Archaeologist searches mansion property in Somers Point for clues from the past

SOMERS POINT — Standing in the front yard of the Somers Mansion invites flights of imagination.

On Friday morning, Richard Veit was happy to indulge the impulse, at least for a little while, envisioning the knoll upon which the structure was built three centuries ago.

“Imagine the landscape without the diner and the bridge and everything,” he said.

The rise overlooking the Great Egg Harbor Bay still allows a sweeping view of the waterway and the barrier islands beyond. Three centuries ago, it would have offered a panorama of the bay and woods.

Veit came to the spot in hopes of peeling back those centuries, to create a detailed picture of the area in the late 1600s to early 1700s. Veit is professor of anthropology and associate dean of the School of Humanities at Monmouth University.

With a small team, including his son, Douglas, he spent the day digging test holes on the property, laying the groundwork for a planned archaeological dig May 6, the Saturday after Bayfest.

They had already been to the site a few weeks ago to begin the work, recovering a stone tool and pieces of pottery from the Leni Lenape, and a few Colonial era pieces, including the metal buckle from a shoe.

“Imagine those Colonial shoes. The Pilgrim shoe with the buckle?” Veit said.

Finding evidence of the European habitation alongside Lenape pieces is exactly what Veit is searching for.

About the time the Somers family began work on the brick house overlooking the water, Quakers and other early settlers lived alongside the native population.

“That’s a period we don’t know enough about,” Veit said.

The work does not include high-tech radar systems or other means of peering beneath the surface. Instead, the team lays out a grid and digs holes with a hand-held augur. The sample of earth is sifted, and when they find something, they dig a little deeper.

“It can be a little bit of a heartbreaker when you find that Yoo-hoo bottle or something,” Veit said.

The spot closest to the highway has seen the most disturbance, he said, with the layers of earth churned up over the years.

But closest to the building and on the west side, there seems to be far less disturbance.

The process will allow Veit and his team to map the most important areas of the property, he said.

On May 6, plans are to host an archeological dig open to the community.

“I know that there are lots of folks locally who are interested in bringing their kids,” said Levi Fox, a Somers Point resident who is active in the Patriots for the Somers Mansion, the organization that helps maintain the mansion.

The land and the building are owned by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

Fox, who also gives historic tours, said the organization received a grant to help cover the cost of an archeological exploration of the site, in part looking for connections between the Native American residents and the early European settlers.

“The fact that we have already started to find some objects that potentially show that linkage really helps to justify that grant,” Fox said.

A visitor to the site 300 years ago would have seen the brick work underway at the three-story mansion. Today it is dwarfed by other private homes, but at the time it would have appeared to be an enormous structure on the remote rise, far from New York and Philadelphia.

Before the first European arrivals, Fox said, Lenape people used the Jersey shore much like contemporary vacations do, as a break from the summer heat. Extended families would visit the barrier islands, and hunt, fish and gather shellfish nearby.

Veit said he worked on an extensive dig across the bay in the Beesleys Point section of Upper Township, where extensive artifacts from generations of Lenape visits were found about 20 years ago.

Even then, he said, he was interested in exploring the ground around the Somers Mansion.

The house was built by Richard Somers, and Fox said it is the oldest extant building in Atlantic County. Long after it was built, the home had been transformed into a Victorian style, but in the 1940s, WPA workers restored it to its Colonial appearance. The site was added to the National Registry of Historic Places in 1970.

Because it is a state site, Veit said, artifacts that are found will be the property of New Jersey, but he would not be surprised if they end up being displayed locally, once they are catalogued and cleaned.

The piece of stone that was once a Lenape tool appears to have come from as far away as the Poconos, Veit said, indicating a wide trading system in place before the Colonial period. In the Beesleys Point dig, he said, artifacts were found that traveled all the way from what is now Ohio.

The pottery appears to have been made locally, from South Jersey clay. He is confident, even from the small pieces, that it is from the Lenape.

“They’re really distinctive. They made it a whole different way than modern pottery,” he said. It is also very fragile, he added, so archeologists tend to get very excited when they find some.

But they will not know the full extent of what awaits under the grass until a more extensive dig begins.

Veit does not think it is very likely, but finding human remains would mean shutting down the project.

His big hope is to find indication of a cabin that stood at the site before the Somers family began the mansion. That would require a much more extensive dig.

For now, Veit has a few small pieces, and an image of the site from a very different time.

“I think this would have been the perfect place to live,” Veit said. There is fresh and salt water nearby, a view for miles around, and fertile land. “It’s like a Walmart. You’ve got everything you need in one spot.”

“The Circle Liquors was there, then,” jokes Fox.

The past is everywhere, Veit said, and can be found just under the surface in South Jersey.

“You don’t have to go to New Mexico or Belize or to Egypt to do archeology,” he said.

For more information about participating in the public dig in May, email levi.fox@temple.edu.