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Archaeologists dig for buried history at Bragg

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — The longleaf pine forests on Fort Bragg where soldiers prepare for battle conceal more than the Army’s training secrets.

Pieces of North Carolina’s history are hidden there, too.

Dirt piles cover chimneys that once blew smoke from Scottish settlers’ homes. The bones of Civil War soldiers — Confederate and Union — lie in mass graves beneath wire grass fields. Pointed stones fashioned by Native Americans have been found from as far back as 12,000 B.C.

There are about 4,200 defined archaeological sites on Fort Bragg and 290 have been declared “worthy of more research” by a little-known office that protects and explores the sites.

For families interested in their genealogy, military history buffs or people just interested in the way this region developed, the office is a link the past.

The Fort Bragg Cultural Resources office employs six full-time archaeologists, historians and preservation specialists. They evaluate the land, examine existing buildings, collect relics and study the way people once lived.

Fort Bragg and Camp Mackall cover more than 160,000 acres — most of which the Army bought in 1919. As shopping centers and developments sprouted in the surrounding communities, land on the reservation stayed untouched.

“It is absolutely unique in the state of North Carolina and in the southeast,” said Joe Herbert, an archaeologist with Fort Bragg Cultural Resources, “because it is such a huge chunk of land and we know so much about it because we have been working on it for a decade.”

A tour through the Cultural Resources offices off Butner Road shows the fruits of their excavations: Stone points from prehistoric times are displayed in a wall cabinet near bullets and buckles from the Civil War.

Tools used by settlers to collect turpentine from the longleaf pines are in a glass case. Photographs and maps describe the Longstreet and Sandy Grove churches, where Highland Scots attended Presbyterian services in Gaelic centuries ago. Both structures have been preserved on Fort Bragg.

Longstreet Church, hidden off Longstreet Road in the back woods of the reservation, is a simple white structure constructed almost entirely of pine.

Two doors lead inside from the front of the building. A pine pulpit and pews fill the room in straight lines. A board divides the pews.

A wooden balcony overlooks the church from three walls.

Historians study this building to reconstruct how the people who worshipped here lived, said Linda Carnes-McNaughton, an archaeologist and curator.

The church likely was built by African slaves, Carnes-McNaughton said. One of the double front doors would have been used by women, the other by men. The board separating the pews was the dividing line that kept the sexes apart. The balcony surrounding the room likely was used by slaves.

The building belongs to the Army, said Charles Heath, an archaeologist with the office, but soldiers do not have open access to it.

Some buildings on Old Post, in the heart of Fort Bragg, are managed by historians and preservation specialists at Cultural Resources but used as offices by soldiers.

At other sites, if soldiers missed one of the signs designating the area protected, they never would know they had hiked over history.

Such is the case with homes used by the Highland Scots who settled this area. In some areas, only a trained eye can recognize where people once lived. The clues can be as simple as a piece of brick that once was part of a chimney, or a patch of garlic that still springs up, hundreds of years later. Soldiers in training can use those lands, but they cannot dig rifle pits there.

Soldiers use Monroe’s Crossroads, where Confederate and Union soldiers fought an impromptu battle near the end of the Civil War, to study military tactics and learn from the mistakes of the past.

Archaeologists say they have surveyed about 80 percent of the land open to them on Fort Bragg, but they have countless sites left to explore.

“Essentially, what we preserve is part of American heritage,” Heath said. “It ties us in with our past and brings a certain context to how we live.”