Excavating the historic Fort Benton kitchen
Story By Josh Chase, North Central Montana District Archaeologist
Photos by Kirsten Boyle, Natural Resource Specialist, Havre Field Office
Conservation Corps and youth in sifting soil and
identifying artifacts.
BLM employees, Montana Conservation Corps interns, volunteers and the River and Plains Society of Fort Benton recently came together to excavate a historic kitchen in the Birthplace of Montana.
Constructed in 1854, the kitchen at the original "Fort Benton" provided employees of the American Fur company a place to butcher game and prepare meals for hungry traders, trappers, and Native Americans until 1869.
contained a concentration of artifacts the
previous day.
The U.S Army acquired the Fort later that year but shuttered its doors in 1881 when the command moved to Fort Shaw near present-day Great Falls, Montana. Following a period of disrepair and neglect, the kitchen was removed and salvaged sometime before 1895.
Throughout the years the River and Plains Society has diligently recreated and reconstructed what the historic Fort would have looked like during the fur trade era. Several key elements of the Fort have been recreated, providing locals and tourists alike a glimpse into the past with period-correct construction and interpretation. In 2021 the kitchen is slotted to return to the landscape but before that, the remains of the structure needed to be located and assessed.
BLM staff were asked to lend expertise related to excavation, determine where the building originally was and if anything remained. Utilizing a U.S. Army engineering drawing from 1869, the edges of the building were staked and multiple subsurface probes were emplaced.
These shovel tests yielded artifacts one would expect from a kitchen and pointed to a concentration of intense usage on one corner of where the building was believed to be. With this in mind, larger excavation units were emplaced and a band of soil was located indicative to the presence of adobe bricks that were used to construct the building in 1854.
Rifle shell casings, gun flints, hundreds of hand-pounded nails, butchered bone fragments and a slew of other artifacts are currently being cataloged and sorted to plot the exact footprint of the building. This information will aid in the reconstruction of the structure and provide valuable insight into a brief period of time during which Montana was born.