Archaeological Testing of the Settlers House Site and Presumed Location of Liberty Church, Kettle Creek Battlefield, Wilkes County

The Kettle Creek Battlefield Association, Inc. (KCBA) is a non-profit organization founded in 2011 and dedicated to the preservation and better understanding of the important Revolutionary War battle that took place in today’s southwestern Wilkes County on February 14, 1779 (Figure 1).

Known as the battle of Kettle Creek, the battlefield today is synonymous with a prominent, 80-foot high knoll directly abutting Kettle Creek that is known as War Hill (Figure 2). In 1930 the Kettle Creek chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution successfully lobbied the United States War Department to place a large stone monument on the crest of War Hill, to mark and commemorate this battle site (labeled as Historical Monument on Figure 2). Kettle Creek Battlefield was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on June 26, 1975, encompassing a 40-acre tract that contains War Hill and a small amount of adjoining land that at the time was in private hands.

In spite of the monuments on the crest of War Hill and its placement on the National Register, almost no archaeological field investigation had been conducted to learn where the various aspects of the battle actually took place until the past decade. Historic accounts and analyses of these accounts in light of modern topographic maps could paint a fairly detailed picture of the fierce, one day battle, but without contemporary battle maps or corroborating archaeological evidence there has been uncertainty and imprecision in trying to reconstruct the battlefield. This lack of archaeological research was significantly remedied with a comprehensive document review and extensive metal detector survey directed and authored by Dan Elliott in 2008. Elliott’s (2008) study, grounded in

previous historic research by Robert Scott Davis and Ken Thomas, showed that a “core area” of the battlefield would encompass about 200 acres around War Hill. As a result of his 2008 metal detecting work, Dan Elliott prepared and submitted an archaeological site form for the battlefield, which was assigned site number 9WS370. In cooperation with the Kettle Creek chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Georgia Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, and the City of Washington, Georgia, the KCBA began supporting a long-term program of archaeological research on the battlefield site that was spurred by Elliott’s ground-breaking work in 2008.

The present project is one of a series of archaeological investigations into various aspects of the battlefield site itself, archaeological site 9WS370, and into related nearby sites. Much of the recent archaeological work has focused on detecting and documenting the field burials of those killed in the February 14, 1779 battle at Kettle Creek. This has encompassed using cadaver dogs and ground penetrating radar to locate potential graves (Bigman 2015, 2016, 2017) and hand archaeology and soil science to verify the indications from the remote sensing (Gresham et al. 2018). The present project, the subject of this report, is the archaeological investigation of a house site on a hill top immediately northwest of War Hill, sometimes known as the Hammett House but here called the Settlers House, and the probable location of the former ca. 1780s Liberty Church (Figure 2).