UMass students search Fowler-Clark farm for artifacts

The Fowler-Clark farmhouse on Norfolk Street is one of only a few landmarks remaining from Boston’s agricultural past. The original owner, Samuel Fowler was a yeoman who farmed a large estate in the late 1700’s, at the time Mattapan was a farming community and celebrated breadbasket of the neighboring city of Dorchester.

Historic Boston is currently in the process of purchasing the half -acre property and will work with local organizations to restore the home to residential use and turn the surrounding property into a public garden.

“It is a Boston landmark,” said Kathy Kottaridis, the executive director of Historic Boston Inc. “It is one of the few remaining farmsteads in the city and is thought to date to 1786. The house likely stands where it was originally built which is rare for a building of its age.”

The barn adjacent to the farmhouse dates from the early 1800s. The properties were designated as historic landmarks in the 1990s. Thus, an archeological survey of the must be completed before any renovations can be made to the property.

Historic Boston has turned to UMass Boston for assistance in this department. Last week, John Steinberg, a research scientist from the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at UMass Boston, and geophysicist Brian Damiata led a team of graduate students as they conducted a survey of the property’s subsoil. Using a microwave device known as the Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) the team scanned the earth a few meters at a time. They searched for geometric shapes, like a line, which may indicate a wall or fragment of a structure. The readings will be used to make a map of the subsoil for any archaeologists who later dig on the property.

“What we would really like find is an Outhouse,” said Steinberg. “We can learn a lot about the way people lived from parasites, and what they discarded as opposed to kept. Close to the barn and right front of the house they may have to dig a little bit to make sure there is not anything there. It seems as if they dug out the foundation at some point and may buried something in the process.”

“Most of the time you don’t see it on one pass,” explained Damiata. “If you can trace an anomaly from one scan to the next, that is when you start see shapes. Using software we are able to create a more detailed map of the subsoil and any unnatural formations become clearer.”

The team’s work was funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant is also funding a similar exploration of former Viking farmlands in Iceland.

The Fowler-Clark farmhouse has a long and storied history. The land it stands on was originally owned by a revolutionary war veteran. The house then passed through five families. In the the 1940s it was owned by Jorge Epstein, who ran a very successful business selling rescued construction material from demolished or refurbished residences in Boston. Epstein incorporated much of what he found into his home garden which was “manicured like the Versailles court in France,” according to his son Norman Epstein in a 2006 interview with the Boston Globe.

The property fell on hard times following the death of its most recent owner. The city of Boston seized the buildings and surrounding land in 2013 after fears that the landmark could deteriorate into an unsalvageable condition. The seizure triggered a lawsuit from the Epstein family estate that owned the farm. They estate entered into an agreement to sell the land and buildings to Historic Boston earlier this year.


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