On banks of Ohio River, dig unearths remains of 200-year-old Army camp

Alexander Hamilton and George Washington had posted them along the Ohio River, a few miles from where it meets the Mississippi, to take the Mississippi River from the Spanish by force if a war ensued.

When it did not, the camp was abandoned and crumbled into the brown clay -- until this summer, when residents led Southern Illinois University archeologists to the site.

''It's a significant find," said Robert Moore, a historian with the National Park Service in St. Louis and author of a book on explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Lewis and Clark had noted the abandoned camp when they sailed by in 1803 on their historic expedition.

Traveler Thomas Rodney described it this way that same year: ''There [are 200 or 300] logged houses in this town, built for our army in regular streets as a post or place of arms."

In the past few weeks, university archeologists have dug eight rectangular holes into the field, where they believe cellars, trash pits, and old latrines stood under rows of log houses.

They have uncovered pieces of broken china, some still painted with dainty orange petals.

They have also bagged and tagged a truckload of rust-encrusted nails, broken bricks, and window glass, as well as what looks like a boot heel, said archeologist Mark Wager of the university's Center for Archeological Investigations, who heads the project.

''Someone described it as the only time-travel device we have," archeologist Jon Pressley said as he scraped topsoil from a bathtub-sized trench, handing it to others to sift through metal trays for any bits of history.

The dirt walls around him show streaks of black, where wood from long-ago trash fires burned, preserved in the hard clay for the past 200 years.

The arrowheads that have been found were made by Cherokee who inhabited the camp after the soldiers left.

The field went unnoticed by archeologists for so long because people were looking for the wrong relics, Wager said. Because the camp was not a fort, it did not have the kind of heavy artillery that can be easily excavated generations later, such as the artifacts found upriver a few miles at Fort Massac.

Instead, soldiers simply lived and trained in ''Wilkinsonville," as it was known, in preparation for fighting elsewhere, he said.

Instead of leaving cannons, they left a light scattering of household items from daily life.

The digging is now done for the summer, and Wager hopes the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and the Library of Congress will continue to fund the project so he can return with his team next year. He has received about $60,000 so far.

He hopes no one will loot the site in the meantime. Collectors have visited the area, metal detectors in hand, searching for the site, Wager said. He agreed to speak about the project on the condition its precise location not be specified.