Virginia Beach students dig their new campus

VIRGINIA BEACH

Local lore indicates that somewhere on the site of the new Kellam High School, there is an unmarked slave cemetery.

The property is thought to date to 1711 and is part of the Whitehurst-Buffington House's original 200 acres.

The historic plantation home, built around 1793, sits about a half-mile away from the site of the new Kellam High. Besides the unmarked burial ground, it is thought that other historic artifacts remain on the property.

"We're looking for any kind of old plantation roads or buildings that may have been part of the plantation," said Tom Higgins, the project archaeologist performing a survey of the school site. "A lot of times when you have large plantations, you have field quarters close to where people were working. On a plantation like that, you have farm buildings, slave quarters."

Lee Lockamy, a member of the city's historic preservation commission, thought it might be a good idea to perform an archaeological survey of the land now, before construction of the school begins this spring.

Lockamy, a Nansemond Indian, said there's another site within a few miles of the new school site that is rich with Native American artifacts.

"There's stuff there from 1607," said Lockamy, adding that Nansemond Indians have lived in the area since around 1608. "We found stuff there - bits of pottery and arrowheads."

For the past 80 years, the new school site has remained undeveloped, aside from being used for hunting and farming.

"There are not many natural places left that you can do some archaeology," Lockamy said. "If we find some stuff there, we're going to put it on display in the school."

Recently, Lockamy, along with a few Kellam High School teachers and about 20 high school students, spent a few days digging at the site, hoping to find pieces of history along the way.

The group was briefed by Higgins on how to conduct field tests and quickly busied themselves with the effort.

They took about 70 shovel tests of the property - digging down at least a foot to take samples - and recorded their findings. The data provided, Higgins said, will be used in his final report on the property.

"We're doing a real archaeological survey," said Mac Rawls, chairman of the city's historic preservation commission, who was also on hand during a recent excavation. "It's not a field trip."

The shovel tests were set up in quadrants throughout the 108-acre property. Higgins selected the sites where the students were to dig.

"By the terrain and the trees, they can tell where the areas of habitation have been," said David Flores, a physical education teacher at Kellam who has an interest in archaeology.

Flores said the excavation taught the ninth- through 12th-grade students about proper archaeological techniques - and they had fun, too.

"It's pretty amazing to learn about," said Matthew Forcier, a ninth-grade biology student. "It's exciting to find things."

Eriks Apelis, a biology teacher at Kellam, helped students with the dig.

"A lot of them learn there's more outside the classroom," Apelis said. "They can see this is science."

Aside from an assortment of old glass bottles and broken ceramic cups - likely from the 1940s and '50s - the students didn't find much. However, they did find an old farmer's plow. In a wooded section of the property, they found a rusted rail that may have been part of a temporary rail line used by horses removing logs from the wooded area.

But nothing much else discovered could hint at the site's deep history. No cemeteries or building foundations were uncovered, and Lockamy said that's fine.

He's hoping to avoid what happened when Cox High School was rebuilt on its current site. That property, he said, is located on a rich Native American site that wasn't excavated before construction.

"It's not what you find," Rawls said. "It's what you're not finding. We want to be sure that we don't cover up or destroy. So making sure that's not here in the first place is important."

 Rita Frankenberry, (757) 222-5102, rita.frankenberry@pilotonline.com