Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove Farmstead (18WA496)

The Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove Farmstead site (18WA496) contains a 19th-20th century standing farmstead, an 18th-century house site and a prehistoric component consisting of Middle Archaic through Middle Woodland camps. The farmstead is located near the Hagerstown Regional Airport. The farmstead today includes 11 intact standing resources on approximately 87 acres of pasture and farmland. These resources are the c. 1895 brick vernacular/Italianate style farmhouse and washhouse; a late-18th and 19th century family cemetery, a stone smokehouse and brick patterned-end barn that date from the last third of the 19th century; and a chicken house, pump, garage, chicken house/corn crib/wagon house, hog pen/corn crib, and silo dating from the early 20th century.

Phases I, II, and III archaeological work was conducted on the property in advance of proposed demolition for airport expansion. This site was initially recorded in August of 2001 during a Phase I survey for a runway extension and the relocation of U.S. Route 11 for the Hagerstown Regional Airport. Additional Phase I, II, III work was undertaken in 2017. Excavation included Phase I-III testing in the area around the core of the farmstead as defined by the locations of the brick farmhouse and barn. The Phase II work included the excavation of forty-four 1x1m test units, four 1x0.5m test unit extensions, and one 2x2 m excavation block. Test units were principally placed to test geophysical anomalies or investigate areas of high artifact concentrations identified during the Phase IB testing. The Phase II effort also included 5 judgmentally placed, mechanically excavated, test trenches 5 feet wide and of varying length. The purpose of this Phase II effort was to collect a robust sample of the plowzone and deposits overlying subsoil, and document large cross-sections of the site stratigraphy. The Phase III effort included the mechanical excavation of large strip blocks which encompassed an area of 1038.16 square meters. These strip blocks, done to allow for the identification of cultural features, were principally concentrated along the south, north, and west of the brick farmhouse.

During the course of excavation, a variety of pre-contact projectile points and debitage was recovered from deposits across the farm. Based on the diagnostic point types, it appears that the farmstead area was used by pre-contact populations from the Middle Archaic through to the Middle Woodland period. In the precontact period this area was largely covered in forest and was home to a variety of springs and streams that would have attracted game and the human populations who exploited them for food. Excavations determined that precontact artifact density was low and highly diffuse, and no precontact activity areas or features were encountered. While not a high concentration, precontact materials were present, especially projectile points. This would seem to suggest that this land was at least being used for resource collecting activities such as hunting during these periods, but the absence of associated features suggests that this site was not the location of extended precontact occupation.

There were three major building phases which related to the principal dwelling of the farmstead. The first was established by Jacob Brumbaugh in the mid-18th century, with the house being subsequently expanded by his son Henry sometime within the first decade of the 19th century. The barn was also likely constructed during the tenure of Henry in the early 19th century. The farm layout of remained largely stable during the 19th century until the property was sold to Samuel Milford Kendle in 1895, after which point the main dwelling was razed and the large brick farmhouse that was standing on the site at the time of excavation was constructed.

The temporal breakdown of the features suggests that the late 18th-century occupation of the site was centered near Feature 6, the mid-18th century Jacob Brumbaugh Flurküchenhaus structure. The principal early 19th-century features included large pathway complexes in the north and east yards, and a set of log stairs leading to the basement of the northern extension of Feature 6, part of the expanded original dwelling that became the basement to the rear ell of the later Kendle period brick farmhouse. Additional potential early to mid-nineteenth century outbuildings in the field to the southwest of Feature 6 suggest that the farmyard area may have continued well south of the 19th-century farmhouse. By the mid-19th century, the smokehouse (Feature 34) and its associated midden (Feature 70) had become part of the landscape. Late 19th-century features were limited to a fence line (Feature 54 complex), a barrel privy (Feature 84), and a disturbance (Feature 95) to one of the cobble pathways (Feature 96).

The 20th-century features principally included pipe trenches: one leading to the well, one to a water tank in the west yard, one to septic tank inside a repurposed 19th-century brick cistern (Feature 16), and a complex of pipe trenches constituting the leach field in the fields to the south of the farmhouse. Analysis of the spatial patterning of the site revealed that while the site in general pursued the same general agricultural plan through most of its active operation, the arrangement of the farmyard and structures evolved over time beginning as a more diversified, tasked-based distribution of outbuildings in the 18th century converted to a more collapsed and consolidated complex of attached buildings separated into an agricultural and domestic sphere by the late 19th century. A family cemetery is known to exist in the cornfield to the west of the farmhouse, yet no work was focused at or near the cemetery, since it is not likely to be adversely affected by future modifications to the property.

*Note that there are some discrepancies between context designations assigned in the report and what appears in the catalog sheets.

(Written by Patricia Samford, from archeological site survey form, Maryland Historical Trust)