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This is the first installment of a new series that answers questions about what’s going on in New Bedford. Ask the Light your question here, and our investigative reporters will look into it for you.
Shaded by a beach umbrella on a 90-degree day, Adam Lanctot knelt over a square hole, carefully scraping soil, layer by layer, at the grounds of the James and Sarah Arnold Mansion. Over the days, as he shook the dirt through a wire sifter and brushed it away from rocks with a well-worn toothbrush, curious passersby on foot and in cars at the nearby intersection asked him the same question: What are you doing?
Lanctot and his peers were busy unearthing broken pipe stems, bottle and window glass, tooth-sized potsherds, rusted nails, brick, and used coal — “trash” of the 1800s and 1900s.
Back then, gardens with native and foreign flora wrapped around the mansion, where wealthy horticulturalist James Arnold and his wife, Sarah Arnold, a descendant of the Rotch family, lived from its construction in 1821 until their deaths decades later.
Students at Bridgewater State University have since wrapped up their field work for the second year of a three-year project between the university and the mansion’s nonprofit, which is undertaking a review of the grounds to see what is underfoot.
Records say the Arnolds hosted prominent figures such as Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and several U.S. presidents, including John Quincy Adams. Their garden was a “horticultural showplace” that welcomed the public every Sunday to stroll through. The 11-acre green space was replete with a greenhouse, graperies, and fruiting trees that extended past the aptly named Orchard Street.
“This charming spot; and its winding walks, open bits of lawn, shrubs and plants grouped on turf, shady bowers, and rustic seats, all most agreeably combined, render this a very interesting and instructive suburban seat,” wrote one man.
The students and their supervisor, Michael Zimmerman, professor of anthropology at Bridgewater State, dug into the footprint of the original garden path, which was first found with ground-penetrating radar. As they dug farther west, they came across more and more redware pottery that could have been from flower pots. (They’ll analyze the data to confirm these initial impressions.)
“It seems we get more flower pots closer to where the greenhouse would have been,” Zimmerman said. “Little things like that are very worthwhile and really help us create a picture of the way the grounds were prior to development in the mid-19th and 20th century.”
Paul Pawlowski, vice president of the Arnold Mansion nonprofit, said the earliest photos they have of the property date to the 1880s. The archaeological findings can help fill out the picture of what took place on the grounds centuries ago, supplementing the written record.
Zimmerman stressed that the items found are of cultural, not material, value, and that any digging at the grounds without written permission of the landowners and a permit from the state’s historical commission is illegal.
“They are all commercially or monetarily worthless, but important as archaeologists,” he said. “The whole idea of archaeology is not the artifacts, but rather what the artifacts can tell us about past people and past history. It’s about the context in which they’re found.”
For every artifact the students uncovered, they filled out a card and plotted exactly where in their square they found the tiny brick fragment or shard of whiteware. They also documented the modern trash they found, be it plastic or asphalt from the nearby roads.
To an untrained eye, many of the tiny pieces bagged and tagged for the lab could easily be overlooked as rocks or other natural debris, illustrative of the axiom that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
In this case, detritus from late 19th- and early 20th-century renovations, or, one can imagine, remnants from possible social gatherings (the students found a broken oyster fork), help inform the site’s history.
It was the “party house,” quipped student Elliott Darowksi, who said the items they found, including porcelain, could show how lavishly the Arnolds were living.
After the Arnolds died, William Rotch took over the property, building additions to the mansion before it became the Wamsutta Club. Today, the mansion is part museum, part members-only club, and part single-room apartments.
The nonprofit received $400,000 in pandemic funds from the city (and has matched that with $130,000) for maintenance and site improvement.
Pawlowski said potential plans include planting more trees; ridding the grounds of a small parking lot; establishing a multi-purpose educational and archival room in the mansion; and installing a walking path around the property with flowerbeds running along it.
“[The Arnolds] opened the garden up to the residents of the city on the weekend to come and literally and figuratively get a breath of fresh air,” Pawlowski said. “We want to honor the legacy of the Arnolds … and create a feeling that reflects that appreciation.”
Next summer, Zimmerman will return with students for more field work.
“It’s a fact-finding mission,” Pawlowski said. “Who the hell knows what will come out!”
Email Anastasia E. Lennon at alennon@newbedfordlight.org.
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