ceramic, glass, and metal artifacts for understanding farm family life. Census data on farm economics and demographics combined with historical maps provide the means for reconstructing, describing, and explaining landscapes and the spatial arrangement of farms, laborers, and other businesses in the town.
So far, this work has been done with tremendous help from several Joneses: Lynne (Mom, who apparently should have been an archaeologist because she's a natural), Dave (Dad, the best community project organizer ever), Jeanne (Grandma, unofficial family historian), Makenna (neice, and budding archaeologist), Brian (brother, and better at reading landscapes than I am). In addition neighbors, Ken and Billy Cody (who's family has been farming in Fenner since the 1870s) and the Troyer and Yoder families have been gracious in sharing their histories, experiences, and access to property. Finally, the librarians at the New York State Library helped begin the work on the censuses. While the global COVID pandemic has slowed this work a bit, we are continuing to work with community members. You can head over to the Research page for updates on this work. |
The remains of the basement of the house at John M. and Betsy Allen farm, where they lived until 1875.
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Past Community Partnerships and Public Education
Allen Forge-Elkin-Jonesville Community Archaeology
While I was sidelined a bit by a move to South Carolina and the COVID pandemic, local historians and community members in Elkin, NC were able to generally locate the original iron forge established in late 1700s that began Euro-American settlement in what is now western Yadkin County, NC. Their painstaking surveying and mapping of slag and metal in and near the river helped establish a new archaeological site with the North Carolina Office of State Archaeologist, and they erected a plaque to educate the public about the forge and its place in the history of the region.
North Carolina Trail Days 2020 - Update: events cancelled due to COVID-19
We were planning to be part of the North Carolina Trail Days this year. Dr. Jones and students on the Wake Forest fieldschool were planning to be on hand at the Redtail site in Jonesville (and hopefully an early Euro-American settlement site) on June 5th to talk about the deep history of upper Yadkin River Valley.
2014-2019 Piedmont Siouan History of the Upper Yadkin River Valley
This work combined tours to individuals and small groups and participation in the NC Trail Days at our past research site in Jonesville, NC. Groups included local residents, teachers from Elkin, NC, school groups from Winston-Salem, and a group of over 50 people (!) during the Trail Days in 2019. The site is a fourteenth-century Piedmont Siouan Native American settlement. During the field season from late May to early August, we routinely showed visitors the site as well as the methods we use to learn about the history of the Piedmont Siouan people, societies, and cultures of the Yadkin River Valley. We have gave tours during the fall and spring when our schedule allowed. Our work here is now done, but if you are interested in learning about the Piedmont Siouan Native societies, people, and cultures in the Carolinas, please feel free to contact us. Just click the "Contact Us!" button on the home page.
2013 Farmington Community Center Archaeology Day
In April 2013, we collaborated with the Farmington Community Center in Farmington, NC to start an annual archaeology education day. The goal of the event is to learn more about the history of the community through archaeology and to educate the public about archaeology. Students from ANT 112: Introduction to Archaeology were involved in every step of the project, from planning, to excavating, to presenting to the public. A slideshow of photos from the excavations is below.