Blog

Archaeologists have nearly wrapped up their analysis of artifacts found at Cherry Hill’s Croft Farm, a historic Underground Railroad site where items have accumulated over thousands of years.

That catalog includes 6,300 ceramic fragments, hundreds of bones, and belongings of the Lenni-Lenape Indigenous people who once inhabited the land along the Cooper River.

In February, Cherry Hill Township invited the public to spectate the dig at Croft Farm, a property purchased by Cherry Hill in 1985 and since added to the National Register of Historic Places. It sits at a dead end behind a playground and a dog park, and Megan Brown, deputy chief of staff for Cherry Hill Mayor David Fleisher, said lifelong residents tend to not know it exists.

The township recruited PS&S, an architectural firm headquartered in Somerset County, a year before the February dig to oversee cultural resource management at the site, triggered by renovations to preserve a building there.

Upgrades to the Kay-Evans House, an 18th-century home at Croft Farm that once served as a stop along the Underground Railroad, are funded in part by a $638,000 grant from the New Jersey Historic Trust, which requires work to ensure the safety of historic artifacts found there. Those items will become Cherry Hill Township property.

Brown said the artifacts collected could find their way into public displays on the first floor of the house.

“We do tell the history, but kind of more as a whispering,” Brown said. “We’re going to start really yelling about it.”

Hundreds of ceramics

Croft Farm has housed generations of people living along the Cooper River, and artifacts like ceramics help archaeologists identify lifestyle and socioeconomic changes over time.

The land at Croft Farm was purchased by the Kay family in the early 18th century, and around 1750, Quaker Isaac Kay built an early version of the building now known as the Kay-Evans House, which today houses the Cherry Hill Recreation Department.

In the 19th century, the Evans family moved onto the property and expanded the home. Like other Quakers, owner Thomas Evans and his son Josiah were members of the New Jersey Abolition Society who pushed to end slavery and support the Underground Railroad, according to the township’s online history of Croft Farm.

Matthew Tomaso, the senior director of cultural resources for PS&S, said the firm found material spanning from the 18th century to the early 20th century. About 1,000 artifacts come from the 18th and 19th centuries, including when the Evans family helped operate the Underground Railroad.

Matthew Kraemer, a PS&S archaeologist on the project, said the type of ceramics discovered on the site varied by time period, from 18th-century Staffordshire slipware to more creamware, pearl ware, earthenware, and whiteware as time went on.

The ceramics, buried by time, were not found in one piece. Tomaso said his team sorted through thousands of tiny fragments to assemble 359 vessels.

Kraemer said he is looking at how the ceramics change through time, since a transition from simple to fancy bowls could indicate shifting values among the Quakers, traditionally known for their modesty.

The location where the ceramics are found matters, too. Since enslaved people often used backyards as outdoor kitchens, Kraemer said, finding ceramics outside the house is telling, since that tradition likely continued as formerly enslaved people fled northward.

“If we find a higher proportion of hollowware in the backyard, then we know this could further indicate, from an archaeological point of view, involvement in the Underground Railroad,” Kraemer said.

The Croft Farm site is known as a former home to previously enslaved people, including Joshua Saddler, who founded nearby Saddlertown, a Black settlement in what is today Haddon Township.

‘An awful lot of butchering’

Chelsea Carriere, another archaeologist at PS&S, said she had not expected to find so many animal remains, since nearby water typically makes bones degrade faster.

But Carriere ended up with a stash of 480 bone fragments showing human alteration, or bones with burn or cooking marks.

So far, she has identified goat, cow, sheep, rodent, and turtle bones, along with a raccoon scapula, clearly chopped, and animals likely trapped and hunted, like rabbits. While historical documents show pigs lived on the property, Carriere did not find many pig bones, though she said it could be that the animals were butchered elsewhere or were cooked in a way that did not make for good preservation.

“We can dive into what the recipes of the time were and see if there’s any correlation between the cut marks we’re seeing and what kind of foods were typically cooked or fashionable during certain periods,” Carriere said.

The team also found bones in the Kay-Evans House basement, which Tomaso said was strange, since people did not usually throw away organic waste indoors.

Studying those remains will help Carriere determine how the people living there butchered and prepared their food, and how the Evans family lived off the land. Bones with rough, choppy markings could indicate at-home butchery by a novice, while clean cuts imply meat purchased from a local butcher.

“You would kind of expect to see a change there where people might be having more access to store-bought cuts of meat in the 19th century during the Evans family’s occupation,” Tomaso said. “And one of the things I think is really interesting … is that it seems like they’re doing an awful lot of butchering right there on the property.”

Over 4,500 years

Most of the recently found artifacts came from the last 300 years, but some items go back further, including ones PS&S archaeologists have not disturbed at Croft Farm.

“We now know that it was probably reoccupied over about 4,500 years or more,” Tomaso said. “So that’s kind of cool.”

Before white settlers came to Croft Farm in the late 17th century, the Lenni-Lenape Indigenous people are known to have lived on the land. Tomaso said artifacts from the Indigenous people are deeper in the ground, and seemingly less intact.

But based on the site’s location and proximity to water, Tomaso said, he suspects Native American tribes used the land for thousands of years, though not continuously. PS&S has bolstered that timeline with the Indigenous artifacts its team managed to find, including triangular projectile points typical of the Woodland Period long before the arrival of white colonists.

The absence of some typical artifacts caught Tomaso’s eye, too. The Croft Farm site had very few glass and liquor bottles, and few smoking apparatuses, and Tomaso said the team is still trying to figure out why.

“I think that these guys might have been practicing temperance, which would have been common for the Evans period, really uncommon for the Kays, even among Quakers,” Tomaso said. “Because 18th century, basically, people just drank all the time. For example, beer was not considered an alcoholic beverage.”

Once the project is wrapped up and the data compiled, PS&S will report its findings to the state, Tomaso said.

In the meantime, Brown said, Cherry Hill is working toward awarding a bid for construction at the Kay-Evans House and finding ways to increase the public’s awareness of the Croft Farm property.

“You can really just kind of disappear from Cherry Hill in this location,” Brown said. “It’s really beautiful and we’re really just looking forward to having people take more advantage of it and having people get to understand it better.”