EDITOR: This is the third installment in our series following the Fort York archeological dig of the Government House site. Click here for more background and previous posts on the dig. It’s hot in the city and if you happen to visit Fort York you can see patches of yellow earth, areas where the grass is drier than the rest of the lawn. These are the traces of old building foundations, yet another subtle sign of history encompassing the downtown national historic site. Also on the lawn is a patch of earth where excavations for remains of the Government House recently ended. One of the most important buildings to be built within the Fort, the Government House was briefly home to four Lieutenant Governors of Upper Canada before it was destroyed by retreating American troops in the spring of 1813. In 1796 Colonel Simcoe, the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, gave orders to build a Government House at the eastern edge of the Town of York. When only the wings were completed the building was immediately taken over to be used for many of the town's needs – to hold parliament, the courts of justice, an early Anglican congregation, etc. In 1799 when General Peter Hunter arrived in York a new Lieutenant Governor’s House was commissioned to be constructed at the Fort. Once built, the vice-regal residence stood prominently on top of the embankment looking out over the lake.

EDITOR: This is the second installment in our series following the Fort York archeological dig of the Government House site. Click here for more background and previous posts on the dig. On April 27, 1813, in a desperate act to flee from the advancing American army, the British troops defending York blew up part of their own fort, the grand magazine. The explosion was so huge reports say it was seen and heard from as far away as the mouth of the Niagara River. Like all military garrisons of the time, Fort York had a storehouse of gunpowder and small arms just outside its walls. When it was clear the American troops were gaining, the British commander, Sir Roger Sheaffe, ordered this storehouse -- the grand magazine -- blown up. This successfully prevented the weapons stored there from falling into American hands and created a distraction while British soldiers retreated east along Front Street to the Town of York. And quite the distraction it was – the explosion killed 38 soldiers, including General Pike, and left another 224 wounded, many of whom died soon after. Surprising as the tactic was, it didn’t win the battle and the American army, which far out numbered the British and Native army, proceeded to loot the town of York for close to a week. Fast forward almost two hundred years to a sunny late-June morning and Fort York is busy with archaeologists searching for the remains of the crater left behind from the explosion. While the main excavation for the remains of the Government House continued inside the walls of the fort, on the lake side of the wall a second team began searching for the remnants of a crater estimated to be 20m in diameter. What exactly would the remains of a hole look like you ask? “It’s difficult to say but most likely we’re looking for rubble dating from the mid 19th century that would have been used to fill the crater, perhaps even rubble from the Lieutenant Governor’s House” explained Ron Williamson the chief archaeologist on the project. Regardless of where the fill came from it would definitely be a noticeable hiccup in the soil profile.

EDITOR: This is the first installment in our series following the ongoing Fort York archeological dig of the Government House site. Click here for more background on the dig. Under a drizzle on Friday afternoon, a team of four archaeologists from ASI, with trowels in hand, were scraping back the layers of Fort York’s history. Layer by stratographic layer, these archaeologists are moving further back in time to the War of 1812. They are looking for the remains of the Government House, the official residence of the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, which was looted and destroyed by American troops as they left York in the spring of 1813. This two-week long dig, sponsored by YAP Films and History Television, is part of a documentary to commemorate the bicentennial of the War of 1812. Given the short time frame, the area being excavated is modest, an area of 8m by 2m divided into four sub-operations. Although the house itself was much larger, the likelihood that they will come across foundation stones from either a segment of the outer wall or a cellar wall is rather high. When the Fort was rebuilt after the war the buildings were built around the ruins of the Government House and the remains of the building were covered and filled in to make the Fort’s present day Parade Ground leaving a relatively untouched area. Plenty of additional calculations went into choosing the site, I was told by Eva MacDonald the excavation director, predominantly with the use of ground-penetrating radar (GPR). The radar identifies anomalies, beyond your average mix of brick, clay, and rocks that are found in the soil. Together with the GPR, existing maps of the fort, and an account from Captain Robert Pilkington who built the Government House, the team was able to determine this small section of lawn to be excavated. In fact, Pilkington’s plan of the Government House (see below) identifies two sets of stairs.

Like many museums, Fort York shows off only part of its collection. In traditional museums, it's simply a fact of space: there just isn't enough room to display everything at once. With Fort York it's a little different: many of the buildings -- or rather, the ruins of buildings -- and artifacts are hidden underground, waiting to be excavated. We don't expect to have archaeological digs in Toronto; we've been trained to think they're more suited to Rome or Athens. But one by the local firm ASI is beginning right now at the fort, and Spacing will be there to cover it. The excavation, sponsored by History Television of Shaw Media, is being documented by YAP Films for an upcoming film about the War of 1812. All buildings at the fort were destroyed in the aftermath of the Battle of York. The ones we see today were built in 1813-16 among the foundations of the original structures. The dig underway now will be peeling back almost two centuries of layers to reveal Government House, the residence of the Lieutenant Governor (LG) of Upper Canada.