Caves of Brownsville - A peek inside

Today we continue our look at the series of caves that once stood behind the main street of Brownsville, Minnesota. I went down on a marvelous early spring day after getting an invite from the local historical society who now own the two caves we will visit today.

The entrances are similar and right next to each other, so I will just show one of them.  Note the later cement additions.  It is possible that the backs of the buildings were in fact a few feet away from the cliff face.  I did not see much evidence of any modification of the cliff face to accept beams or metal pegs.

On the other hand, the foundation stones seen up above may have been the back wall of the building - both of these appear to have been pre Civil War hotels - and the caves may have been directly accessed through the ground floor.  Note also that the doorway here is too narrow to be practical as a brewery cave.

This cave has a rectangular shape and a slightly arched roof.  The latter had a thin coat of plaster on it but this has fallen off in places.  The plaster would have reduced the fall of sand and debris from the roof.  You could tolerate this with beer kegs perhaps.  But if the hotel kept produce, meat, wine etc in cold storage those might be commodities less tolerant of a little grit.

The other cave was smaller and somewhat crudely made.  The historical society has not yet cleaned out all the old stuff, hence the beauty parlor chair in the foreground!  Incidentally, this part of Minnesota is known for its orchards and these caves were used for apple storage until fairly recently.

It was fun to spend a bit of time investigating the caves in detail.  I am always interested in clues as to how these caves were made and why they had certain design features.   Consider the vent holes that most caves have, whether they stored beer or other temperature sensitive commodities.  The vents can sometimes extend upwards a very great distance but are invariably seen to be perfectly round. Nobody could shinny up a chimney that narrow while carving such a perfect hole.  I have long suspected that some sort of auger system must be used, basically a big drill bit to which one could add extra segments as the boring progressed.  And after years of search I finally found evidence.

Note the central divot and the circular grooves further out?  This looks like spot where the vent driller was placed, turned a few times and then moved further back in the cave where a shaft was then drilled to the surface.

Here is another interesting feature, one that appears to be specific to non brewery caves:

Nicely cut ledges for setting goods on.  I have seen something a bit similar in the Wolf brewery caves in Stillwater, but in general this sort of thing would be useless when the main goal was keg storage.

As to how the caves were formed, they appear to have just been chiseled out with pick axes.  St. Peter sandstone is easy to work with when fresh.  After exposure to air it firms up rock solid. This next picture shows pick axe marks.  Note that they are small and round near the ceiling, then turn into longer and angled grooves further down.  That is the reality of how one would swing a pick axe.  Near the ceiling you have no room for a downward swing.  I am surprised that the lower marks do not show a decided "right hander" orientation.

I close with a mystery.  In some caves you see  mysterious holes drilled into the sides of the cave walls.  Some are solo, others as below are in lines.  A single hole here and there might be a test drilling to see that the stone is solid. But an array of them is odd.  I have no compelling theory for it. Not yet anyway.

These caves are locked but the local historical society folks are very friendly.  If you are interested in this and in other history of this scenic part of the world I suggest you get in touch with them.

The Seven Caves of Brownsville (Minnesota)

Brownsville is a pretty little community.  It is in far southeastern Minnesota right along the Mississippi.  Of course it got its start early, back when steamboats were the main method of transportation.  In the 1850s it had a busy main street with all the necessities of 19th century life...saloons, hotels, stores, offices.

But prosperity went elsewhere and the boom was over by the 1870s.  Oh, folks still lived there but it became a sleepier place.  Eventually the main street went from a narrow dirt road to a four lane highway, taking out all that was left of Old Brownsville.  But because the town was tucked in so tightly to the river bluffs, the original settlers had dug a series of caves.  These are the storage cellars of Pre-Civil War Brownsville.  I am numbering them from north to south with my comments on each:

Cave One.  A narrow doorway and fairly high up in the cliff.  This seems to have been an ice storage facility.  This is interesting, as it suggests that the tunnel goes quite a ways back into the cliff.  You don't dig a cave to store a few trays of ice cubes.  

I have seen, and will attempt to add on, a picture of this door with a ramp at its bottom and with two guys sliding a large block of ice down it.

Cave Two we have seen in our earlier visit.  As you can see in the second photo it has all the features of a beer storage cave.  In fact I think that's what it was.  The spot corresponds to the location of a hotel owned by a man named Fred Gluck (great name, makes you think of the sound of pouring beer!). Gluck was also a partner in one of the two breweries in Brownsville, so it would make sense for him to store some of the "product" here close to where it would be consumed.

Cave Three looks like an "oops".  Somebody started digging and just quit.  Did the building project go belly up or did they hit some hard rock?

Cave Four has the look of a natural cave that has been expanded some.  It lacks the straight edges and gently arched top of the other caves.

Cave Five is another of the classic "brewery cave" type.  And it might be one.  One of the breweries in Brownsville claimed to have excavated a 100 foot long cave if a 1866 newspaper article is not just the boomerism of 19th century civic pride.  Cave Two only goes back 30 or 40 feet tops. Another possibility would have this the cave from the earliest brewery in town, one run by a man named Knoblauch.  It only lasted a few years in the early 1850s, and its location is unknown.  Of course a hotel or grocer might also find use for a nice cave.

Below are Caves Six and Seven.  Come back next time for a look inside!

Meta Sudans - And other Roman Turning Points

The ancient monument called "Meta Sudans" fooled me.  I assumed when I first heard of it that its name was geographic in origin.  There is of course a country called Sudan, and although the Romans would have called it something else (Nubia? Aetheopia?) it made a certain kind of sense.  Romans were big on geographic bragging, witness the nicknames given to various Imperial worthies...Germanicus, Brittanicus etc.  But in fact the name means something else entirely.  Here is an artist's impression of what the Meta Sudans would have looked like in Imperial times. (image courtesy of Wikimedia, originally by "Claushalls").  In the background is the Arch of Constantine.

This is probably an accurate depiction, as several similar structures are known from around the Empire including one in Algeria that is more or less intact.

The Meta Sudans dates to the 1st Century AD.  As seen above it was covered in nice marble, all stripped off for other uses after the Fall of Rome.  In this 1858 view, with the Colosseum in the background, it is a sad little thing, just the remnant of the original brick core.

What the name actually meant, and what finally happened to the Meta Sudans are related stories.

In Latin meta means a destination or a turning point.  We keep this sense in a few modern words such as metamorphosis. And sudans, oddly, means sweating.  Literally the Meta Sudans was a "turning point that sweats".  In fact it is felt to have been a fountain but not one that shoots water upwards. The water probably flowed down the sides like a modern day "water feature" used in decor.

The part about it being a turning point is because that is where Roman Triumphs, the victory parades they held from time to time, took a turn.  A meta was also the somewhat pyramidal shaped markers on the "spina" of a Roman circus that indicated a turn.

We tend to regard Mussolini as a B level villain in the history of the 20th century.  He caused a great deal of death and destruction but certainly not in the class of Hitler or Stalin.  But when it came to archaeological misdeeds his legacy is abysmal.  He wanted to have modern day Triumphs in which his showy but ultimately mediocre military could do what they did best, march around in swell uniforms. (By the way, with current international tensions running high the entire vicinity of the Colosseum/Meta Sudans is still under the watchful eyes of well accoutered soldiers of uncertain effectiveness!)

So that military parades could go unimpeded through the Arch of Constantine and make a nice smart turn, he had the remains of the Meta Sudans bulldozed in 1936.  Later revisions of the area have shown the foundations of the monument.

Here are the sad remains of the Meta Sudans in 2015.  Nothing more than a wide circle of stone foundation in a grassy field between the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine.  I suspect that tens of thousands of people walk past it on an average day, and that you could count on one hand the number of visitors who recognize it.

There were actually two other monuments in Rome called "meta".  One still exists. Neither name had any accuracy.

Between Hadrian's tomb and the Circus of Nero (now St. Peter's Square) there was a pyramid shaped structure that was called the Meta Romuli.  Here is a view by Pirro Ligorio from 1561. It appears to show a lot of things that he could not have actually seen by that date, but is a nice representation. Note the depiction of actual metas at the ends of the spina inside the circus.

It was probably a tomb.  The notion that Romulus was buried there is of course nonsense.  This structure has vanished without a trace but a quite similar one, the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius was built into the Aurelian Walls and has survived many historic misfortunes in good shape.  The Pyramid of Cestius was sometimes called the Meta Remi, the supposed place where Romulus'brother Remus was interred.  Again with no basis in history whatsoever.

Before leaving the, well, "meta-analysis" of the word Meta, I have to show one final image.  When we visited the marvelous Roman site of Ostia we walked around in the back sections.  We had them pretty much to ourselves, just the ruins, my wife and I, a few fellow eccentrics and lots of lizards. We walked right into a former Roman mill, where donkeys patiently turned millstones grinding grain for the bakeries.  Check this out:

The mills were made of hard volcanic stone, so as to reduce the amount of tooth damaging grit in the daily diet.  The upper part of the mill was an hourglass shaped stone with slots for the handles.  These were then slowly rotated over the lower part of the mill....conical shaped stones called "metas"!
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Etymology side note.  The country Sudan gets its name from an Arabic phrase, "Bilad-al-sudan" which means literally "country of the blacks".  Having noted that the Italian word for south is "sud" I had speculated on a Latin origin.  Alas, in Latin south is "australi" the source naturally of Australia! Languages tend to swirl around and imitate each other over time.  Was "sud" a carry over from the Saracen invaders of early medieval Italy?

Forgotten Brewery Caves - Winona, Gilmore Valley

One of the very earliest breweries in "outstate" Minnesota was established in 1855 near Winona in what is called Gilmore Valley.  The proprietors shifted around a bit but for most of its 22 year existence it was run by a man named C.C. Beck.

This was a rather large enterprise for its time, with an output of 2,500 barrels in 1875.  It was noted that 200 tons of ice were required annually to keep the beer cold down in the storage cellars.

A catastrophic fire in 1877 destroyed the brewery and Beck decided to retire to farming.

Beck's storage caves were extensive and their remains can be seen near US Highway 14 at Gilmore creek, on the edge of the St. Mary's University campus.

Here is the setting.  The building to the left is a cottage owned by the University.  Two stone structures are to the right.

Here is one with a conventional door.  I think this may be a later addition. This was probably the back wall of the brewery.

The area behind this is a hillside, but it looks as if this cave may have collapsed leaving a depression. Between this and the next structure are some odd chimneys.  They look like ventilation shafts so likely there are more caves beneath.  But they also look newer than 1877 and appear undamaged by fire. The caves were probably used for some other storage purpose after the brewery burned.

The second area of stonework is deeper down and partly buried.  It has what looks like a conventional cave entrance.

The barriers are sufficient to prevent unwelcome visitors but of course I snapped an arm's length picture of the inside....

These caves are on private property and look unsafe.  Leave them alone please.

UPDATE 1 December,  2016.

The Winona Daily News of 26 May, 1967 provides some interesting notes.  At that time a new business was being launched at the site.  The West Gate Gardens was a combination greenhouse, florists, landscaping business.  The owners lived on site, probably in the little house seen above.  To quote in part:  "A man made electrified cave goes through the hillside at the rear of the property.  The main shaft is 300 feet long and two rooms off the main entrance are each 50 by 25.  The nursery men use the area for storing seedlings and bare root stock."

No doubt the newer looking yellow brick chimneys date from this era and show which parts were then in use.  As I said above, the site is not one you should attempt to enter.  T.

Vindolanda 2015 - Cleaning Up.

I am home.  Back at work in fact with all the traces of Roman horse manure laboriously scrubbed out of my fingernails before my first shift.

Of course the work back at the site continues on without me.  One can only hope that the supervising archeologist on occasion looks at the current crew as they wobble their way down the wheelbarrow run and recalls our hard working team with a smile....

Some of the finds from our session need a quick revisit.  Remember this one?

A heavy bronze cylinder, it was said to be of uncertain use.  Well, in a museum at another Roman site I found an entire display case of these.

My example probably corresponds to one of the ones on the left.  The information that accompanied this display again said they were not certain about these artifacts, but it was considered likely that they were ornamental bead work for cavalry horses.  That would fit the context of where we found it, in what is fairly certain to have been a barracks for a late Roman cavalry unit.

We find lots and lots of pottery shards.  Amphorae are the big boys, some of them are over a half inch thick.  On a very muddy day we hauled up some big slabs and put them into the pottery bag for washing.  Next day we learned that one of them had writing on it:

This was incised in the clay when the amphora was made.  Lots of them came from Spain.  A very long trip to end up in a cold, slushy trench on the northern frontier of Brittania.  Note also the iron nail fused onto the surface.  This is a "graffito" rather than a maker's mark.  Meaning unclear.

Ah, remember our writing tablet?  Here is a closer look;

Squint away, it might say something but I can't see it.  The process of stabilizing and reading these is very complex.  This is a "Stylus tablet".  Covered in wax it was a sort of ancient "Etch-a-Sketch" that could be wiped smooth and used again.  Note the raised edge.  I was quite happy that we had found this little guy, and still have hopes it might have a brief message fragment on it.  A few days after we left, and presumably not far from where we were excavating, a much better example came up.  From the official Vindolanda site:

This appears to be the back side, but as you can see there is a lot of tablet waiting to yield its ancient secrets.  Or maybe just an 1800 year old grocery list....

Mussolini and the Virgins

To most people Roman religion was simply a tossed salad of whatever deities the Legions picked up on their march around the known world.  You kind of got the feeling that diffusing the piety among so many objects of devotion made all concerned a little luke warm about the whole enterprise.

But one specific Roman cult is widely remembered.  Even those with a casual acquaintance have heard of The Vestal Virgins.

The worship of Vesta, goddess of hearth and home, goes way back.  It may in fact have been borrowed from the Greeks who had a similar deity named Hestia.  In addition to the similar names each of these guardians of family life had priestesses and a Sacred Flame that had to be kept alight at all times.

In the Roman version the priestesses were the Vestal Virgins, usually six in number. Being a Vestal was in some ways a good job.  You were signed on at a young age and the duties were strictly ceremonial.  They had their own posh accommodations in the Forum, they got great seats at public events, they had various legal rights that were otherwise unavailable to women in that day. They could even pardon convicted criminals, this being just about the only way to get a sentence commuted in Rome unless the Emperor decided in your favor. (And how often in history did THAT happen!)

There was a catch of course.  Virgin meant just that.  You were signing on for a 30 year stretch of celibacy and if you were caught cheating on it you got buried alive.

The temple of Vesta and the adjacent House of the Vestals were important spots, so when the Forum was being cleared of medieval rubbish you would think that impressive ruins would be found and preserved.  Uh....no.  The place had been knocked about quite a bit in Late Imperial times and what remained got burned up in the lime kilns in the 15th Century.  If you want the Pope to look upon your monument with favor it would be better to be less pagan.  Constantine or Emperors mistaken for him had a much improved survival rate.

In the 1930's Mussolini was trying to recreate the Glory of Empire.  He did a lot of things that modern archaeologists have come to hate.  He plowed a whopping big road across the north edge of the Forum, destroying who knows what.  And when his teams wanted to have a nice inspirational Temple of Vesta they just took the existing sad little piles of rubble and rebuilt it.  And what was their guide to doing so?

This:

Yep, the Temple of Vesta as you see it today is almost entirely a 20th century concoction of Fascist archaeologists working off of tiny images from Roman coins! So lets take a look around.....

I visited on a blazing bright day when the back lighting was brutal.  You couldn't get a photo from the other angle because like so many areas of archaeology in Rome, things were fenced off.  Budgetary issues are rather dire I understand.  One of the places you could no longer walk around in was the garden area of the adjacent House of the Vestals.

Again, there was a lot of modern imagination going on in the reconstruction of this. Many statues and bits of same, representing past Vestals were found stacked up waiting to be tossed into the the lime kiln.  The best ones went into the museums. These bits and bobs were put up on podiums.  When it was possible to go in there I understand that young ladies would often hop up on the empty ones and try their level best to look Virginal...

In general the signage inside the Forum is both minimal and pretty bland, but even it has to admit that the Temple of the Vestals is largely a 20th Century construct. How bad is it?  Have a close look at one of the main front panels.  See that little bit that looks different?  That is original stonework.  The rest.....

Much more Roman stuff to come but I need a little time to organize.  I think it will be "Roman Mondays" for the rest of the summer.....

Vindolanda 2015 Day Ten - Things that Survive

Another two weeks of digging have flown past.  Good weather, good friends, good finds.

I made my last hike from the Twice Brewed Inn to the site today.  I hope to be back next year but the Inn has been sold and I fear the needed improvements will make it a bit too upscale for my vagrant tastes.  Sadness on this point but good memories over the years and a final Pub Quiz Victory to cap it off.  Our magnificent First Prize was a small green anthropomorphic pear.  I think it was a cider company giveaway.

Archeology is more about how things change than about how they survive.  We are so often just seeing the faint ghosts of things.  Here we have 1800 year old oyster shells:

A lot of things survive in forms that are recognizable if you know what you are looking for.  Here we have a Roman shoe.....from its size it is felt to be that of a toddler:

Other things come down to us in better shape.  Bronze items found down in the anaerobic layers sparkle like gold.  This is some sort of medical tool.  It could be as mundane as an ear wax remover!

Sometimes the process of change is surprisingly fast.  Here is the same sheep jaw I showed the other day.  When exposed to air for a day or two it acquired the odd pigment spot that you can see here.  This form of change is due to something called "Vivianite" and is a natural process.  Or perhaps the Romans actually invented "Blue Tooth" technology!

Things that survive and things that don't.  I have a lot of friends here, some old some new.  Of course I realize that humans are finite but I like to imagine that long after I stop coming over, they will all still be here at least in spirit.

But at least the stones survive.  Pretty much forever by human standards.  Here is the Roman mile stone I walked past this morning.  Still by the side of the Roman road, right where it was left almost two millennia ago.  I think it is there for good.