SOUTHEAST STUDENTS DIG UP DIRT ON MYSTERIOUS CABIN

STE. GENEVIEVE -- Some Southeast Missouri State University students are digging up a yard here in an attempt to solve a mystery.

The mystery is whether a vertical log French Colonial house located a few miles south of town was occupied by one Pierre Delassus de Luziere, a figure of some historical importance.

The students historic preservation and archaeology majors and graduate students are trying to find artifacts that date to approximately 1793, when Delassus arrived in Ste. Genevieve and was known to have built a house.

The logs in the cabin have been dated to the 1790s, but they could have been salvaged and moved to the site at a later date.

"We don't know for sure if it should be called the Delassus House," says Dr. Bonnie Stepenoff, coordinator of the Historic Preservation Program at Southeast.

So far, only prehistoric and post-1850s artifacts have been found by excavating the dirt surrounding the house. The suspicion around the dig is that the Delassus house was located on the hill above the cabin.

"Historical descriptions put the house on top of a hill with a commanding view of the valley," said Dr. Kit Wesler, a Murray State university archaeologist and director of the Wickliffe Mounds Research Center. Wesler is supervising the dig.

The students working dirt through wire screens bring him every minuscule piece of pottery and rock, all of which will be catalogued and turned over the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

"These are pieces of the puzzle," Wesler says.

The house is informally known as the Delassus-Kern House, the Kerns being a German farming family who bought the house in the mid-1800s and added a second story. The house, its logs covered with clapboard at some point in history, was donated to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources four years ago.

The DNR hopes the field school, the first Southeast's Historic Preservation Program has ever been involved in, can find out more about the house's history. "They want to preserve the house no matter what," Stepenoff said, "but if it turns to be an original French Colonial log house, they probably will restore it."

Besides Stepenoff and Wesler, Southeast archaeology professor Dr. Carol Morrow is also involved in the field school. They are leading an archaeological and archival dig into Delassus' life.

Pierre Dehault Delassus Deluziere was a French nobleman displaced by the French Revolution. His son, Carlos Dehault Delassus, became lieutenant governor of Upper Louisiana in 1799 and oversaw the transfer of Louisiana to the United States in 1804.

Pierre, meanwhile, was given control over a district called New Bourbon. It was to be settled by expatriate French aristocrats like himself and located on the Mississippi bluffs just south of new Ste. Genevieve.

New Bourbon was a failure, and French influence in Ste Genevieve itself began to wane once Americans and Germans began emigrating after the transfer of Louisiana.

While trying to excavate the truth from the yard during the six-week field school, the students also are spending their Fridays doing archival research at the Ste. Genevieve County Courthouse and elsewhere. They are studying the chain of title and the original land grants, taking oral histories and accumulating every bit of information they can about the families believed to have lived there.

They have discovered that Delassus had an orchard, and that a free black woman lived in a cabin on the land. These are more pieces of the puzzle that somehow may help connect Delassus to the cabin. Or they may tell the researchers to look elsewhere.

The house is the largest example of poteaux sur sole ("post on sill" -- closely set, unbraced vertical timbers resting on a sill) construction in a town which boasts more examples of this type than any other in North America.

The fact that it had six rooms gives weight to the possibility that someone of wealth or stature was the owner.

But the team probably never will be able to prove this cabin was the Delassus house, Wesler says, only that it could have been.

That's archaeology.

"Every time you answer a question you end up asking more," he says.

Lectures are being given by the field school from 7-9 each Wednesday evening in the Ste. Genevieve County Services building through July 9. Wesler will deliver the final lecture on African-American archaeology.