Frankie Bushong’s metal detector, a Minelab Equinox 800, appears to be placed at the end of a rainbow.
by Megan Schiffres –
The heritage of the Northern Neck is waiting to be discovered just below the surface. Today, archaeologists and amateur artifact collectors are steadily uncovering it.
“Every time you dig that hole and you see a big piece of silver or a buckle or something like that, your heart just starts racing and it’s just a wonderful feeling. It keeps you going back and trying to find more,” said self-proclaimed relic hunter Frankie Bushong.
Bushong spends most of his weekends and lunch breaks trekking through forests and wading through rivers with his eyes trained on the ground, searching for any sign of man-made buildings and objects. After over a decade of hunting and researching artifacts he’s found buried in the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula, Bushong says he still gets a rush pulling a piece of the past from the ground.
“Each time gets me differently. With most of the finds just blowing my mind,” Bushong said. “I just love uncovering history that’s been lost for hundreds of years. I always enjoy being the first person to touch something since it was dropped years ago. And I get just as much enjoyment out of researching and figuring out what it is that I found as I do finding it.”
A variety of relics ranging from 2500 years old up to World War I which includes native artifacts, colonial relics, and Civil War era artifacts.
Armed with a metal detector and a probe for digging deep into the earth, Bushong has amassed thousands of native artifacts, fossils, civil war relics and colonial products. His collection includes gold coins, a pre-Civil War horse breastplate bearing the unicorn seal of the local Berkeley family, and a mallet bottle and brazier ring used to light tobacco before the invention of matches and lighters. But Bushong is not alone in his search for relics in the region.
“The majority of my collection comes from the Chesapeake Bay area right here,” said Chris Trimble, another local artifact collector. “From pottery to implements such as tools to spearheads to arrowheads, there’s lots of different Indian artifacts that I’ve found over the years.”
Trimble began collecting native artifacts near his home in Saluda in the 1970s, and is collaborating with Dr. Julia King, an archaeology professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, to catalog his collection for archaeological study.
“The collectors are going to collect. And it’s what got me. When I was a little kid I would collect arrowheads in the field behind my house. So I understand the impulse and if we can share that knowledge, and it can benefit the tribe, then sign us up, because that’s what we want to do.” Dr. King said.
Dr. King is working on an archaeological survey of the Rappahannock River, and is collaborating with collectors of native artifacts across the region to identify items pulled from the river, and to pinpoint where they were found.
“It’s an opportunity for people who have these collections to get them examined by a professional so they know what they are, the time frame they’re from,” said King.
A 1725 – 1735 French mallet bottle Frankie Bushong found while metal detecting.
However, most archaeologists are not so forgiving of amateur archaeologists. According to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources (DHR), digging up artifacts destroys valuable evidence of the society it came from, and threatens the preservation of the historical item. Archaeologists at the DHR say that digging artifacts up without keeping field records, as professional archaeologists do, makes understanding history impossible. The department also says that due to their extreme age, these artifacts are often unstable and difficult to preserve unless properly trained.
For the descendants of the communities whose relics lie in the soil of the Northern Neck, private collectors are also unintentionally destroying their knowledge of, and connection to, their cultural history and the lives of their ancestors.
“We have a cultural recovery program for our historic preservation, not only to recover artifacts, but to recover the history and document it that so that the future generation of the Rappahannocks will know this is the location of this town, it was mapped by John Smith, these are the people who lived there, these are the pottery patterns they were using, the pipe patterns they were using, all the various things that are uncovered,” said Chief of the Rappahannock Tribe Anne Richardson. “It’s all very important to the recovery and history of our culture, so that when we are teaching the next generation about these things, they carry that institutional knowledge collectively into the next generation. It tells a more complete story of the tribe’s history.”
In Virginia, artifact hunters must have permission from landowners before they collect on private property. It is illegal to remove artifacts from state or federal land, or from the bottomlands of creeks, rivers and other bodies of water without a permit from the DHR.
This item was found by one of Frankie’s buddies and he was excited to show it to the camera!
“Each time gets me differently. With most of the finds just blowing my mind,” Bushong said. “I just love uncovering history that’s been lost for hundreds of years. I always enjoy being the first person to touch something since it was dropped years ago. And I get just as much enjoyment out of researching and figuring out what it is that I found as I do finding it.”
––Frankie Bushong
Both archaeologists and amateur collectors seem to have remarkable success discovering artifacts in the Northern Neck, because, according to assistant professor of archeology at the University of Mary Washington Dr. Lauren McMillan, it is mostly unexplored and undisturbed.
“The reason archaeologists have been really drawn to the Northern Neck is because it’s rural and because a lot of the sites still exist. There’s still a lot of farmland, still a lot of agriculture on the Neck and it hasn’t been destroyed through development,” Dr. McMillan said.
Native American tribes have inhabited the Northern Neck for 13 to 15 thousand years, according to Dr. McMillan. Colonists have occupied the region since John Smith explored the Chesapeake in 1608. The cultures of Native Americans, colonists and the African Americans they enslaved were all intertwined in this region of Virginia, and stayed that way for longer than other territories because it was slow to develop.
“The interaction among those three groups of people was so intense on the Northern Neck for much longer than in other parts of Virginia where colonization was a little more rapid. The archeology of the Northern Neck has allowed us to study those interactions for a longer period of time, from the 1640s well into the 1700s, which has allowed us to understand the interactions between these three groups of people that ultimately form American society on the East Coast in Virginia,” said Dr. McMillan.
The buried history of the Northern Neck is still largely undiscovered, although accessible due to the region’s preservation of nature and lack of large-scale industrial development. Archeologists have been studying the region for decades and have recently conducted excavations of several sites including at the Stratford Hall Plantation by Dr. Doug Sanford of the University of Mary Washington, at Coan Hall by Dr. Barbara Heath of the University of Tennessee, and at Nomini Plantation by Dr. McMillan.
Horse breastplate bearing the family crest of the Beaver Stone Branch of the Berkeley family.
Recent excavations at the Stratford Hall Plantation, the famous home of two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee, revealed the tools, buildings and daily lives of the other inhabitants of the plantation including the female members of the family, their slaves and the plantations’ undertakers.
“Average everyday people, they tend to be less documented. You might get indirect references to them through tax records or census information, but to see their everyday objects, what their lives were like, a lot of that comes through archeology,” Dr. Sanford said.
Once Stratford Hall reopens this summer it will showcase a new exhibit on these uncovered narratives called Stratford at the Crossroads, using artifacts discovered by Dr. Sanford and his team of student archaeologists over the course of 20 seasons studying the plantation.
“The artifacts are particularly important for looking at the lives and culture of the enslaved because they were not writing their own history, they weren’t writing letters, they weren’t allowed to learn to write. So you’ve got this archaeological record really speaking to their presence there,” said Dr. Kelley Deetz, director of programming, education and visitor engagement at Stratford Hall.
Although these excavations have revealed much that was previously unknown to archeologists and historians about the Northern Neck, there is still much to learn from the region. According to the DHR, there are 15 historic sites in Lancaster and 27 sites in Northumberland. Of these, only a handful have been studied.
The Rivah Visitor’s Guide provides information about places to go and things to do throughout the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay region, from the York River to the Potomac River.
After the Civil War, the Virginia Legislature provided pensions for those who served the Confederate Army. This included soldiers, widows and daughters of deceased...
