Nov 12, 2018 4 min read

Standing next to a sieve and growing pile of fine dirt, Don Rados said he was trying to find clues to the archaeological site’s history.

“We throw the McDonald’s (packaging) away,” said Rados, a retired coal miner who lives in West Bethlehem Township.

Rados was one of four men who were painstakingly digging into a strip of earth outside the historic LeMoyne Crematory on South Main Street in North Franklin Township Sunday. Around noon, they’d already scooped out a shallow trench about a half-meter wide and one-and-a-half meters long without finding anything of interest.

“I’ve dug probably more sterile holes than I’ve dug ones that have anything in them,” said Bryan Cunning, an archaeologist whose day job is with the consulting firm Michael Baker International. Cunning, historian Clay Kilgore and their friend Rich Baker – who wasn’t around Sunday – collaborate together on a YouTube show called “Searchers,” where they document their excursions at local historic sites.

In the first episode of the show, which they posted back in September, the trio came across a section of earth that looked like it might have been a road bed. Among their finds nearby was a French Decime from 1799 and an 1835 Spanish Real, suggesting people of European origin had been passing through that area at least that far back.

While digging for them, they also came across a layer of what looked to them like a roadbed.

“It’s a very historic hillside,” said Kilgore, executive director of the Washington County Historical Society. Francis Julius LeMoyne, a prominent doctor and abolitionist, had the first crematory in the country built there in the 1870s, when that part of the county was still mostly woods and farmland. The spot was known as Gallows Hill because early Anglo residents used it for public executions.

Kilgore said the previous finds led him to believe they could have found a section of Old Redstone Road, which linked Redstone Old Fort in what’s now Brownsville and the city of Washington. The road passed by the crematory.

On Sunday, they followed up on that theory, digging nearby to see if they could find the path of the road.

“Here’s what we’ve ruled out,” Kilgore said, a few hours into the day. He indicated the first and second spots where they’d dug. “It’s not from here to here.”

Cunning and other experienced archaeologists working at the site that day said that process of forming hypotheses and trying to confirm them is a persistent feature of their work.

“We ask questions that lead to other questions,” said Carl Maurer of Washington. “That’s what’s interesting about this.”

Maurer, a former California University of Pennsylvania administrator, and Rados, who said he spent 34 years mining coal because he “couldn’t find a teaching job,” are both retired. They’re active in the Mon/Yough Chapter of the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology. Both of them were digging at the crematory site for the first time.

Late in the day, Kilgore said they did find some traces of the site’s history: pieces of stone with scorch marks on them. But instead of proving they’d been digging in the path to the road, this just fueled more speculation.

“It’s something that’s either been in a fireplace or a fire pit, we’re not entirely sure,” Kilgore said Monday.

By then, it was almost time to pack up to beat the onset of dusk. Kilgore said once everyone can get together again, they’d go back out for more.

“When you find nothing, you at least know it’s not there,” he said, echoing something he’d heard from Cunning.