“We found everyday items like tin plates, a wash basin, several bottles, and a flask with a picture of George Washington on one side and General Burnside on the other,” Anderson says. “We also found chicken bones, which we think were from someone’s lunch.”
Even more striking are messages from Civil War-era prisoners, literally scrawled on the doors and walls in their own handwriting. Men left notes of contrition preaching that “To be good is to be happy,” and also issued warnings to “Shun this place oh, man who so ever art thou.” Others just wrote their names, perhaps to leave some evidence that they lived.
One inscription—“Wm H. Howe”—proves particularly significant. A hero who rallied Union troops at the Battle of Fredericksburg, William Howe later deserted along with 300 others and killed the bounty hunter pursuing him.
Howe was convicted of desertion and murder, and the Army sent him to Fort Mifflin where he spent three weeks in Casemate 11 awaiting his hanging. He was the only person executed at the fort during the war.
“All this time we believed Howe was imprisoned in a guardhouse that’s no longer here, but it turned out we were wrong,” Anderson says. “Ironically, we discovered the casemate almost 142 years to the day of his hanging.”
Painstaking preservation
Once past the initial excitement of these discoveries, Anderson and his staff turned their attention to the task of preserving them. To do this, they enlisted the help of Milner + Carr Conservation, a Pennsylvania-based firm that specializes in architectural preservation.
“The prison as a whole is in a remarkable state of preservation, especially the inscriptions on the surface of the doors,” says Andrew Fearon, an architectural conservator with Milner + Carr.
“At the same time, these materials are extremely fragile, so we have to be very careful how and in what order we remove them.” The casemate’s environment has held a constant temperature and humidity for over a century. Its wooden doors have been moist for so long that the water is actually holding them together. If dried too quickly, they would disintegrate.
To preserve and restore these artifacts, conservators must simulate the casemate’s environment and change it incrementally to slowly adjust them to conditions above ground. Then they clean any corrosive surface products to prevent further deterioration.
The process is painstaking and time-consuming, with the drying stage alone taking several months, according to Fearon. In the meantime, Anderson’s staff will install replica doors and artifacts in the casemate to give fort visitors a sense of the existence Howe and his counterparts led years ago.
“This site is the best kept secret in the country, and we don’t like that,” Anderson says. “We want to show this gem to the world.”
And that’s exactly what they’re doing. Anderson estimates that attendance has tripled since the discovery.
So much for that quiet existence on the banks of the Delaware.