Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 25, 1994 TAG: 9403250227
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Somebody warned they might not be the most welcome guys in Gainsboro - five white men digging in the dirt in a historic black community that feels whites have done enough disturbing already.
After all, the reason archaeologist Mike Barber and his crew were hired to dig into a vacant lot was so the Virginia Department of Transportation could pave a four-lane road over it.
The men did catch the occasional wisecrack during last summer's dig. ``Found any gold yet?'' a passer-by asked as they sifted through the subsoil in 90-degree heat.
Others stopped to ask what the men from Preservation Technologies Inc. were doing and seemed glad they were looking for artifacts from one of the foremost black-owned drugstores in Virginia.
What came out of the ground eventually was a treasure trove of 30,000 artifacts and a rare look back at an urban black neighborhood and a black doctor whose life and death had great impact.
By federal law, historic sites are supposed to be studied by archaeologists before developers move in. This dig cost $70,000, paid for mostly by the state, with the city of Roanoke's help.
The site work is done now, but road construction still has not started.
Meanwhile, Barber and his partners are polishing their paperwork and getting ready to turn over the artifacts.
It took months to catalog on computer the 88 boxes of bits and pieces from Gainsboro, located near downtown. That listing alone runs 410 pages. Barber is seven chapters into his report on the dig. Soon, he hopes, the state Department of Historic Resources and the city of Roanoke will decide what to do with it all.
His wish is that the Harrison Museum of African American Culture will get some artifacts - it hasn't room for all of them - and that exhibits on the dig go up at City Hall, the city courthouse and all over town.
Barber, an archaeologist with the Jefferson National Forest when he's not running Preservation Technologies, expected to find lots of pharmacy paraphernalia in Gainsboro - and he did. His crew unearthed a veritable landfill of old bottles from the pharmacy of Dr. Isaac David Burrell.
Shops and homes once surrounded the pharmacy, and the crew dug up glass and earthenware marbles, parts of white ceramic dolls, reeds for a pipe organ, old coins, a Norfolk & Western Railway button and key, a 5-cent Lemon-Kola bottle, a bottle of Currie Cola and the precisely butchered lower leg bones of cattle and pigs.
The crew found fancy toiletries, indicating that, despite racial segregation, Gainsboro residents enjoyed the finer things in life. There was a bright green bottle with a crown on its stopper and the words ``Crown Perfume Company'' and ``London'' on the small flacon.
Burrell's was more than just a drug store. It sold tobacco, toilet articles, soda and ice cream, too.
``The site opens a window onto early Gainsboro,'' said Dan Pezzoni, architectural historian with Preservation Technologies in Salem. ``It's Gainsboro in miniature.''
In 1897, the Richmond Planet, one of the biggest African-American newspapers on the East Coast, described the Burrell pharmacy as the ``largest and best-stocked drug store in the state owned by a colored man.''
Dr. Burrell fell ill, reportedly with gallbladder trouble, in 1914. Historians say Roanoke's white-run hospitals refused to admit the black doctor, so his family put him on a freight train to Washington. He died before he could be treated there.
His wife, Margaret, kept the pharmacy going a few more years, according to Barber. When it closed, someone apparently threw the store's contents out the back door, not knowing they would make late-20th-century archaeologists so happy.
The Burrells had been planning to open a hospital in Roanoke. When Burrell Memorial Hospital was organized a few years later in Gainsboro, it was named in memory of Isaac Burrell.
Among the things Pezzoni wanted to learn was how similar Burrell pharmacy was to white-run drug stores such as the Barnes pharmacy on Campbell Avenue. Pezzoni said the dig revealed the two pharmacies' stocks were very similar. Both relied heavily on patent medicines which were as much as 20 percent alcohol.
At the Burrell pharmacy, the archaeologists found such prizes as a tiny bottle of Dr. Kilmer's Swamp-Root Kidney Remedy, made in Binghamton, N.Y. Some bottles still had pills and liquid medicines in them.
Barber said he was excited when workers found a turn-of-the-century Tivoli beer bottle. He thought it might come from European immigrants working on the railroad. Then he learned that ``Tivoli'' was just ``I lov it'' spelled backwards.
Preservation Technologies also specializes in Indian sites, and Barber is planning to write his doctoral dissertation about that work.
His crew helped excavate three Indian woodland villages in Salem and Altavista. Sifting soil through the fine mesh of window screens, workers found glass beads, copper and an iron needle - all evidence, Barber said, that Indians had contact with Europeans earlier than many believe, perhaps by the early 1600s.
Now that he has seen what lies beneath Gainsboro, Barber wishes he could dig elsewhere in the city. A 1928 monograph says bones of a mammoth, an extinct elephant, were found on Hollins Road. It is too late to excavate, though, as industries have occupied the spot for years and the valley's new trash-transfer station has been built there.
He wishes archaeological work had been done before the Coca-Cola plant was built in Gainsboro in the early 1980s. He watched from his office at national forest headquarters as that area was torn down. ``I got to watch it out the Poff Building window.''
by CNB