well - do you chalk this up as a success or a failure?

David Rotenstein schrieb:
> 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.


geoff carver
http://home.t-online.de/home/gcarver/
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