A new archaeological website is announced concerning the François Deloeuil (ca. 1760-1840+) house and blacksmith shop located in Monroe, Michigan. The site (20Mr229) was the home and shop of a Canadien who became an American citizen with the jurisdictional transfer of the Old Northwest Territory from British to American control in 1796. Deloeuil was a blacksmith for the British Indian Department in Canada during the Revolutionary War stationed at Sandusky (Wyandot Town) in Ohio and at Shawnee Town (present-day Wapakonetta, Ohio) repairing firearms and other items of Native American use. After the war, he settled on the River Raisin in 1789 in a newly establshed Canadien community known as "Frenchtown."

20Mr229 is a long-term site (1789-1867) that was salvage-excavated in 1988 by Dennis M. Au, the Monroe County Historical Museum, and academic and non-academic volunteers for a three-month period working with construction crews of the Frenchman's Bend housing development. Approximately 731.5 square meters (2400 square feet) of the site area were excavated which consisted of 24 excavation units (3.0 square meters) and 28 archaeological features  with an overall depth of 1.6 meters from surface level to sterile subsoil. Three stratigraphic levels (soil deposits) are tentatively dated as level 1 (1867-1988), level 2 (1818-1867), and level 3 (1789-1813). Level 3 contained the remains of the house cellar where the blacksmith shop was located. The house and shop were destroyed during the War of 1812 by British and Native Americans who evacuated the settlement in June of 1813 at the approach of the American northwest army to recapture Detroit.

The excavations produced 52,105 artifacts of material culture which consist of  45,255 man-made artifacts (whole objects and fragments) and 6,850 ecofacts (6,165 animal bone, 591 shell, and 94 fish bone). One unpublished report was made on the 1978 test excavations of the site by Deborah Duranceau and two articles in Michigan History (vol. 73, no. 3, May-June) were published by Dennis Au and Gerald Wykes on the 1988 excavations.

The current Deloeuil project at the Monroe County Historical Museum seeks to document and report on the entire excavations and material culture that has remained in storage for the past 24 years. The website can be accessed and viewed at https://sites.google.com/site/20mr229/.

Patrick M. Tucker