An Archaeological Survey of the Proposed Radisson Hotel Construction Site and River Walk Corridor

During October, 1989, the Jeffrey L. Brown Institute of Archaeology, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, conducted a Phase I archaeological reconnaissance survey of a tract on the east side of Savannah, Georgia, for the Columbia Sussex Corporation. As the site of a proposed hotel and river walk complex accessing the Savannah River, the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Natural Resources, State of Georgia, required cultural resource testing to determine if sites eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places would be impacted by the proposed construction. The site of the proposed hotel was adjacent to the eastern boundary of the City of Savannah National Register District. The main hotel tract consisted of four parcels of land, identified for most of the 19th century as: the eastern portion of Lot 19, Trustees' Garden; Lots 1 and 2, front and back, of the Eastern Wharves, Lamar Ward; and a triangular portion of a large tract south of Lots I and 2 known generally as the Cotton Warehouse Lot. Prior to the late 1830s, the land was in rice cultivation and otherwise unoccupied. The Eastern Wharf Company, headed by industrialist Gazaway Bugg Lamar, drained and filled the waterfront area, creating the Eastern Wharves and subdividing them into Lots 1-6. G. B. Lamar, and son Charles A. L. Lamar, erected a cotton press and warehouses on Lots 1 and 2 prior to 1853, and these early improvements were replaced by similar but more substantial structures prior to 187 1. The press and warehouses remained standing until the 1940s, passing through several compress and warehouse companies in the process. The warehouse lots were not reutilized until the 1960s, when a marine construction company purchased the lots. On Lot 19, bought in 1835 by Henry F. Willink Sr., a shipyard was built including a boat slip. In 1851, the yard passed into the control of H. F. Willink Jr., who retained title to the lot until 1860 when it was sold to G. B. Lamar. During the Civil War, several Confederate warships, including the ironclads Savannah and Milledgeville, as well as smaller vessels, were built on the yard under Willink's supervision. In December, 1864, the yard was burned and the incomplete Milledgeville was scuttled in the river. In the early 1870s, Willink moved his marine railway and ship repair facilities across the river to Hutchinson Island, and the Lot 19 property reverted to commercial dock uses. The principal tenant in the late 1800s was the Merchants and Miners Transportation Company, who used the wharf for freight and commodity transfers associated with the Baltimore Shipping Company. The eastern portion of the Lot 19 wharf was bought by founder William Kehoe in 1904, who erected a marine railway on the eastern fringe of the lot. Subsequently, the eastern portion was occupied by the Marine Railway Company and later by the Savannah Foundry and Machine Company. The marine railway had been filled in by the late 1960s, when Sayler Marine Construction occupied the eastern portion of Lot 19, Lots 1 and 2 in the adjoining Eastern Wharves, and the triangular parcel to the south. Sayler Marine moved from the property in the 1980s, leaving little standing architecture. Seven archaeological search trenches were excavated by backhoe and recorded during a three-week field testing program. Profiles were drawn and photographed, with 45 features being recorded in a total of 159m of trench line. Excavations were hampered by groundwater and poor visibility. No in situ aboriginal remains were encountered in the testing program, nor any features clearly attributable to the Colonial or early Federal periods. Landforms such as dams and ditches, associated with early rice cultivation, could not be conclusively identified. Most of the features encountered were brick and/or timber structural footings associated with the postbellum cotton warehouses situated on Lots 1 and 2, Eastern Wharves. Many of the brick footings encountered were supported on pads of boards or planks to provide support and buoyancy in the unstable sandy site soils. Heavy timber cribs associated with an antebellum feature known as Lamar's Canal, a wharf-fronted canal built prior to 1840 along the west side of Wharf Lot 1, were recovered and complemented historically-described construction techniques in an 1854 wharf construction contract. The concrete walls of the marine railway on the eastern portion of Lot 19 were also exposed; the marine railway, built in the period 1904-16, adversely impacted that portion of the historic Willink shipyard that fell within the project boundaries. Extensive deposits of fill of 20th century origin were common in all areas of the site, and the remains of concrete foundation pads from the last tenant of the site were also in place at the time of testing. Although extensive archaeological features were encountered at this site, closed context deposits containing datable remains are apparently rare. Much of the archaeological record has resulted from modern fill efforts, and such secondary depositions possess marginal analytical utility. Secondary testing of the terrestrial component of the site was not recommended.