A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America
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Compiled from Department of the Interior information Several of the 18 National Historic Landmarks designated by Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt on March 1 are of interest to historical archaeologists, industrial archaeologists, and historians. Newly named are Ferry Farm (George Washington's boyhood home in Stafford County, Virginia) and Fort St. Pierre (a French fort established in 1718 in what is now Warren County, Mississippi); excavations have been undertaken at both sites. Architecturally important are Sotterly (one of two extant examples of a post-in-ground framed house, in St. Mary's County, Maryland), the 1722 Abel and Mary Nicholson House (a Delaware Valley brick, patterned-end house in Salem County, New Jersey), Fort James Jackson (built 1808-1812 to protect the harbor and city of Savannah, Georgia), and Kennebec Arsenal (constructed in Augusta, Maine, in 1828-1838 to protect the border with Canada). The nineteenth-century Bollman truss railroad bridge in Howard County, Maryland, which is the only surviving example of the type, was also made a landmark, as was the early twentieth-century Shenandoah-Dives Mill, a hard-rock milling facility in San Juan County, Colorado. Of historical note are New Haven, Connecticut's Grove Street Cemetery (incorporated in 1797), the Nathan and Polly Johnson property in New Bedford, Massachusetts (where Frederick Douglass first lived after his escape from slavery in 1838), and the Camden, South Carolina, home of Mary Boykin Chestnut, famous for her Civil War diary. About 2,200 of the 67,000 sites on the National Register of Historic Places have been made National Historic Landmarks. Landmarks are overseen by National Park Service archaeologists and historians; designation of landmark status is the federal government's official recognition of the national importance of historic properties.
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