(Updated 11:15 a.m.) A new ‘windowfront exhibit’ about the Buried Ships of Robinson Landing is coming to Old Town early next month.
The exhibit features scale models of four 18th and 19th-century ships discovered during excavations of the Robinson Landing Site.
One year after Alexandria re-sunk historic ships into the pond at Ben Brenman Park, City Archeologist Eleanor Breen said studies show the unconventional preservation project is working as intended.
Back in 2018 during work on the Robinson Landing project, a group of somewhat intact hulls were discovered underground. They’d been scuttled beneath the ground, likely as part of the foundation of the new waterline.
Five years after buried ship timbers in Old Town were shipped off to Texas A&M for study, the director of that research team is hosting a virtual lecture to discuss their findings.
Christopher Dostal is the Director of the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation and the Director of the Analytical Archaeology Laboratory that scanned four 18th century ships dug up in Old Town.
Fieldwork started earlier this week on a project to put the Old Town ships back underwater, and a public event scheduled next Sunday will give locals a chance to discuss the process with city archaeologists.
The public event, called “SeeWorthy in the Park,” is scheduled for Sunday, May 15, from noon to 4 p.m. at Ben Brenman Park (4800 Brenman Park Drive). The name SeeWorthy is derived from a new exhibit in the Torpedo Factory featuring digital reconstructions of the ships.
Work is scheduled to start next month on one of Alexandria’s more bizarre projects: putting a set of historic ship hulls recovered in Old Town back underwater.
Ben Brenman Park Pond (4800 Brenman Park Drive) near Cameron Station will be playing the part of Davy Jones’ Locker for the project. The city is hosting a meeting on-site next week to discuss the project.
Almost exactly four years after archeologists recovered three 18th-century ships from under the Old Town Waterfront, Alexandria is planning on sending at least two of them back to Davy Jones’ Locker.
Three ships were discovered under the Robinson Landing construction site in March 2018. While the most intact of the trio was sent to Texas A&M for study and will get a new Torpedo Factory exhibit next month, the other two have sat in water tanks in the DASH bus barn. At a meeting of the Waterfront Commission, City Archaeologist Eleanor Breen said that sometime this year the city will start moving the ships out of their 12×24-foot tanks and out to Ben Brenman Pond (4800 Brenman Park Drive).
The Alexandria Archaeology Museum announced on Twitter that a new exhibit coming to the Torpedo Factory will offer a digital guided tour of one of the ships found buried under Old Town’s waterfront.
In 2018, hulls from three mid-18th century ships were found buried underground during an excavation at the Robinson Landing development. The crown jewel of the archeological discovery, however, was a mostly intact lower hull from one of the ships.
The discovery of the Old Town Armada was an unexpected boon to Alexandria archeologists. But impressive as it is that so much of the three ships have remained intact after centuries underground, recent archeological work has uncovered an interesting detail on one of them.
Somebody screwed up.
Alexandria’s Archeology Museum is inviting the public to come see its new exhibition on ships long-ago sunk to build the city’s waterfront.
This Saturday, October 19, the public will be able to see for themselves how archeologists and volunteers have worked to excavate and restore four of the ships in time for Archeology Month.
(Updated 10/17) New details are coming in about one of Alexandria’s long-buried ships.
Two hundred years after the ship was scuttled to be built into the artificial waterfront, teams in Texas and here in Alexandria are putting the ship back into a stable condition and learn more about them.
