SOUTHBURY — Archaeologists won’t be excavating the ruins of the Diamond Match Company factory uncovered by last month’s flooding in Southford Falls State Park just yet, but they might have the opportunity in the future.
State Department of Energy and Environmental Protection officials will rebury the artifacts and repair the road and the Burr Arch Covered Bridge damaged during the August storm, said Catherine Labadia, deputy historic preservation officer at the state Department of Economic and Community Development.
“It is good best practice to not excavate unless you have to. The goal is always to preserve the site for future generations and excavations. And luckily in this case, there is a way to basically re-cover what nature had uncovered,” she said Friday.
Nominated to the state and the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, the Diamond site was among several factories belonging to the nation’s oldest manufacturer of matches, matchboxes and toothpicks. The company still has a plant in Georgia.
Formed in Connecticut in 1880 by a merger primarily between the country’s two largest match manufacturers, Diamond launched its Southbury paper mill site in 1881. It employed about 100 people and operated until it burned down in 1923. The federal Civilian Conservation Corps buried its remains while creating the park in the 1930s.
The site reflects the economic strength of the Southford Falls area, which thrived in the 1800s and 1900s thanks to its local woods, streams and rivers. This included gristmills, sawmills, paper mills and clothing manufacturers. Many of these businesses were post-Industrial Revolution manufacturers who relocated from New York City and Boston to capitalize on Connecticut’s abundant shallow, wide and fast-moving waterways to power their factories and manage pollution.
The ruins’ emergence, mostly red bricks and segments of walls and foundations, prompted Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office officials on Aug. 29 to declare the site a Designated Archaeological Preserve to dissuade scavengers who had been pillaging the site’s artifacts.
DEEP declared the park’s road and bridge repair a priority, while reburying the factory site can preserve the ruins for later and better excavation, Labadia said.
State DEEP workers have photographed and mapped the ruins. They will be filled in and buried slightly with sand to keep them from getting compacted by the layers of landscaping cloth, topsoil and gravel for the road, she explained.
“The goal is that the layering of materials will provide a cushion or a buffer for the archaeological remains and protect them,” she said. “They will also be able to provide us [with a guide] for future explorations. We will know what is a fill layer, what has been added to the archaeological site and then what are the actual archaeological deposits.”
Judging partly from photographs and drawings taken when the factory was functioning, Labadia suspects the ruins are part of a much larger complex or set of buildings still buried. It is a measure of the storm’s power that it “uncovered things that we haven’t seen in 100 years,” she said.
The storm resulted in the deaths of two Oxford residents, homes, bridges and roads being washed away, and damage to dams. The flooding was so abrupt that firefighters and police had to perform rescues from cars and buildings, and the storm also led to contamination of wells.
State and federal workers have been working to get funding or other aid to victims who lacked flood insurance. Gov. Ned Lamont sought a major disaster declaration earlier this week from the federal government that would open the hardest-hit areas in Fairfield, Litchfield and New Haven counties to funding sources, specifically for home and business owners.
When the park road is repaired, historic excavations can be scheduled by federal and state agencies. Labadia’s agency doesn’t perform archaeological digs, but assess sites and advises agencies if sites need protection. About a dozen digs and hundreds of historic investigations occur annually, she said.
The digs can be privately funded and are often done for educational purposes. The University of Connecticut, Central, Southern and Western Connecticut state universities, and the University of Massachusetts are among those who participate.
But the lack of an archaeological investigation of the Diamond factory does not mean history is being slighted, Labadia said.
“Historic preservation is always a balance, and I would say that there are historic values to both the bridge and to the archaeological site. So that is why we are going through this plan for how to allow for this access,” she said.