Archaeology has been an integral part of rebuilding the stories of Mitchelville from the very beginning. In the 1980’s archaeological excavations first identified Mitchelville while excavating a much more ancient Indigenous site located in the same place. Those first archaeologists arrived at what is now Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park at the request of their colleague Michael Trinkley to do an exploratory dig. Without funding, over fifty archaeologists showed up to donate their time, excavating over a few days enough to prove that they really were looking at the remnants of a town, and begin to seek funding for more investigations. Over the next few years, Trinkley’s firm, the Chircora Foundation led several archaeological digs here in the park looking for more information on who these artifacts belonged too. Trinkley dug into the archives and located dozens of primary source documents, and in the late 1980s and 1990s published the first reports and papers written about Mitchelville’s residents and their daily lives.
After the Chicora digs, when the Town of Hilton Head Island was expanding their airport runway in the 1990s, as per federal regulations they were required to have an archaeological survey done on the area before they could begin construction. Quickly, the lead archaeologists Christopher Espenshade and Scott Butler (of Brockington & Associates) began locating remains of Mitchelville as well. Other than archival documents like newspapers, Army letters or lists, and scholarly work on The Port Royal Experiment written by people who had not lived at Mitchelville, these archaeological digs gave us the first information about Mitchelville’s residents and what their lives may have been like.
These projects highlighted how much there was to learn about who the first free Black people in the American south were, what choices they made, what kind of lives they might have lived. These are not things we can find in history books.
In 2017, at the Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park was in the process of expanding, an archaeologist was asked to assist them in locating the first church or praise house in Mitchelville. Then doctoral student Katherine Seeber led a remote sensing survey in the Spring using a ground penetrating radar (like sonar for soil) and electrical resistivity survey (reading how face the soil transmitted electrical pulses) across areas in the park looking for clues. Her and her team used the results to narrow down places to excavate looking for the church. In the summers of 2018 and 2019 the Seeber research team (consisting of undergraduate and graduate college students) excavated three areas looking for evidence of a church or praise house.
These digs were also instrumental for helping to develop a community-based research approach to archaeology at Mitchelville. Instead of traditional science were researchers choose the questions they would like to answer, these projects were in service of community desire and need. This trend helped Seeber establish a different relationship with primary stakeholders, or people directly effected by archaeology at Mitchelville than researchers in the past. From that point forward, all archaeological projects in the park have been in service of HMFP’s primary mission of preserving and promoting the heritage of Mitchelville’s residents.
In 2020 Seeber and HMFP were awarded the National Trust African American Heritage and Culture Action Fund Grant for the Connecting the Dots Project. This project was a park wide remote sensing survey that produced thousands of heat maps showing where archaeological remains might be underground in the park. The project took several months to complete the survey and several years to process the results. It was also Seeber’s dissertation project. When completed, Seeber and her team had identified dozens of “heat signatures” showing where Mitchelville homes, yards, gardens, workspaces, and buildings may have been located. The current Ghost Structure buildings exhibit mark places where the archaeologists located Mitchelville homes under the ground.
During this process, Dr. Seeber worked with dozens of Mitchelville descendants, talked to hundreds of local residents and thousands of seasonal visitors about the little-known history of Mitchelville. After speaking with Gullah Geechee islanders, it became apparent that places where Mitchelville residents actually did the work of living as free people for the very first time were just as important (or more so) than where buildings had been. These places like where women did laundry, cooking, soap making, or villagers sewed fishing nets, sewed baskets, shucked oysters, or gardened became the most important places for archaeologists to find. These “Ancestor Hotspots” have become one of the primary goals of Dr. Seeber’s current research at Mitchelville both within and outside the park boundaries.
Over the last fifty years, thousands of artifacts and archaeological remains have been found and studied in what was once Mitchelville. Every day, archaeologists work to learn more about the extraordinary lives of Mitchelville residents. Their results are shared through the Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park, the exhibits there, and eventually in the Visitor’s Center once completed. Archaeology at Mitchelville is unique in that it each step of the way, primary stakeholder needs and desires drive the research. We are honored to continue diving into the rich and complex past of Mitchelville’s community.
