Data Recovery at the Proposed Public Safety Complex Columbus, Georgia

This report details the results of archeological data recovery on one city block in the City of Columbus, Georgia. The block which today is bounded by 5th and 6th Avenues and 9th and 10th Streets was originally laid out with eight half acre house lots in 1828. Southeastern Archeological Services, Inc. (SAS) initially investigated the project area during an archeological survey for the proposed City of Columbus Police Headquarters building complex in February 1994. Data recovery was conducted by SAS during the fall and early winter of 1994. The project area, referred to as the 9th Street Block, changed a great deal through time. It began as a predominantly white, middle class, residential neighborhood of the mid-nineteenth century becoming the thriving center of an African-American neighborhood in the early to mid-twentieth century and finally developing into a mixed residential-small business area in the latter part of the century. Data recovery focused upon the earlier development of the block by combining excavation and archival research. Excavation consisted of machine stripping of large block areas on three of the eight original town lots. The total area exposed by stripping was approximately 1800 mz and information on a total of 666 features was recorded. Excavation was conducted on 116 of these features, many of which were large and artifact-rich pits such as wells, cellar pits, and privy pits dating to the nineteenth century. Cultural remains recovered from excavated features ranged in age from ca. 1840 to ca. 1920. As a result of data recovery, significant new information has been retrieved relating to urban development of Columbus during the period of the mid to late nineteenth century. In particular, the excavations revealed information relating to the evolution of feature types, artifacts or material remains and subsistence remains that accompanied the shift from an essentially frontier community of the early to mid nineteenth century to the urban neighborhood of the later twentieth century.