After 2024 Fire, Overfield Tavern Dig Uncovers Thousands of Artifacts

Overview

• Ohio Valley Archaeology Inc., museum staff, and volunteers are excavating beneath the 1808 Overfield Tavern, the oldest building in Troy, Ohio.
• Museum director M. Chris Manning estimates roughly 4,500 items have been recovered, with laboratory analysis now underway to confirm dates and uses.
• Finds include an 1817 fifty-cent coin, an 1846 coin, buttons, ceramics, clay marbles, a smoking pipe, a French gunflint, Native American artifacts, and prehistoric fossils.
• Fieldwork suggests a small rear log structure was built later than previously believed and reveals a deep limestone foundation with a brick floor that may be an ice house or root cellar.
• Officials ruled the December 7, 2024 blaze accidental, and the museum plans to reopen to the public in 2027 with selected artifacts exhibited after conservation.