Shockoe Bottom dig finds 18th-century cellar

Building the future of Shockoe Bottom is uncovering bits and pieces of its past.

An archaeological dig at the future site of Cedar Broad, a 200-apartment, four-story development with ground-floor retail spaces, has uncovered remnants of the homes of some of Richmond’s early residents.

Lyle Browning of Browning and Associates Ltd. said finding the brick cellar and hearth of a late-18th-century home on the 3-acre site at North 18th and East Broad streets was unanticipated. The property is next to a McDonald’s restaurant.

Browning and his crew was expecting to find the remnants of homes built in the 1840s.

“To our surprise, we found no less than two 1769 or thereabouts buildings that were covered over by the 1840s homes,“ he said beneath a tent covering exposed layers of brick and soil. Jeffrey Ruggles, a curator with the Virginia Historical Society, said the discovery is significant.

“That is a very early find,“ he said, noting that it was just within the original Town of Richmond, chartered in 1742 by William Byrd II. “Because that area has been so often rebuilt, there haven’t been many findings from that period.“

Because the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development backed the loan for the $20 million project, the site was guaranteed an archeological survey.

In August, Browning realized that the artifacts dated well beyond what he had expected to discover as his crew uncovered the remnants of five incarnations of the homes at 317 and 319 N. 18th St.

The property first was sold in 1747 to Jonathan Hopkins, according to deed and tax records. James Murphy, a butcher, purchased a lot in 1769 and built two small structures. After he died in 1793, the houses were demolished.

One of the properties was sold in 1840 to John Clarke, a grocer, and the other in 1842 to Francis Childress, a shoemaker.

Childress would go on to sell to Samuel Reese, a slave trader, in 1862. In 1866, a year after the end of slavery, Clarke sold to Charles McMurray, a former slave trader-turned-grocer.

It became “the most heterogeneous block in the city of Richmond that I’ve ever seen,“ Browning said.

“You had free African-Americans living where McDonald’s is now, literally next door to slave traders, and you had a factory owner living just on the other side of the block, and a seamstress,“ he said. “You had the wealthiest people in the city to the poorest all living in one block.“

In later years, a small cottage was built on the property and survived until the 1930s, when the area began to decline. The site was a parking lot until the dig began months ago.

After uncovering the bricks from the later structures, Browning’s crew found the cellar from Murphy’s original home.

The crew dug up brass buttons, sewing pins, beads, buttons and other artifacts that predate the 1840s. Rat tunnels filled with river cobbles, bricks and wine bottles added to the story.

“They literally threw bones into the corner of the room, and when it got too smelly, they put a layer of clay down and sealed it off,“ he said. “We found jawbones of cows.“

The structures and artifacts will be excavated, cleaned and handed over to the state’s Department of Historic Resources.

Wesley P. Hester is a staff writer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.