Iron Hill Museum In the News

Iron Hill Museum visitors experience earlier cultures

By ROBIN BROWN
The News Journal

Six-year-old Cheyenne Tanner of Hockessin stared at the paper in her hand with an expression that seemed serious, considering her face was painted like a monkey.

"Wow," she said. "I'm a junior archaeologist."

Her certificate represented a day of fun and learning at the Iron Hill Museum's 10th annual Archaeology Festival, and a great day out with "Gaga."

Gaga is her grandmother, Kathy Tanner of the Newark area, who said the event offered a rare opportunity to experience American Indian culture, dance and worship.

"And I loved the activities on the rustic way of making things," she said, including butter-churning, pit cooking and pottery making.

Cheyenne liked making a snow woman from clay, but her heart belonged to the lambs, born less than a week ago at Greenbank Mill, an education and historic interpretation center near Prices Corner.

"They were just so little and cute and everything," she said.

On topics from archery to iron-making, many history-related groups and their members gave presentations, demonstrations and talks under a pavilion built as an Eagle Scout project.

For example, staff of the John Dickinson Plantation near Dover gave an herb presentation, Welsh Society founder Peter Williams gave a talk and longtime resident Viola Palo of the Delaware Valley Finnish Americans told of a bygone era when the area was dominated by Finns' egg farms.

Her son, Roy, president of the Finnish cultural group, said members enjoyed having their first table at the festival and aim to return.

Activities also focused on the site's two schools for black children -- ruins that are being excavated and the other, the Iron Hill Museum itself, once a segregated school.

Operated by the nonprofit Delaware Academy of Science, the museum has been a focus of Delaware Archaeology Month since its start. The economy has led to fewer state- and business-sponsored events, said archaeologist Wade P. Catts, an Archaeology Month founder, but the program still is successful.

Tim Mancl, president of the Delaware Archaeological Society, said uncounted hundreds of families and individuals have attended events statewide, such as a 17th century symposium

Copyright 2009 The News Journal.

Weather dampens attendance at annual archaeology festival

Those who braved the rain were treated to a variety of demonstrations - from cooking to arrowhead-making

By ROBIN BROWN
The News Journal

Colonial cooking was firing up and artifact digs were about to get under way when rain came Sunday to the Hungry for History Archaeology Festival at Iron Hill Museum.

"We've been excavating [the site of] a tenant house that we've been working on for a couple of years and a couple of prehistoric sites...and we just had them opened up when it started to rain," said archaeologist Bob Hoffman.

"It's mighty muddy, but I'm glad we came," said Tony Shahan, executive director of the Greenbank Mill & Phillips Farm near Prices Corner, part of the Bloomery Project volunteer team that demonstrated how wrought iron was made from Iron Hill's ore in the early 1700s.

The rain also dampened attendance at the annual event, one of the most popular programs among dozens of celebrations and events held statewide each May for Delaware Archaeology Month.

"It's unfortunate," said the nonprofit museum's volunteer coordinator, Brian Shertz, "a lot of great people stepped up and put in a lot of time to present the activities."

Despite the weather, he and other said, the day gave guests a chance to visit the county's Iron Hill Park before its reopening next Saturday and to see demonstrations of skills such as archery, arrowhead-making and cooking in Colonial style.

The "time chef" program "is something that appeals to everyone," said former board member and volunteer face-painter Valerie George.

Guests also had the chance to see the one-room museum building itself, the former Iron Hill Public School 112-C, built in 1923 as one of more than 80 schools for black children and given to the state by philanthropist Pierre S. du Pont.

The museum, operated by the nonprofit Delaware Academy of Science, is undergoing a restoration financed by a grant from Lowe's Charitable and Education Foundation through a trust administered by the National Register of Historic Places.

Since 1967, the academy has operated the museum - dedicated to human and natural history of the region and visited by nearly 10,000 children a year - under an agreement with the former Newark Special School District, which also provided two acres of surrounding land.

New Castle County, which is planning a new museum and education center on the parkland it owns behind the old school, in 1971 provided the museum with two more acres - including the areas where activities were held Sunday.

Year-round programs offered by the museum center on the Iron Hill area, focusing on earth science, archaeology, American Indian studies, natural history and paleontology. The Delaware Academy of Science also offers programs for teachers.

Copyright 2008 The News Journal.

Digging into Earth's secrets

Intriguing and historical, Iron Hill is a quirky wonderland for exploration

By KATHY CANAVAN
Special to the News Journal

Drivers who speed down I-95 past Iron Hill probably never imagine:

•George Washington stood atop the hill and spied on the British on Aug. 26, 1777:

•Minqua Indians raided Lenni Lenape villages there in 1661.

•The governor of Pennsylvania operated an iron forge there in 1725.

•The yellow, one-room schoolhouse there houses a stuffed brown bear, mosasaur bones, a whale's shoulder bone, a 10-million-year-old extinct oyster shell and live Madagascar hissing cockroach babies born last summer.

Iron Hill, now a quirky wonderland for children interested in science, has had more past lives than Shirley MacLaine. It was an American Indian mining site. British troops pitched their tents there in 1777. Caesar A. Rodney, nephew of the signer of the Declaration of Independence, led an encampment of American troops there during the War of 1812. P.S. du Pont built a state-of-the-art African-American school there in 1923.

What mineral first drew American Indians to Iron Hill? The answer isn't the no-brainer you expect. It was jasper, not iron ore, that drew them to Iron Hill in the 1600s and possibly earlier. Archaeologists believe they quarried the hill's jasper, a sharp-edged variety of quartz, and made it into tools on-site. The evidence: They found thousands of jasper chips leftover by the toolmakers.

Iron Hill does get its name from the iron ore mined there for about 200 years. Seven abandoned pit mines still dot the hill.

Today its principal attractions are the offbeat Iron Hill Museum and Iron Hill Park.

The Museum features a willy-nilly collection that boasts a petrified tree trunk, a stuffed coyote and rocks that float (pumice), rocks that write (lead ore), rocks that smell (sulfur-streaked spalerite), even rocks that make noise (limonite concretion).

The park that surrounds the museum is a favorite of mountain bikers because it features 40-foot drops and a 30-foot-deep half-pipe. Walking the museum grounds and the county park, visitors will spot a large wildflower garden, ancient mining sites, a pond teeming with frogs, and the old schoolhouse, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

A new playground was constructed this year. A bark park for dogs is slated to open in the spring. A new entrance road and a learning center will be added, and the schoolhouse will be restored.

Copyright 2007 The News Journal.

Summer Camp Scientists

By KATHY CANAVAN
Special to The News Journal

How do we know what happened at Iron Hill when the American Indians lived there if they couldn't write it down? Archaeologists figured it out by observing - and by shoveling.

"It's like doing a 100-piece puzzle and you have eight of the pieces," said Iron Hill Museum Director Laura Mackie Lee, a historian by training. "You have to look for clues."

Archaeologists search the landscape. One thing they found on Iron Hill was "debitage" - waste material. They found leftover chips of jasper, thousands and thousands of them, leftover from fashioning points for hunting spears.

"We knew the Native Americans could not go to Lowe's and buy their tools, so they needed to come here and dig for jasper to use for spear points, and we know they couldn't go to McDonald's to feed their children, so they had to use spears to hunt for their food."

Archaeologists working at Iron Hill used shovel-test pits. They tested every so many feet."It's almost like putting a piece of graph paper on the ground and testing every so many squares," Lee said. "You test every so many squares on the ground, and, if you find a hot spot, you dig there."

Iron Hill is teeming with children every summer for its five camps - junior archaeologist, junior geologist, junior paleontologist, junior naturalist and junior entomologist.

The young archaeologists perform digs and take a field trip. Last year they visited an old pirate's house in Rehoboth Beach.

The geologists go rock-collecting on-site. You can spot them by their red hands - from the iron ore. They take a field trip and each child compiles his own rock collection by the week's end.

The paleontologists usually go fossil-collecting on the C&D Canal and take a field trip to a museum. By the end of the week, they each amass a fossil collection.

The junior naturalists go out in the field to study plants, insects, amphibians, rocks, and fungi. The camp includes a canoeing field trip.

The junior entomologists learn to catch, pin and mount insect specimens to form collections of their own. They collect at Iron Hill and go on an overnight trip to catch nocturnal insects.

Copyright 2007 The News Journal

Have You Tried...Getting a lesson in natural history

Iron Hill Museum programs cater to kids

By CHRISTOPHER YASIEJKO
The News Journal

Maybe you know a kid who still harbors visions of sugar-plums. But just in case you know one who'd rather dissect owl pellets, have I got the place for you.

Tucked just off Old Baltimore Pike, less than a mile west of the Del. 896 intersection just south of I-95, a schoolhouse once reserved for black students reopened in the late 1960s as the Iron Hill Museum.

The old-fashioned natural history museum, operated by the Delaware Academy of Science, is the primary resource for the study of the human and natural histories of the Iron Hill area. It's filled with rocks and minerals, taxidermy and fossils.

Schools, scouts and community groups can reserve programs seven days a week. And classes sponsored by the Newark Department of Parks and Recreation are available to the Public year-round.

The second Saturday of each month is Science Saturday, when admission is free and kids can explore a different theme each month. Popular topics include insects (complete with live specimens) and owls. For the latter, kids using tweezers dissect owl pellets, 2- to 3-inch clumps of regurgitated fur and bone from an owl's prey. Kids can see what the animal ate, such as two tiny skulls from two mice.

Copyright 2007 The News Journal