Wrought iron scissors

About This Artifact

A pair of wrought iron scissors was recovered from beneath the artificial beach at Smith's Cove during excavations led by Dan Blankenship and David Tobias in the late 1960s. The scissors were found below the level of the drainage system, in the same campaign that uncovered an old metal set-square and a hand-worked heart-shaped stone. Fanthorpe records the scissors discovery in 1967 in the period leading up to the 1970 cofferdam construction. The set-square and scissors were estimated by experts to be between two and three hundred years old.

The scissors, along with iron nails, spikes, and old tools from the same excavation, were sent to the Steel Company of Canada for testing, and all came back as estimated to predate 1790. The Smithsonian Institution subsequently identified the scissors as typical of Spanish-American manufacture prior to the mid-nineteenth century. Spanish-American ironwork of this type was produced in colonial workshops across the Americas and the Caribbean, where a distinctive forging style and composition developed that specialists can distinguish from European or British manufacture through visual and metallurgical examination.

The scissors were revisited during Season 11 when Gary Drayton and Peter Fornetti recovered a scissor handle from the Lot 5 shoreline near the slipway. The find immediately reminded Gary of the scissors Dan Blankenship had discovered at Smith's Cove. Blacksmithing expert Carmen Legge confirmed the new piece as a scissor handle from the 1600s to early 1700s and told the team it was older than Dan's original find. The presence of Spanish-American scissors beneath the flood system at Smith's Cove places them among the artefacts deposited before or during the construction of the cove's water management infrastructure, rather than arriving through later searcher activity.