Officials at Mount Vernon said Thursday that archaeologists have unearthed 27 more bottles containing the remnants of cherries and assorted berries that were stored about 250 years ago in the basem*nt of George Washington’s mansion on the Potomac River.
Six other bottles were found damaged and empty.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) who have examined samples said the fruit was probably washed before being bottled and sealed with a cork — a process that left it remarkably well preserved.
A letter written by first lady Martha Washington suggests that the preservation of the fruit may have been done or supervised by an enslaved worker known as “Doll,” Mount Vernon experts said.
“I don’t think anything else like this has been found in North America,” said Jason Boroughs, Mount Vernon’s principal archaeologist. “It’s incredible. It’s unheard of.”
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Mount Vernon has assembled a team of plant geneticists and microbiologists, as well as archaeologists and curators, to examine the botanic and historic record.
They also are exploring whether some of the seeds might grow after 250 years — though being waterlogged more than two centuries is proving to be an obstacle.
The glass bottles, along with two previously discovered bottles containing cherries, were found in six storage pits in the mansion’s basem*nt during archaeology conducted as part of the renovation of the historic home of the country’s first president, about 20 miles south of Washington.
USDA scientists said, among other things, they will try to collect DNA to see what kind of cherries they are.
“This is such a historic find,” said Benjamin Gutierrez, a plant geneticist at the USDA’s Plant Genetic Resources Unit, in Geneva, N.Y. “There are very few examples where you could look at fruit remains in this condition.”
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“We’re hoping to do more than just identify the cherry,” he said. “What other chemical qualities are in there? Can we look at sugars and how acidic were they?”
He said that some of the cherry stem fragments looked like they had been cut.
“Cherries have a long stem, and you don’t want to fill a bottle of preserves with stem tissue,” he theorized. “They’re likely harvested with the stems intact, and, before bottling, trimmed down.”
Or, as Mount Vernon suggested, the stems might have been clipped off when the cherries were picked.
Mount Vernon’s enslaved people likely planted the trees, cut the stems, and placed the berries in the bottles.
“It is the fruit of their labor that we’re exploring,” Boroughs said. “When you put hands on these things, we know that the last person that put hands on them did so in bondage.”
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Boroughs said the fruit survived for so long because it was packed in tightly-sealed bottles after it was cleaned and then preserved in the dense clay where it was buried.
“That provided as close to an airtight environment as one could achieve,” he said in an email.
So much material has been found that Mount Vernon had to buy a large refrigerator in which to store the contents of the bottles after they were emptied.
The discoveries come after two bottles were unearthed in March and were found to contain remnants of cherries, as well as pits and stems. As archaeologists kept digging, they uncovered 33 more.
They have now recovered a total of 12 bottles containing remnants of cherries, 16 bottles with remnants of unidentified berries, and one bottle with the remnants of cherries and berries, said Boroughs.
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The bottles also contained ground water or spring water, and, in some cases, pieces of the cork stoppers, he said. The ground water might have seeped in over time, or the berries might have been packed in spring water, as one recipe suggested.
Boroughs said the fruit was probably intended for consumption a few months later.
He said there is the possibility that some of the surviving cherry pits, which contain the seeds, could be planted and germinate. “That’s extremely exciting,” he said.
It wouldn’t produce a carbon copy of the tree the seed came from, he said, “but we would be bringing back that strain of whatever was here at that time.”
“We don’t know if that’s possible yet,” he said.
Victoria Meakem, a molecular biologist at the Plant Genetic Resources Unit, said: “We broke open a few pits, and they were water logged, so that kills the potential to germinate it. But it’s something we’ve thought about.”
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Even if some of the fruit was to grow, it might not thrive today, Boroughs said: “The climate has warmed much more than it was at the tail end of the 18th century … Today it’s a lot hotter.”
Brendan A. Niemira, a USDA research food microbiologist, has examined some of the liquid that came from the bottles. He said it was largely devoid of contaminants.
“What that means is that whoever was preparing these berries really knew what they were doing,” he said in a telephone interview. “They prepared these with care and real attention to good food preparation techniques. These things were quite clean.”
“They were washed carefully,” he said. “And prepared in such a way that you didn’t have these dangerous bacteria or problematic bacteria that might compromise the safety or quality of the food.”
The newly-discovered bottles were dug up earlier this month and last month, said Lily Carhart, Mount Vernon’s curator of preservation collections.
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Boroughs has nicknamed one of the pits the “Revolutionary War pit.”
“I think that pit was dug in the summer of 1775,” he said. “You can see that the pit was dug, that three rows of bottles were placed in there … The thing was covered up, and then that very same summer Washington rode off to Philadelphia and became commander in chief.”
Shortly after that, a brick floor was installed in the basem*nt. The bottles were covered and forgotten, he said.
He said a historic letter offers a hint as to who might have prepared or overseen the preparation of the berries. In 1795, Martha Washington wrote from Philadelphia asking a niece at Mount Vernon to arrange for some berries to be bottled.
“I should think old Doll cannot have for got how to do them,” the first lady wrote.
Doll, who in 1795 was about 74, was an experienced cook and one of more than 80 enslaved people Martha Washington brought to Mount Vernon in 1759 after she married George.
