Pit 142: Level 3

Completed on Mar 5, 2022 by DC Locke, Odess and David Brinkman. We useds an electric saw to cut some of the roots to allow for excavation of level three. It was worth the extra effort because level three produced a good set of Granby artifacts including pipe bowl pieces and a rare large piece of blue lead. Probably because the roots pushed artifacts down, we were still finding artifacts at our normal stopping depth of 50cm. The decision was made to continue digging on another day.

Pit 142: Level 3 produced:





Somehow, during the dig, we got on the topic of Mount Tacitus which led me to restudy the following survey which was probably made about 1780-1790. The drawing is important to us because it might show houses in Granby where we are digging. I decided to do more research and measurements to prove this.

People have argued for decades about "Governor Pinckney's (signer of the United States Constitution) Mount Tacitus mansion/plantation." Some people say Pinckney had nothing to do with Mt. Tacitus. Other people claim it was on the Lexington side of the Congaree River. Archive records show the original land grant went to Tacitus Galliard in 1740, and Henry Laurens would later buy it from him. Laurens left the property to his daughter Eleanor Pinckney. A SC law says Charles Pinckney was granted a ferry at his plantation at Mt. Tacitus in 1797. I'm sure you could figure out all the details of the land transactions of these famous people just by doing genealogy. Thanks to a survey done around 1790 and an old creek shown in an 1818 survey, we know exactly where Mt. Tacitus was located. The older survey is also only the second image we have of the buildings that stood on our Granby dig site (that's how I got interested in it.) My new measurements add more evidence that those Granby buildings are, in fact, the buildings that produced so many of the artifacts we are finding. As far as the Mt. Tacitus mansion goes, this work also shows the mansion sat on the athletic fields of today's Heathwood Hall school in Richland County.