Rita, Many pioneers first arrived at Fort Pitt before settling in the area and western parts. Same with a couple of my ancestors. Below is an interesting recent article from May 03 - posted in the Pittsburgh (PA) Post Gazette. Julia ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Fort Pitt Blockhouse excavation site is archaeologist's delight: http://www.post-gazette.com/localnews/20030524blockhouse0524p5.asp (visit the site for photos!) Saturday, May 24, 2003 By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Staff Writer Kathy Lombardi held out her open hand to David Anderson, displaying two flat, circular pieces of ivory-colored shell joined together by a tiny metal chain. "Oh cool, cuff links," Anderson said. "Sweet." Yesterday morning, when Aron Schmid discovered them inside the Fort Pitt Blockhouse, the cuff links joined more than 2,000 other artifacts unearthed during the third and final round of blockhouse excavations this spring. "Let me show some of the goodies," Anderson said, leading the way to a screen mounted on sawhorses under the arms of a gingko tree. "This stuff just came out yesterday." Big stuff, too, like a 3-inch shard of hand-painted pearlware and the bottom of a wheel-thrown redware vessel, both of which date to the 19th century, when the blockhouse was used as a residence. Anderson, an archaeologist and manager of the Cultural Resources Section of the Coraopolis-based engineering firm Michael Baker Jr. Inc., is conducting the dig for the Pittsburgh chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which has owned the city's oldest building since 1894. "We're getting much greater quantities of materials than we thought we would," Anderson said. In just a 2-inch layer from a 1-meter square, there were almost 300 artifacts. "And it's everything under the sun that we've gotten," from small bones and straight pins to watch fobs and a 1737 Spanish colonial coin minted in Mexico City. The silver coin, a little larger than a nickel, also carries the Spanish royal crest, the name of the reigning king of Spain -- Phillip V -- and the Latin motto "VTRAQUE VNUM," spelled Utraque Unum in English and meaning "both in one." How did a Spanish coin end up beneath the floor of an English blockhouse? Blockhouse curator Franklin LaCava thinks he knows. Members of Scotland's 42nd Royal Highland Regiment ("The Black Watch") spent the summer of 1764 defending Fort Pitt from the Indians during Pontiac's War. Two years before, they had defeated the Spanish militia in Cuba and been rewarded with Spanish coins, the famed "Pieces of Eight." "We've also gotten a George II English coin," Anderson said. "We don't know the date on that yet; it's a copper coin and kind of corroded." The dig also turned up Native American currency. "They found quite a bit of wampum -- tiny polished shell beads and the glass fake wampum -- and a lot of trade buttons," LaCava said, including one cluster of 19 pewter buttons. Anderson's crew also discovered the linear remnants of the blockhouse's original floor joists, laid in 1764 and looking today like thin bands of petrified wood in the dirt floor. "It's appearing from the material we're finding that at some point the [original] wooden floor was taken out, either before or during its occupation as a house," Anderson said. "The deposits that we think are from the fort period were small artifacts that would have dropped through the cracks. The larger things are from the house period." The total fort period "is about 6 inches thick. We've removed everything to the original 1740s ground surface, pre-Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt." They have found only the occasional prehistoric artifact, such as chips of stones from arrow making, because the dig wasn't planned to go that deep. In researching the blockhouse, LaCava turned up evidence that in the late 19th century, it had been a store. In an article on Pittsburgh in the December 1880 issue of Harper's magazine, the writer describes his encounter with a woman who lived on the blockhouse's second floor. She seized the opportunity to complain to him, in an unmistakable Irish accent, that she paid "foive dollars" in rent when the woman who ran a store out of the first floor paid "only the thriflin' sum of four dollars." Anderson estimates that about 400 people have visited the dig since it began earlier this month. It won't be operating this weekend, but is expected to wrap up next week. "It's been an incredibly neat project archaeologically but I also wanted the opportunity to do the public outreach and public education," Anderson said. "Archaeology isn't just Egypt and China. I want people to know there are still things left in the ground here that archaeologists are trying to identify and understand to get a better picture of Pittsburgh's past."