Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial, The 1993 Park-wide Archeological Survey of South Bass Island, Ottawa County, Ohio

• Main Author: Pennington, Rose E.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln 2015
• Subjects: Lockwood; Archeological Survey
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/natlpark/180; https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/natlpark/article/1186/viewcontent/Pennington_AR8_2015_Perry_s_victory_unlocked.pdf

During early May, 1993, personnel from the Midwest Archeological Center conducted a park-wide archeological survey of Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial (PEVI) on South Bass Island, Ottawa County, Ohio. Much of PEVI’s 10.15 hectares (25.38 acres) rest on a heavily filled and graded tombolo, and a small portion of the park had been surveyed previously. For this reason, the 1993 investigations surveyed only a total of 5.6 hectares (14 acres). The artifact yield was low and much of the project area was found to have been previously disturbed by grading. However, one historic site was discovered. A small test trench was excavated in order to explore a structural foundation uncovered to the northeast of the memorial column. Apparently this foundation was associated with the late-nineteenth-century Mary Lockwood estate, a substantial house and vineyard depicted in extant photographs dating to the construction of the memorial column in 1912-1913. This foundation was recorded as site 33OT244 in the Ohio Archaeological Inventory (OAI). Additionally, this report includes a brief discussion of an unmonitored backhoe trench that was excavated for the purpose of installing a new sewer line segment in the west end of the park. This survey noted evidence for the presence of an historic midden near the north seawall. The circa 1890s-1920s artifacts recovered from the backhoe trench suggest that a redeposited portion of the Put-in-Bay town dump may have been used as fill over the tombolo in this area.