Archaeological Field Testing of Potential Grave Locations, Kettle Creek Battlefield, Wilkes County, Georgia

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 (DAR) 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. The DAR had acquired about 14 acres of War Hill around 1900.

According to the KCBA web site, in 1958 the Georgia Historical Commission placed two historical markers atop the hill, and additional monuments were placed in 1962, 1973 and 1974. In 1979 the Washington-Wilkes Historical Foundation placed a low stone monument with the names of soldiers involved in the battle on the hill top, and in 1988 the Georgia Department of Natural Resources placed a brass historical marker on the hill top. At some point a number of tombstones were placed within granite coping on the hill top, but these are cenotaphs and are not atop buried human remains. 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 clustering of all these monuments on the crest of War Hill, almost no archeological field investigation had been conducted to learn where the various aspects of the battle actually, took place. 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 archeological 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. 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 archeological research on the battlefield site that was spurred by Elliott’s ground-breaking work in 2008.