Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Post date: Oct 21, 2017 12:26:58 AM

On Wednesday, October 11, 2017, we had Darryl Dan On Wednesday, October 11, 2017, we had Darryl Dan from the London Chapter of the OAS join us for a presentation. His presentation focused on 3 sites he found on one property and his journey to get his avocational and research archaeological licenses. Darryl also spoke of the responsibilities a license holder is legally obliged to follow.

The three different site were in one farmer's field, the Wiener Farm, and consisted of a 10,000 year old pre-contact site, an old log house that was once a school house, and a 19th century inn called the Halfway House. The farm land in question is located south of St Thomas and Darryl was able to discern much of the history of the site without ever putting a shovel or trowel to the ground.

Interestingly, the land in question originally had a crown patent to John Baptist Baby, brother of James Baby, who was the owner of the of our local Duff-Baby House on Mill St, and Francois Baby, owner of the Baby House which is now the original site of the Windsor Community Museum on Pitt Street.

Darryl interviewed the Wiener family, the owners of the land at the beginning of his investigations, concentrating on the older gentleman who owned the land and grew up on the site as it was his family farm. His knowledge of the site was quite extensive and provided interesting tidbits to the history of the Halfway House Inn and to the construction of the family farmstead itself.

The pre-contact site on the farm land took up the major portion of his investigations, not because it was the only thing that interested him, but because when he would have looked at more of the rest of the farm land and the other sites, Mr. and Mrs. Wiener passed on. The farm land was sold and the new owner has a great, and unfortunate, distrust of archaeologists.

Darryl did do a brief examination of the Inn site prior to the land being sold but did not pick up a single artifact. All of the artifacts that he did collect were only from the pre-contact site. What information he has on the Inn was gained by speaking to the family and doing historical research.

While there is much left to discover on this farm, and Darryl hopes to be able to one day continue that hunt, nothing more is permitted to be done on the lands themselves. Darryl does his research by other historical means and continues to write papers to report what he has discovered.