Site History

The Susquehanna site is located aboard the Naval Air Station Patuxent River in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. The peninsula on which the site sits had been occupied by colonists since the 1650s, but 18ST399 was not established until the mid-18th century. The first construction at the site seems to have been undertaken by Captain Henry Carroll and his wife Araminta Thompson Carroll, who had inherited the property by 1767. After Henry Carroll died in 1775, Araminta married George Briscoe, who moved in with her and managed the property until they moved to Prince George’s County in 1813.

After Araminta’s death, the property shuffled among Carroll family heirs for several decades. In the 1840s, Henry J. Carroll managed the property and assumed ownership. Henry Carroll was a planter who owned up to 65 slaves, but he suffered financially when a failed business venture was followed in short order by the Civil War and the emancipation of the enslaved individuals that had previously represented a large portion of his estate’s value. He died in debt in 1884, and his daughter Eleanor Carroll Darnall had to buy the property at a court ordered sale in order to remain there.

From 1894 to 1942, the property was owned by absentee landlords and occupied by tenant farmers. In 1942, the Navy acquired the property and made plans to develop it. The landowner at the time offered the house at Susquehanna to Henry Ford for a new a new museum he was establishing. They believed that the house dated to the 17th-century and had been the residence of Christopher Rousby, who was buried nearby in a grave marked by a large slab tombstone. Ford accepted the donation of the house, and it was subsequently dismantled and moved to Dearborn, Michigan, where it is currently part of the exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum.

Archaeology

The Henry Ford Museum sponsored a systematic archaeological project at Susquehanna in the late 1980s. The project included the excavation of 175 shovel tests and ten 5’ by 5’ test units, all of which focused on the main house and its yard. These excavations revealed the presence of a c. 1760-1820 house foundation that measured approximately 35’ by 30.’ This structure had been located just west of the dwelling that had been moved to Michigan, and it is interpreted as the residence of Captain Henry Carroll and his wife Araminta Thompson Carroll.

Archaeological and dendrochronological analysis determined that the house at the Henry Ford Museum was probably constructed in the 1840s by Henry J. Carroll. Artifact distribution studies suggest that it was maintained with a formal yard area and symmetrically placed outbuildings during the occupation by Henry Carroll and his family. After the property passed on to absentee owners and tenant farmers in the 1890s, however, the formal layout was abandoned in favor of using the yard for farm production as much as possible. Land was plowed and planted within 15 feet of the house, and chickens were raised in the nearby outbuildings.
More distant outbuildings and activity areas associated with Susquehanna have been given their own site numbers. For example, 18ST393 is a possible slave quarter, but study there has been limited. The Rousby site, 18ST751, is primarily a 17th-century plantation, but Phase II excavations also revealed evidence of 19th century activities that have been attributed to the site’s proximity to Susquehanna. It may have been used for creek access or oyster processing during the Carroll family’s tenure.

References

The Susquehanna archaeological collection is owned by the Naval District Washington, Naval Air Station Patuxent River and curated at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory.