Possible box drain entrance

About This Structure

A stone formation matching the physical description of the original box drain entrances was discovered at Smith's Cove during Season 6 excavations within the steel cofferdam. Doug Crowell spotted a triangular-shaped opening between two rocks near the wall of the U-shaped structure, with a steady trickle of water flowing through it. The formation matched the detailed 1863 Yarmouth Herald article that Doug had discovered at the Lordly House archives in Chester, Nova Scotia, which described the original drains as built from two flat stones placed on their edges in a triangular configuration.

Charles Barkhouse pulled coconut fibre from the adjacent soil, the same filtering material the Truro Company had documented covering the fan-shaped drains when they first uncovered them in 1850. Coconut fibre previously recovered from Smith's Cove had been carbon dated to 1260-1400 AD with ninety-five percent confidence. Archaeologist Laird Niven and geologist Terry Matheson examined the stones and confirmed the construction was consistent with a drain system, though Terry cautioned that the proof would come from following the feature back toward the Money Pit to see if a pattern emerged. Subsequent trenching by the team did not locate additional drains beyond this single confirmed example.

The original box drains were largely destroyed or displaced by successive cofferdam operations and heavy excavation equipment over more than a century and a half of search activity. The 1863 Yarmouth Herald account recorded five finger drains, each sixty-six feet long, with the two outermost sixty-six feet apart, converging within four feet of each other at a collection point leading to a flood tunnel. Finding a stone formation that matched these descriptions, with coconut fibre still in place, confirmed that at least one section of the drainage system survived the later disturbance and provided a direct physical link between the modern excavations and the nineteenth-century accounts.