Southport Magazine

Brunswick Town dig discovers long lost treasure

story By Jeffrey Stites

I met an old friend at a local tavern after work on a recent Friday afternoon. That wouldn’t normally be worthy of even this column, but this tavern was special, despite -no because- it was lacking the basics. 

No one knows its name, it doesn’t have any drinks or food…….or walls or a roof for that matter. In fact it’s just a spot in the grass marked by four PVC pipes sticking out of the ground and a square of string.

My friend is local historian Jim McKee, Site Director of the Brunswick Town-Fort Anderson State Historic Site off Rt 133 and the tavern was just unearthed there this summer by the students of East Carolina University’s Archaeology Field School. 

Standing in what was once, more than 250 years ago, the tavern’s doorway, McKee showed me what the building would have looked like. It was a 15 foot by 25 foot rectangle with a brick foundation. The door would have been in the center of a short side facing the street and opposite the doorway would have been a fireplace. 

It’s not difficult to imagine the scene, really. The river is easily visible just a couple hundred yards away and at the time would have featured docks and wharves, as Brunswick Town was a major port. Walking up the street from the wharf, a sailor would have found this tavern waiting. 

“They certainly would have had a bar,” Mckee said. “There would have been tables and chairs. It would’ve been full of people.” If the tavern offered sleeping space to travelers, it would have been upstairs, probably in an open room. “You wouldn’t have rented a bed, you’d have rented sleeping space, maybe sharing with two or three strangers. It would have been cozy in the winter.” 

This site was first thought to be a house, but the artifacts told a different story. “We found a lot of tankards and pipe stems,” said McKee. They did not find other household goods, so it wasn’t like any of the dwellings in town. McKee said if the tavern served food, it would have been served on pewter plates that would not have survived the fire that destroyed it, so the lack of plates isn’t telling. 

The dig site has been re-buried to protect the bricks, but the excavation will resume next summer. They hope to uncover all the walls and see if there may have been a second doorway, which would suggest an outside kitchen. “I would have had an outside kitchen,” McKee said. He showed me where he believes the tavern’s well was located and said that ground-penetrating radar has suggested a lot of activity behind the tavern, perhaps including a detached kitchen. 

Besides the tavern-related artifacts, other evidence both supports the tavern identification and helps place the building in time, also revealing why it doesn’t appear on any maps of Brunswick Town. 

The land the tavern sits on was part of a parcel including the home closer to the river. McKee said deeds show the parcel being purchased and resold a few years later for almost twice the price. “Something added value to the land,” he said. “This tavern would have done that.” Also, the deed for the Lord-Wright House on the other side of the tavern lists the occupation of the owner, Mr. Wright, as “tavern keeper”. 

“People have this misconception about archaeology,” said McKee. “They think that the digging reveals everything. But for every hour spent digging on a site, days are spent in archives or a lab.” 

The fire that destroyed the tavern is easier to date thanks to an Irish half-penny minted in 1766 found in the rubble. McKee said it likely took a year or so for the coin to circulate across the Atlantic, so the tavern was almost certainly still standing as late as 1767. It doesn’t appear on a 1769 map of Brunswick Town, so the fire can be fairly reliably placed between 1767 and 1769. 

But let’s get back to what this place was like before the fire. What did one drink in a late 18th century tavern? Rum. Mostly, one drank rum. There was probably hard cider, maybe wine and beer, but according to surviving records of taverns in the late 1700s, almost 80 percent of drink sales were rum, and most of that straight up rather than mixed with anything. According to Wayne Curtis’ excellent book “And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails” the average American over the age of 15 in the 1760s was consuming the equivalent of 5 shots of rum per day. 

That kind of makes it easier to understand why the colonists thought facing down the biggest superpower in the world with a volunteer army of farmers with hunting muskets was a fine idea. In fact, Brunswick Town itself was a hotbed of anti-government activity. 

The Stamp Act, passed by the British Parliament in 1765, set off protests all over the colonies including in Brunswick Town, where the customs house was seized by angry colonials in 1766. We know the tavern existed then and it would have been a common meeting place for the people of Brunswick Town, perhaps even being used as a courthouse, according to McKee. 

A small jewel found at the site positively places revolutionary activity in this very tavern. It is etched with the words “Wilkes and Liberty 45,” a sort of secret code rallying cry among anti-crown colonists. Displaying these jewels would have allowed revolutionary-minded colonists to identify each other without advertising their leanings to everyone. 

People who brought these little jewels with them into Brunswick Town’s tavern were looking for like-minded folks, and judging from the armed take-over of the customs house, it’s not unreasonable to guess that this is where they found them. 

So right there, where Jim and I were standing happily chatting away on a sunny, quiet summer afternoon, the seeds of freedom were being sown two and a half centuries ago. 

A big, hearty CHEERS to that.