This article (quoted below and linked to online version with photo) was
published in Thursday's (8/31) Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

[article URL: http://www.post-gazette.com/regionstate/20000831dig6.asp]
Archaeologists explore site of Heinz expansion
Dig uncovers pieces of city's tanning industry
Thursday, August 31, 2000
By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

More than 130 years ago, someone dropped a bottle of Dr. Lunt's Family
Medicine down a privy in Allegheny City and likely never gave it another
thought.

  Archaeologists Ron Carlysle, left, and Ben Resnick of GAI Consultants walk
near the remnants of a tannery along River Avenue yesterday on the Allegheny
River's north shore. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)
This summer, archaeologists dug it up, along with more early bottles,
pottery shards, tobacco pipes and building foundations that will help tell
the story of one of Pittsburgh's earliest industries and the people who
lived near it.

"This is the first excavation of a small urban tannery in the Mid-Atlantic
region," archaeologist Ben Resnick said yesterday morning, overlooking the
excavated foundation of the Adam Wiese & Co. Tannery, which operated along
River Avenue on the Allegheny River's north shore from about 1873 to 1890.

The tannery was located just east of a small group of two-story row houses
likely built between 1850 and 1880. The row houses went up in two campaigns,
with the more recent houses erected over the privies of the older dwellings,
sealing their contents. It's from those wood-lined privies that the
artifacts were recovered, including Dr. Lunt's medicine bottle, manufactured
before 1870, and a pocket telescope dating to about 1860.

The city Urban Redevelopment Authority commissioned the dig from GAI
Consultants of Monroeville, which has been intensively investigating the
2.8-acre site since March. Soon, it will be paved over for a parking lot and
truck staging area for the expansion of the H.J. Heinz Co. plant -- growth
made possible by the demise and demolition of Pittsburgh Wool Co., the last
remnant of the city's once-burgeoning leather and tanning industry.

Although more tanneries were located in Pennsylvania from 1880 to 1920 than
anywhere in the nation, Resnick said, there is little archaeological
information on late-19th-century tanneries like the Wiese (pronounced
weezee) operation. Aided by historical maps and deed searches, as well as
the doctoral dissertation of historian David Rotenstein, Resnick and fellow
archaeologists have been piecing together the construction history of the
site, which is helping them interpret what they found.
Yesterday morning, they gave an informal tour, leading a small group of
local archaeologists, historians, architects and city planners between the
Wiese and row house sites, over a rough hillock covered with teasel,
mullein, goldenrod, Sweet Annie and stag horn sumac.

Hidden deep under the overgrown mound are the remains of yet another
tannery, Adolph and Julius Groetzinger's LaBelle Tannery, which will not be
excavated because it's too far below the mound, built up over the years by
debris.
"We felt we would encounter similar resources at the Wiese tannery, which
was much more accessible," Resnick said over the roar of a dump truck
working on the demolition of the Monteverde building, just west of the
completed dig. GAI archaeologists will return for more excavations when
demolition of the adjacent Pittsburgh Wool Co. building begins next month.

"We're going to be monitoring demolition," Resnick said, looking for
features associated with the James Callery and Co. tannery, which once
occupied the wool company building. After Callery's death, his sons
purchased the smaller Wiese tannery, where archaeologists found evidence of
the tanning vats used for curing sheep pelts and the lime used to remove the
last bits of hair from the pelts.

Under a concrete floor, archaeologists found the floor of the Wiese leach
house, in which tannin was leached from the bark of hemlock trees in a
six-step process.

"To the best of my knowledge, very few of these leach houses have ever been
uncovered and studied," said Resnick, the dig's project manager.

An 1884 Sanborn insurance map shows a bark shed between the leach house and
railroad tracks, which transported the hemlock bark to the factory.

Hollow logs carried the tannin water from one leaching vat to another.

"By the time it got to the sixth leach, it was the right temperature and
concentration to convey to the tanning vats," Resnick said.

The 1880 manufacturing census reported 312 tons of hemlock bark at the Wiese
tannery, Resnick said.
"Forests were being depleted and it was expensive to transport bark," which
hastened the demise of the industry, he said.
But in 1880, it was in high gear, with the five well-paid Wiese employees
earning $2.25 a day. Wiese leather was used to make harnesses, gloves and
shoes.

There were other 19th-century businesses on that long, narrow strip between
the railroad tracks and the river. Between 1862 and 1872, the Keystone
Planing Mill was built on the site where the Groetzinger tannery would rise
in about 1882. When it folded in the late 1890s, the building was acquired
by the Lutz & Schramm Co., which made pickles, sauces, preserves, fruit
butters, baked beans and catsup -- just like its competitor down the road.

The archaeological work, triggered because state funding is involved in the
Heinz expansion project, will cost about $225,000 when complete, said Angelo
Taranto, the URA's manager of project development.

Eventually, the smaller artifacts probably will go to the Senator John Heinz
Pittsburgh Regional History Center or the Carnegie Museum of Natural
History, said Heinz history center curator Anne Madarasz. The history center
has no immediate plans to mount an exhibit on the leather and tanning
industries, but Madarasz will schedule a public program in November, at
which Resnick and Rotenstein will be speakers, and filmmaker Peter
Argentine's new 18-minute documentary on the Pittsburgh Wool Co. will be
shown.