Daniel McDonough

This week the Roberson Project interns went on a research trip to Nashville. First we visited Fort Negley, which was built by the union army during the occupation of Nashville during the Civil War. Interestingly, after the war the area around the fort became a community for recently freed enslaved people during reconstruction, which is a part of the fort’s history which has been given much more focus in recent years. The park staff also practice sustainable groundskeeping by allowing goats to graze on the site, which is not very historically relevant, but interesting nonetheless. After that we went to the Tennessee state archives to see if we could find any more information about the Kennerley School or Belmont club. The next day I participated in Sewanee’s “SURF research frenzy,” where the Roberson interns presented posters we made about our projects. There were a lot of people at this event, and I spoke to a lot of other students and community members about what research we’ve done and what else we hope to achieve. Lastly we worked with a ground penetrating radar specialist from UTK to take some additional scans of the site, which we think will be more informative than our initial ones.

This week we spent out time cataloging and bagging the cleaned artifacts. Each artifact or set of artifacts is placed into a bag with information about the site, which shovel test the artifact came from, excavation date, and a brief description. This process can be quite tedious, since dozens of bags have be labeled with only a line or two of information changing between bags, but we need to do our due diligence to make sure everything is accurate. It is important to catalog and bag artifacts in this way in order to make sure every piece of information about the artifact is on record and preserved. We also helped set up the St. Marks community center for the 4th of July, and had the rest of the day off afterwards, which was a nice break.

This week we began our archaeological dig at the site of the Kennerly school. The Roberson project organised a community dig, so we had several members of the surrounding community coming to help us out. This was a great experience because I got to learn more about how shovel tests are conducted as well as interact with the community some more. On some of the test pits we used a soil auger to bore down to the natural subsoil, so ithe professor taught me how to use that tool, which was cool. Unfortunately, it rained most of the week so we had to cancel or stop digging early on some days, but we were still able to finish up our shovel tests and get some interesting artifacts. It was great to get to know some more members of the community, and some even shared their experience of going to the Kennerly school which was helpful for our research. Digging outside in the Tennessee Summer is not easy, and i went home tired every day, but it was worth it to interact more with the community and get more hands on archaeological experience.

My first full week as an intern for the Roberson project was a big learning experience for me. It is interesting being an intern for The University of the South in Sewanee when I attend Roanoke, but I got comfortable fairly quickly. The Roberson Project is the University of the South’s public history project investigating black history in Sewanee, which is a deep and interesting story to look into.
One focus of the project is an archaeological dig at the site where a neighborhood elementary school, called the Kennerly school, used to stand in the former black part of town. We have been using ground penetrating radar in order to try to find the foundations of the school. This technology allows us to effectively see through the ground and find features underneath it, but it will take a while for the data to be processed. We also helped set up for the Juneteenth celebration at the local community center where i got to know some of the people who went to the Kennerly school. Overall this has been an exciting week and I am looking forward to working on this project some more!