The Jesuit mission at Newtowne Neck in Compton started in the 1640s, and the current church there dates back to 1731.
But there was an earlier church thought to be have been located at the cemetery of St. Francis Xavier, which is about a half mile away.
A team of archaeologists is now working to find where the 1662 church was.
The underground finds have been encouraging so far.
Several tobacco pipe stems, red tiles, nails and layers of oyster shells have been found, said Scott Lawrence of Grave Concerns. His company is contracted by the church to locate the old chapel.
The cemetery site used to be accessible by water, but the small creek has been silted in for a very long time.
Working at the rear of the old cemetery, which used to be waterfront, Lawrence said, “We are convinced we have a [building] site here.” Not a lot of domestic artifacts have been dug up so far, which wouldn’t be in a church anyway, he said.
The challenge is to determine if the site was a house or a chapel.
Lawrence already inventoried the cemetery. On at least two occasions, the cemetery was so overgrown that the church paid to have it cleared. Bulldozers knocked over headstones sometime in the 1950s and 1980s to clear the undergrowth, said the Rev. Brian Sanderfoot.
The headstones were propped back up, but a lot of broken stones were thrown into a pile in the woods, Lawrence said.
“There’re graves all over here that are unmarked,” he said.
Lawrence and archaeologist Jim Gibbs and volunteers opened up three 5-foot-by-5-foot sections of earth to inspect the colonial-era soil, which is only about 6 inches down. The land there was never plowed.
Smoothing out the exposed soils with trowels, Gibbs and Lawrence think they found a grave site in the section and possibly a post hole, which would indicate a building corner.
“A lot of archaeology is common sense,” Gibbs said, as they worked on a Friday in August before Hurricane Irene hit.
A change in the color of the soil indicates that the ground was previously dug up for some reason. “Something’s going on here, it’s just confusing at the moment,” Gibbs said.
But once a post hole is found, there are sure to be others close by. “They’re like roaches, you find one, you find a bunch,” Gibbs said.
The 1662 church was locked up in 1704 when Catholics were forbidden to worship openly in the Maryland colony. The building fell into disuse and was torn down in 1719, Sanderfoot said.
The religious persecution later ended and the current church was built in 1731.
“It ebbs and flows,” Sanderfoot said. “The nature of religious persecution, it ebbs and flows.”
Lawrence said the team will continue work this weekend.
jbabcock@somdnews.com
