ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, September 4, 1996 TAG: 9609040059
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: C-4 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
A 270-YEAR-OLD BRITISH COIN unearthed beneath the grand staircase at Independence Hall has fired the imagination of archaeologists, historians and people who just like to envision the past.
Did it accidentally drop out of a carpenter's pocket as he was helping build the tower of Independence Hall? Or did someone bury it there intentionally, a sort of time capsule to be discovered nearly three centuries later?
An archaeologist found the 270-year-old British coin this week while digging beneath the grand staircase leading up to the Independence Hall tower. He was poking around under the building to make sure no rare artifacts would be lost or destroyed when a new air-conditioning system is installed soon.
The coin, made of bronze or silver, is about the size of a quarter and probably is an English farthing, said Karie Diethorn, chief curator of Independence National Historical Park.
It features a profile of King George, either George I or George II, and probably was struck in the 1720s and buried in the dirt 30 years later, when the tower was being built, she said.
``It's not a rare coin, but a wonderfully evocative coin,'' Diethorn said. Similar ones have been unearthed behind the historic building and elsewhere in Philadelphia, she said.
The coin represents a message from another time - the 1750s, before the Declaration of Independence and the drafting of the Constitution created a new nation and made the modest brick building a shrine to democracy.
``It's one of those touches of the real people of the past who were there in Independence Hall,'' Diethorn said.
She said the farthing was ``a commoner's coin that would have been found in the pocket of an average 18th-century citizen. You could have bought lunch with it or a maybe a small piece of chewing tobacco.''
The coin is so tarnished and encrusted with brick and mortar dust that park staff members aren't certain which King George is on it, particularly because the father and son looked alike, Diethorn said. George II ascended the throne in 1727.
The find will be sent to a conservator to be cleaned. Diethorn said she did not know how much it was worth on the collectibles market.
A National Park Service archaeologist, Paul Inashima, made the discovery Thursday during a weeklong dig. Such surveys are required whenever there are renovations to buildings in the historic park.
Inashima dug a trench along the interior west wall of the tower to get a look at the building's foundation. Six feet down, he uncovered fragments of 18th-century garbage: shards of pottery, early window glass, pig teeth, animal bones, construction debris, even stems from pipes that workers liked to smoke while they toiled.
The air-conditioning system is being added as part of a renovation of Independence Hall and other historic buildings in the city. The units are intended both to keep tourists comfortable and help preserve the buildings.
``I can go to Independence Hall anytime I want. That's one of the privileges of my job,'' Diethorn said. ``Sometimes it's hard to remove myself from the 20th century, hard to think what it was like when it was first built. A find like this makes it easier to imagine that time. That's what makes it exciting.
``These were the people who made our nation.''
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