Chris Balusik

Chillicothe Gazette

CHILLICOTHE - Andy Sewell's voice grew a little more animated Tuesday morning when he approached a large concrete pit on the southwestern corner of a Camp Sherman archaeological dig off Ohio 104.

"This is one of the buildings we don't have any floor plans for," said Sewell, principal investigator on the project for Lawhon & Associates. "Finding something like this was a complete surprise, and trying to understand what it was took a little while. Because why would you have a cellar like this?"

It appears to have been was a fire station for the World War I-era training camp that once dominated the landscape along Ohio 104 just north of the city. Making his way past the concrete pit to another part of the excavation of the structure, Sewell was able to point out piping that appears to have belonged to the lavatory for the fire crew, the location where it was likely the crew's quarters once were and a water pipe running into the facility from elsewhere in the camp.

The excavation work has been going on for nearly a month as part of a task order from the Ohio Department of Transportation to retrieve whatever items from the portion of the camp that existed where an extension of Industrial Drive is scheduled to go. The extension is part of an effort by the Community Improvement Corporation to expand development opportunities within the industrial park off Ohio 104. The excavation is expected to wrap up Thursday.

Sewell — along with members of his crew, representatives from the Ohio History Connection and local historians and preservationists — has been using original site plans and building schematics of the camp, along with photographs taken at the time, to piece together what crews are seeing as the foundations of structures are uncovered. They've discovered several surprises.

"Surprises have been finding parts of buildings that don't match the maps," he said. "Mainly, the buildings are where they are supposed to be, but there's a mess hall, for instance, that's further to the west than it shows on the map, and it kind of matches up with some of the photos that show it in line with another mess hall. We also have a small building that I think may be part of a lavatory on a part of the map where there are no lavatories."

Trying to piece together the answers is part of the fun for Sewell and his colleagues. In the case of the lavatory, they base part of their assumption on photos from other training camps that existed across the country around the same time.

New discoveries have come quite frequently. In the relatively short period of time a Gazette reporter and photographer toured the excavation site Tuesday, workers discovered a post in one of the buildings and charred fragments of what appeared to be pages of a ledger that had been burned and buried so quickly that they were preserved, although fragile, a century later.

In addition to the evidence of physical structures, each area of the dig had yielded some artifacts: a broken bottle, pieces of a toilet, bones likely from food that was consumed. Even the ground itself had answers to provide; red patches of soil in the bakery showed where the large ovens were located, and footprints discovered embedded in some of the concrete of the bakery reveal how quickly the camp's buildings were constructed.

Johni Doerres, president of Camp Sherman Inc., said the excavation is the first he's known about of the camp, and he hopes the approaching centennial of the camp's creation will spur support to keep another section of the camp, which contained its cultural center, from having a planned electrical substation built over it.

"This (excavation) is a blessing in disguise," Doerres said. "It exposes the value of the history of this enormous camp that few locals are aware of, and even I'm learning stuff. What we have up there (pointing north), which has never been built on, doesn't need to be built on when we can do something like this and expose where was the 4,000-seat auditorium, where was the K of C hall, where was the Jewish welfare center, where was the Red Cross office?"

American Electric Power Ohio is planning to build a power distribution center where the camp's nerve center existed at the northwest corner of Ohio 104 and Moundsville Road as part of a transmission line upgrade between Chillicothe and Circleville. AEP has said before the state's Power Siting Board that the location provides the greatest service reliability for customers served by the line and that no standing historical structures would be affected by the substation. The board approved the utility's proposed route for the line on March 9, 2015.

Doerres would instead like the area of the camp's cultural center to be used as the home of a new World War I memorial to replace Ohio's former official one that was demolished a few years ago.

"We lose the cultural center, we might as well consider this the funeral (for Camp Sherman) as well as the unearthing," he said.