A lovely day to close out the field portion of our work at the First Presbyterian Church site. With some relief and with some sadness, we returned the approximately 1045 cubic feet of carefully screened dirt, brick rubble, and limestone to the excavation units.

When we arrived at the site on June 2, the church lot appeared as in the following photo.

Yesterday, we left the site "ready" for some assistance from the City Parks & Recreation department in moving our enormous pile of dirt (see below).

When we departed today, we left the area as it appears below -- the grass will quickly spread into the nicely sifted dirt. If necessary, this fall, we will come back and seed the areas with grass to complete the restoration to its former appearance.

As the "field" part of our project concludes, the staff and crew leave you with another crew photo -- tired and dirty, but satisfied with the success of our endeavor.

Now the "lab" part of our project starts -- processing the artifacts recovered from the site (washing, sorting, cataloguing, and analyzing) will take about two months. Additional historical and architectural research will continue at the same time. Recording and mapping of the surviving tombstones in the cemetery will continue. By early-mid fall, we will begin preparing the paperwork for nomination of the church and cemetery to the National Register of Historic Places.

Although the fieldwork and the daily updates to the webpage end today, the project itself will continue for several more months -- and the webpage will be updated as we have new things to add.

We hope you've enjoyed tracking our progress -- and will continue to do so as the project continues.