ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — The site of a historic school house revealed artifacts that students and teachers left behind.
Nuns with the Sisters of St. Joseph are restoring a the St. Benedict the Moor school building in the Lincolnville community of St. Augustine.
Working around and with the contractor, archaeologists were able to scour the site on Martin Luther King Avenue.
"It’s the oldest brick structure in Lincolnville," St. Augustine City Archaeologist Katherine Simms said. She and her colleagues with the St. Augustine Archaeology Department dug inside and outside of the schoolhouse. Its walls were literally propped up with large metal beams at one time.
"It was a great excavation," Sims said. "We started working out there two years ago in 2022."
They found all kinds of artifacts such as a glass inkwell, small buttons, small fragments from pencils, pieces of safety pins and old Nehi soda bottles.
Holding a dark gray slim piece of slate, Sims said, "We’ve got a piece of slate tablet with writing lines on it from when kids used to practice writing their letters on slate tablets."
The school for Black children was built in 1898, and the Sisters of St. Joseph taught Black students there until 1964 when schools were integrated.
Sims said the archaeology teams also found an metal old barrette with decorative carvings on it. "This one would have been probably either late 1800’s, early 1900’s." She then pulled out a smaller, faded pink plastic barrette with birds depicted on it. She thought that barrette probably came from the 1960s, closer to the time the school closed.
"My favorite part of being out there," Sims said, "is we would have former school students come up to us and be like, 'Oh yeah. I remember getting sodas across the street!"
That kind of oral history is a rarity for these archaeologists who are used to working on digs that are more colonial and Native American oriented.
Sims said as for the site itself, "A lot of people think, 'Oh, it’s just an early 20th century site. It’s not that old. It’s not archaeological.' But," she continued, "it gives us an opportunity to document those deposits before they're impacted by development. It's important to consider our early 20th century sites."
A lot of history happened on this land where segregated school children played… and where nuns are now creating a neighborhood center for single mothers to get good job skills. It's land where the history has been unearthed and where hope is being planted.