Dig opens window on 1694 raid by Native Americansc

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Source: Union Leader

Like gardners painstakingly at work, the diggers hunch and scrape away layers of soil. Scoop dirt. Screen. Examine. Repeat.

Centimeters at a time, they are bringing the colonial past to life on Durham Point, the site of the famous 1694 Oyster River massacre.

The Oyster River Environs Archaeology Project, now in its fourth year, has recovered more than 5,000 artifacts. Project Director Craig J. Brown continued to unearth history this summer with the help of volunteers enrolled in field trips.

"This is as close to time travel as you can get," Brown said as he inspected a recent excavation.

Brown aims to shed light on the interactions between the Native Americans and the English settlers at Durham Point, once known as Oyster River Plantation.

The frontiersmen suffered many attacks, not just the 1694 raid that resulted in the brutal slaying or capture of about 100 people. The land was settled in the 1630s, not long after the first settlements on Dover Point and Odiorne Point in Rye.

The Field-Bickford garrison now under excavation was a homestead, tavern and ferry center for Darby Field, the first European to summit Mount Washington, and later the Bickford family.

In the massacre, unsuspecting settlers were killed amid the confusion, in what Brown believes was an orchestrated attack. Fast-acting men and women escaped. Others holed up in their garrisons -- fortified homes of the day -- and fired at the raiders. Thomas Bickford was one of them.



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