Last Saturday, five members of our Wayne’s Legion Research Group made a detecting recon at a new permission farm field – which is directly across State Route 121 from the 1791 Fort Jefferson site. Having recovered hundreds of St. Clair and Wayne’s Legion period materials on properties that border the north and south sides of the fort’s small Ohio state park, we expected that there would be a few stray artifacts that needed to be located and recovered in this eastward direction, at the very least.
As we began branching off in different detection directions, I began working a slope that was about a quarter mile from the fort but was facing in that direction. Immediately, I began recovering .62 caliber musketballs, along with rifle balls and buck shots (all being in fired conditions) in a very concentrated area. One of my recoveries was a pair of .62 caliber balls that were fused together, as a result of one ball being embedded in a wooden target and the second ball having impacted almost directly on top of the first. Ian called my recovery an example of a “Robin Hood” marksmanship shoot. That soldier definitely wanted the extra gill of rum for the best shot of the day!
As I wire flagged each recovery with appropriate colored wire flags (red = .62 caliber, Blue = rifle ball sizes, and lime green = buck shot), it was obvious that nearly all of this fired lead was massaed together because of flintlock weapons being aimed at the specific location … a target shooting range, most certainly.
Jim, Chad, Mark, and Ian gravitated towards this area they’d been noticing I hadn’t moved away from for about two hours, and immediately, they began detecting and flagging fired lead balls, too.
By the end of our seven-hour outing, we’d recovered 151 fired lead balls, plus a few pieces of camp lead and a nice Tombac button from the perimeter areas.
At the end of the day, Ian GPS’ed each color-coded flag. With these GPS coordinates, I’ll be mapping out the exact locations of all our finds on a Google Earth image. Our oppinion is that this target range was from the Wayne’s Legion occupation period (1793-1796), since the inclusion of buck shots is an indication of the Legion cartride loads having been fired, here at General Wayne’s direction, he’d ordered the cartridges for the Legion’s Charleville muskets to be loaded with “one .62 cal ball and three large buck shot”, each.
TwoTarget shooting area associated with St. Clair or Wayne’s Legion Fort Jefferson 1791-1796 occupation period. (Greg Shipley photo)My photos of the flagged area aren’t the easiest to make out, as the sun was very bright, but you should be able to make out some of the flags in concentration. My Google Earth mapping will make for a much easier interpretation.
Thanks, go to Ian, for securing this new property permission, so that this new bit of early 1790s Ohio military history info could be created by our discoveries. He cleaning and cataloging all of these recovered artifacts, now. The only downside of that day was that the skin in my arms and neck were almost as red as the fed flags we’d used, by the time our adventure had come to an end. But, worth the minor sunburn pain, for sure.
Greg Shipley, Guest Author
