Nails. Boring, right? No way! Nails give us tons of information at archaeological sites. During the search for the first Fort Vancouver nails have been at the top of my list of artifacts I hoped to find because they are diagnostic and generally ubiquitous at historic sites. Nails can shed light on site occupation dates, presence and purpose of structures, building techniques, structural changes over time, and myriad other things. Of course there is much more information about nails than I can include here so I encourage anyone interested to do more research into these humble but extremely important little objects.
Nail manufacturing techniques have changed over time making nails great indicators of age at archaeological sites. The history of nails goes back thousands of years, but at Fort Vancouver we are limited to the last 200 years. Very broadly there are three categories of nails that I am interested in for this project: Hand-wrought square, machine-cut square, and round wire nails.
Hand-wrought nails are those made by blacksmithing. These nails are roughly square in cross-section and are covered in small indentations, the characteristic ‘hammered’ look of hand-wrought metal. Their tips come to a blunt point or flattened point, and their heads have a ‘rose’ shape.
Machine-cut nails have been manufactured since the late 1700s. These nails are also roughly square in cross-section because they are formed from a flat sheet of metal cut into wedge shapes. The heads of early machine-cut nails were hand applied displaying a rose shape (from roughly the 1790s to the 1820s) and later the heads were machine applied and had kind of a hexagonal shape (beginning approximately in the 1820s with some still manufactured today). As opposed to the hammered look of hand-wrought nails, the shafts of machine-cut nails are smooth.
Modern nails are round in cross-section and we call them wire nails. Wire nails had their start in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and were popularly used in America for building construction beginning in the twentieth century. They are the most common type of nail used today.
During the search for the first Fort Vancouver I have found many nails. Several of them have been so encrusted in rust that it is impossible to tell what type of nail they are. Some have been wire nails so I know the levels containing these nails are from more recent times. Others have been machine-cut nails with machine-applied heads, or what we call American machine-cut nails.
Even though American machine-cut nails were manufactured and used in the United States as early as the 1820s, at Fort Vancouver we find these nails in deposits most likely dating to the early Army period, beginning in 1849. This makes deposits in which I have found these nails later than the time of the first Fort Vancouver which dates to 1825-1829. Even so, it is exciting to find American machine-cut nails during excavations because I can potentially interpret these nails as dating to the 1800s.
Hand-wrought nails are the ones I have been looking for the most during this project. People at the first Fort Vancouver would have most likely used nails made by a blacksmith. I have not found any documents specifically related to nails at the first fort, but one primary source mentions that there was a blacksmith at the first fort who set up operations under a tree outside of the stockade walls. Any metal objects including nails were likely wrought by a company blacksmith or sent by ship from England to Vancouver.
So, did I find any hand-wrought nails in my excavations??? No spoilers here! You’ll be able to find out results at my second presentation in Vancouver in the next few months, or wait to read about results later here on this blog.