Granville is working through a series of downtown street projects, which has opened up opportunities to peer deep into the village’s past.
In archaeology, stratigraphy is one key method of learning from an excavation. The layers you dig through are like pages in a book, and you learn how to read them, the most recent events being the top layers as you scrape down, one layer at a time, to the oldest human activity until you reach sterile subsoil, or bedrock.
Our streetscape is a little different. There’s no “O-horizon” of turf at the top, or an “A-horizon” of topsoil, let alone a “plow zone” of largely disturbed material tilled by early farmers. Still, there’s a story to be told in the harder layers made visible by an excavation at, say, Broadway and Prospect Street in the heart of the historic village, founded in 1805.
Within trenches in the street, you could see a layer of blacktop – asphalt material mixed with stone – that has been typical street-paving material in Ohio over the last hundred years. In fact, there’s a two-inch thick layer of blacktop atop a thinner layer of asphalt with less stone mix. Cheaper, and more likely to pothole, this is an older street surface but by no means the oldest.
Below the two layers of blacktop are other layers, each with their own story. This isn’t an archaeological dig, and the crews who worked on the streets earlier this year were trenching not to uncover history, but to place drainage pipes to carry away stormwater. A bystander had limited authority to ask for clarification or extension of what’s uncovered.
| Read more: Quick sewer project on Granville’s Broadway is prelude to one that will last from April through November
Toward the middle of Broadway, below the two blacktop strata, you could clearly make out a layer of brick. Not the more recent crosswalk pavers, but older brick. We’re talking late 1800s-era street brick, in a still stable, coherent layer, if now six inches or so below today’s surface.
Below the brick layer is a kind of concrete. This layer is irregular, more crushed limestone but with a sort of cement matrix to it, binding the aggregate together. It looks more like a bonding basis for the brick street than an earlier working surface.
In some places around the trench, the concrete below the brick layer appears to be two layers thick itself. Is this a remnant of an earlier basis below a removed brick pavement, stripped then re-prepared for the brick layer we see now? Or a two-step process? Given our history, I lean toward an earlier brick street whose bricks, broken up by time, horse hooves, and frost heave, were taken up and new foundation layer applied before the final brick street we would have (other than our one block of brick on North Main Street between the Methodist and Presbyterian churches).
Underneath the cement layers, we finally reach soil, but it’s darker, denser. That makes sense, given the pressures on it – even when it was closer to the surface, wagon wheels and carriages and oxen and horses . . . plus what horses left behind, pounded into the soil of the oldest iteration of our Broad Way through the village.
And below this soil layer, there are views to lighter and more clay filled subsoil, where previous drainage tiles were laid in trenches dug long ago, and as newer drains are put in place.
What is intriguing – a mystery left in place – is how on the Prospect side of Broadway, toward the crosswalk, there is material that looks to be ancient timbers, deep below the layers of pavement. Desiccated and deteriorated to where they’re basically soil themselves, the grain of wood appears out of the trench, perhaps a baulk of timber laid to support an earlier trench wall and left in place when it was filled.
All of this is filled back in now, and the new crosswalks and garden bump-outs along Broadway are going into place, the latest stage of development on this corner. These layers of history are pages of a now closed book, just below where you walk to visit the post office or library.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio.