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Group searching for artifacts from lost village of Galveztown in Ascension Parish

By GREG LANGLEY
News Features assistant editor
Published: Mar 15, 2009

Glenn Cambre, in straw hat and suspenders, leads his small dog on a leash as he walks along his property bordering the Amite River off La. 42 in Ascension Parish. He pauses and looks across the field in front of three white-painted houses. It’s maybe as long as two football fields end-to-end and in the middle, tiny red flags sprout like poppies.

They outline a 500-foot by 500-foot grid where members of an LSU Union leisure class are digging archaeological shovel test pits (STPs). This unassuming grassy field, dotted with a few pecan trees and pines and cut through by a U-shaped drive, is the site of a lost village: Galveztown.

“We don’t have any aboveground evidence of the site, but we do have historical documents that are pretty clear in showing us that the village was in this particular section. This is section 17 of Township 8 South Range 3 East. When the Americans came in one of the first things that they did was to start surveying their new territory. These surveys note the fact that in this area, Galveztown was located,” said Rob Mann, LSU professor and Southeast Regional Archaeologist and the leader of the dig.

The village in question was a Spanish-sponsored settlement that dates to the period of the American Revolution. It didn’t last, partly because the reason for its existence vanished after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. But that’s not all.

“They had lots of problems including flooding, hurricanes and crop failures and epidemic diseases. By 1820 or so, we get a sense from the documents that there’s not much left of the village. By 1830 it’s pretty clear that Galveztown is gone. So really you have a village that was here from about 1779, late 1778-1779, to about 1820. So from an archaeological perspective, it’s a nice little time capsule because there’s nothing before really — there was probably some Native America occupation of the area — but after that we don’t have any historic occupation. So when we find stuff that dates to the right time period, we can be fairly certain that we’re finding evidence of the Spanish Colonial village here,” Mann said.

“One of the things that leads us to this area is that when we look at the historic maps of the village as it was planned and as it was actually put into place, it appears that closer to the river and closer to the Spanish fort which was also built here is where most of the occupation took place,” Mann said.

That a fort and a village were built in this seemingly remote site seems illogical today, but given the political situation in Louisiana in the late 18th century, it was perfectly logical, Mann said.

“The way that this settlement gets started is actually an interesting process. There are Isleño or Canary Islander (Spanish) folks coming to New Orleans. They’re coming in 1778. He (Spanish Gov. Bernardo de Galvez) knows he has these settlers and soldiers, so they’re used both as colonists and soldiers to garrison this fort. They’re bringing their families with them as well.

“He (Galvez) knows that he’s got to find places for them, so he’s out scouting in the winter of 1778 for someplace to place these Isleños folks. At this area, at the confluence of the Amite and Bayou Manchac, he finds a little community of British Tory refugees and some French folks and maybe some other folks. The British had just been kicked out of their settlement in Canewood in Livingston Parish by American Revolutionaries. So you’ve got some patriots — the war is just getting started on the east coast but already out here, in 1778, you’ve got some American patriots moving against some British loyalists, some Tories, and driving them out of British West Florida and driving them into Spanish Louisiana. They’re kind of huddled here, not quite sure where they are, and Galvez finds them and he says, ‘I’ll grant you asylum if you allow me to lay out the village of Galveztown and also a condition of it is that we’re going to put our fort here.’

“And they say, ‘OK, that’s fine,’ and in deference to him they name the village Galveztown,” Mann said. “This area is important for a couple of reasons. One, this was high ground. The Native Americans told Galvez that this was the high ground in the area. And it’s where Bayou Manchac flows into the Amite River. In this part of the 18th century, Bayou Manchac and the Amite River form an international boundary. We’re on the Spanish side of that boundary here at Galveztown. North of Bayou Manchac and the Amite River was British territory. So geopolitically, this is a very strategic area.”

“One of the things that leads us to this area is that when we look at the historic maps of the village as it was planned and as it was actually put into place, it appears that closer to the river and closer to the Spanish fort which was also built here is where most of the occupation took place. We’re kinda maximizing or trying to maximize our effort here where we think there is pretty good chance (of finding artifacts),” Mann said.

There are 15 students in the leisure class, although not all are present this day. The students range in age from college-age to middle-age, and they fan out over the field bearing marked plastic baggies into which they will deposit their finds. They are here to do the grunge work, shoveling and digging out the dirt in the roughly 1-foot by 1-foot by 18-inch-deep test pits, wielding shovels and trowels and then sifting the soil through wood-framed screens to extract any artifacts. This is the second year the class has dug in this field, a section nearer the highway was pocked with STPs last year but the filled-in holes in that part are all but invisible now.

John Hickey, one of the students in the class, is actually an amateur historian who has written about Galveztown and who helped lead Mann to this site. “John and I have been kind of working this project up for three or four years,” Mann said. This day Hickey makes a typical find in an STP and brings his discovery to Mann for further identification.

Mann holds the pebble-sized artifact in the palm of his hand and explains that it is a tiny pottery sherd, one that reveals a great deal about the site. It’s “faience.”

“This little piece, although it looks fairly insignificant, is really important because it is a kind of pottery made in France, and it’s made in the early 18th century but not in the 19th century, or it’s not being imported to Louisiana, so we know that this particular pottery must date to between 1779 and 1800 or so,” Mann explains, then points to another pebble-sized pottery bit Hickey has unearthed.

“This is a little later. This is British creamware. I say later, but it was made at about the same time, 1780s, 1760s on,” Mann explains.

“This stuff, this British stuff, becomes so popular around 1800 that the French stuff gets pushed out of the market. Faience is a great 18th century marker.”

This is more than just an abstract dig seeking academic data, Mann said. Part of that has to do with the students doing the digging.

“This year on our project, we have several descendants of Isleños families who lived here at Galveztown. That’s really important as well so that people can connect back to their history. There is a Canary Islander historical society in Baton Rouge, and I have actually given presentations there. Some members of that society are students on this project,” Mann said.

One of those Isleños descendants is John Hickey’s wife, Janelle.

“I was born on Section 19,” Janelle Hickey said. “My Canary Island connection is from the Gonzales (family) — Gonzales Cabo.” Like many of the Spanish families from Galveztown, the Gonzales family relocated to Baton Rouge after the village failed.

“When Galveztown kind of breaks apart in the 18-teens, 1820s, one of the places that some of the folks go as they leave Galveztown is to Spanish Town in Baton Rouge. Spanish Town was actually laid out for refugees from Galveztown. That’s where it gets its name ‘Spanish Town,’ Mann said.

In fact, Jannell Hicks said her ancestor once owned the land where the present State Capitol is located. But they came back to Galveztown. “When he died, his wife and children were at Galveztown,” she said.

There are 15 students in Mann’s class this semester — Jeanne Bergeron, Kathy Henderson, Hickey, David Hulbert, Alisa Janney, Patricia Mayeaux, Virginia McAnelly, Pamela Melder, Linda Dabdoub Potter, Angelle Stahl, Althea Rasti, Joan Aleman, Myrna Arroyo, Patricia Comeaux and Beverly Nuschler.

Bergeron is from Baton Rouge. She is a retired nurse and also an Isleños descendant. “We did find that we have an Acosta (ancestor) and that is our connection,” Bergeron said as she used her gloved hands to push dirt around in a sifter.

But not all the leisure class diggers have a genetic link to the village settlers.

“Most of these people who are taking this class don’t get anything out of it except the excitement of archaeology,” Mann said. Like Melder, who came to the class in a roundabout way.

“A friend of mine told me that if you wanted to do belly dancing, it was cheaper to do through the LSU Union than a private class,” Melder said. “So I went through the catalog, and as I was looking I found this class and I thought ‘well that’s better than belly dancing.’”

This is Melder’s second year on the dig. She liked last year so much that she came back again. “Last year we found some really interesting pieces of pottery and we found the bottom of a champagne bottle, which is kind of cool,” she said, and “we found a hog tooth.”

Even though she doesn’t have an Isleños connection, Henderson, an IT worker in the Livingston Parish Clerk of Court’s Office, wanted to learn more about local history. “I tracked my Babins all the way to Nova Scotia. Searching my ancestors, I read a lot of local history,” Henderson said. The Galveztown dig is her way of getting to know more about Louisiana history in a very up-close way.

Archaeology is enough to keep Potter coming out to kneel and dig and sift and pick through the dirt. “I’ve always been interested in archaeology,” said Potter, who works at the LSU Health Sciences Center. Potter is descended from Italian crusaders who stayed in Palestine to guard the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem where she grew up. “They would dig up Roman coins in the backyard,” she said. She loved the idea of finding the past in the ground and when she and her husband temporarily relocated to New Mexico after Hurricane Katrina, she was able to participate in some digs there. She was hooked and when she returned to Louisiana and heard about the Galveztown project, she joined. Her motivation? “I keep thinking maybe I’ll find something.”

Mann knows they will find artifacts because they already have found many things. “We’re looking for those kinds of things out here: trash pits, refuse pits. In the 18th century and until modern sanitary movements in the late 19th century, people would just deposit the trash out of the closest opening, so out the window, out the front door, out the back door. You get what we call a sheet wash of trash around the house or sheet midden — midden just means a refuse pile — and we can look at those middens and see what people were throwing out on a daily basis.

“Bones, broken bottles, broken plates. And that is what we find. We don’t anticipate finding whole artifacts necessarily but what we’re looking for and what we’re really interested in is what those bits of everyday life can tell us about what it was like to live here in the 18th century,” Mann said.

Once the survey is done, Mann will collect all the information and plot out the “artifacts distribution” according to their location on the grid. “If we can use all this information to actually pinpoint some structures on the ground, then we have some 18th century maps that we can go back to and we might eventually be able to, even down to the level of the individual houses, say this must have been the house of so-and-so,” Mann said. And maybe a larger project will ensue.

“Last year in this part of the site,” Mann said as he gestured toward La. 42, “we found a concentration of brick and some burned soil and ash that might indicate that it was near a hearth, near a chimney. If we find things like that, we can go back and dig larger areas. Real excavations.”

As Mann succinctly puts it, the diggers have one deep motivation: “We want to find more.”


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