Listen to audio by Dr. James Tuck
The colony soon outgrew its original four acres, and houses and other buildings began to be build outside of the original palisade. In this area we found the remains of one of those houses and the well we think was associated with it. The house measured about 18 x 38 feet (5.5 x 11.6 m) and had a stone chimney, the base of which is still preserved in the eastern gable end. We don't think the house was built until the latter part of the 17th-century, perhaps not even until after the Dutch raid in 1673. We know that the house was burned very late in the century, probably in the French raid in 1696 when the colony was destroyed. We know this because we found burned timbers and beams as we excavated through the layers that covered what was once the floor of the house. We also found some coins from William and Mary and William III. Since they were not on the English throne in 1673 during the Dutch raid, we know it must have been occupied after that time and up into the 1690s.

If you look to the right and up the hill a little south of the house, you can see the remains of a stone well. The top two feet (0.6 metres) have been reconstructed so that nobody would fall in the well, but the 25 feet (7.6 metres) below that are just as they were built, and very carefully built, back in the latter part of the 17th century. We suspected all along that the house and the well were associated, simply because they are very close to each another, but in the last little while we have been finding some cross mends, or joins between pottery and glass from the well and pottery and glass from the house. We can be quite certain that both were in use at the same time, maybe for 25 or 30 years before the French raid in 1696.

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© 1999, Colony of Avalon Foundation.

Revised March 2002.