“So, would you like to see the grave of your great, great, great, great-grandfather?” asked John Dixon, smiling. “Absolutely,” I said. My heart beat a little faster. “My family has been looking for him for 30 years!”

We were atop a remote hill in northern Washington County, Alabama, on an expedition to try to find the lost town of Washington Court House and the grave of my ancestor Judge Harry Toulmin (1766-1823), one of the founders of Alabama. The expedition was sponsored by the Explorers Club, one of the premier exploring organizations in the world, and by the University of South Alabama Center for Archaeological Studies, with some of the leading archaeological investigators in the south-eastern United States. John Dixon was a local resident who had grown up in the area, and he knew every rock and tree for miles around. This was a follow-up expedition to the effort reported in the Sentinel in September, 2007.

“Here it is,” John said. We looked down, and under the leaves we saw some stones peeking through. “Let’s get some pictures of the undisturbed ground before we clear away the leaves and branches,” said Bonnie Gums of the USA Archaeology Laboratory. We took some photos, then carefully raked the site clean. There were four stones, apparently a headstone and a footstone for each of two graves. There were no markings on any of the stones. The graves ran east and west in the traditional manner.

John Dixon said, “We’ve heard two different stories about these graves all our lives. One is that the larger grave to the west is Judge Harry Toulmin, and the grave to the east is a criminal that he recently hung. The other story is that one grave contains an Indian, and one grave contains a slave. Supposedly they were both criminals, and they were hung by a rope tied to a strong chain wrapped around the branch of a nearby tree. We don’t know which story is true, or if either is, but that’s what we’ve always been told by our parents and grandparents.”

The search for Judge Toulmin had started 30 years ago, when my now deceased father, Harry T. Toulmin, searched this isolated part of Washington County in southwest Alabama, and thought he found traces of the lost town of Washington Court House. The town was the county seat of Washington County from about 1819 to 1842, and was the burial place of Judge Harry Toulmin, an English immigrant and Unitarian minister who had fled religious persecution in Britain in 1793.

Toulmin so impressed Thomas Jefferson that the President gave him the difficult job of judge of the vast Tombigbee District of the Mississippi Territory, one of the wildest and most lawless parts of the United States. That District is now the southern part of Alabama, including about twenty counties from what is now Washington County in the west all the way over to the Georgia line on the east.

Judge Toulmin served ably for fifteen years and died in the small, remote town of Washington Court House in 1823. He was the only delegate from Baldwin County to the first Alabama Constitutional Convention, and the town of Toulminville, Alabama was named for him and his family.

“These graves look genuine, and the first version of the story is good evidence,” I said. “So this location is very impressive and extremely gratifying. I hope it is the right grave. But my father’s sketch map from 1977 shows that he thought that Judge Toulmin’s grave was closer to what everyone calls Court House Hill, where the old courthouse was probably located. We should do some more looking over there – I don’t think we can call the search finished quite yet. First let’s get the traditional picture of the Explorer’s Club flag with the expedition members, and with the grave in the foreground.”

The Explorers Club has 202 flags that can be taken on authorized “Flag Expeditions.” Each flag has a history—some have been in outer space, some to the bottom of the ocean, and some to the highest mountains on Earth. Some flags have been on expeditions with the many distinguished members of the club—Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Everest, Gilbert M. Grosvenor, the President of the National Geographic Society, and Bob Ballard, the man who found the Titanic, the Bismarck and PT-109. Members of the Club include the first persons to walk on the moon, to climb Everest, to reach the north and south poles, and to reach the deepest ocean trench.

Our flag, number 24, had been to central Africa on a famous expedition in 1929 with explorer and taxidermist Harry C. Raven. Since then our flag had been on various expeditions, including most recently, a successful effort in 2004 to find the huge silver treasure of King Phillip III, King of Spain and Portugal, which was lost off the coast of Mozambique in a battle and shipwreck in 1622. Club members can get permission to carry a flag on an expedition, if it is deemed worthy. Only one other Explorers Club Flag Expedition had ever been authorized for Alabama. This was the expedition of cave explorer William W. Varnedoe, Jr., who in 1996 undertook an expedition to document petroglyph caves in north-central Alabama.

Using Ground Penetrating Radar on Toulmin expedition

Later in the day, still looking for the definitive location of Judge Toulmin’s grave, we “trenched an anomaly” near the Court House Hill site. Our earlier expedition on December 19, 2006, with the University of South Alabama Utilities Department and their ground penetrating radar, had shown two “anomalies” in the field below Court House Hill. Each was about six feet long, three feet long, and perhaps five or six feet deep – perfect. But experienced Bonnie Gums warned, “We get lots of ‘false positives’ with high tech equipment, where we think there is something underground, but it turns out to be nothing. So we have to ‘ground truth’ everything. What that means is: we dig. Here’s a shovel.”

We dug a shallow trench across the site of the anomaly, which had been marked out in orange paint on the ground. “We’re looking for dark staining in the red subsoil,” said Bonnie. “That would show that the ground has been disturbed by digging or other non-natural processes.” But the ground stayed stubbornly, uniformly red. We squared up the sides of the trench, sketched it and made notes for future reference, took a picture, and then filled it in. “Don’t be too disappointed,” said Bonnie, “Negative evidence is evidence, too.”

One of the highlights of the expedition came on top of Court House Hill. Carey Geiger, a USA and Alabama Archaeological Society volunteer with many years of experience, was examining a small white limestone rock protruding from the surface of the soil. “I think this rock might be something,” he said. “I know we’re not here today to do any real excavating, but I’m going to dig around this rock.” Geiger kept digging, despite being bitten by fire ants which had made their nest beneath the stone. Gradually what seemed like a small stone became bigger and bigger. When it was totally revealed, it was 18 by 15 by 7 inches.

“This stone is big,” said Geiger . “But most important, look at this crescent-shaped cut in the corner of the stone – I think that’s manmade. I’ve seen that on other sites—this is a cornerstone for a building or for anchoring a fence or corral post. A corner post would be placed in this curve, and the stone would anchor the post in place. This is good evidence that the courthouse was located here.”

A few minutes later we found a similar, smaller stone nearby with two crescent shapes in it. Carey Geiger said, “I think this is another stone carved by man. Two side wall posts would be placed in the two curved holes. Let’s take this back to the lab, where we can examine it closely for tool marks. This might be our definitive proof that the courthouse was here.”

We headed home, satisfied with our day’s work. Next steps in our on-going quest include: examining the cornerstone, using ground penetrating radar on the possible Judge Toulmin grave, moving to a “Phase 2” excavation of some of the possible structures at the site, and broadening the search to include the Judge Toulmin house site at Old St. Stephens Historical Park. Director Jim Long kindly offered, “From old maps of St. Stephens we know within about 100 feet where Judge Toulmin’s house was here in St. Stephens, before he moved to Washington Court House. We can find his house site here easily and quickly.”

So the quest continues. A step at a time, historical archaeology is piecing together a bit of the missing tapestry of Alabama and US history. And when archaeology, history and genealogy can combine to bring us closer to our ancestors – well, it just doesn’t get any better than that.

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