It’s not as easy as it looks.
That was the consensus of Historic St. Mary’s City staff members sitting outside at the Woodland Indian Hamlet the morning of Aug. 3 and painstakingly scraping bark off cedar saplings.
They were preparing the trees to be used as the frame of a new witchott, an Algonquian word probably meaning “my house,” according to signs at the site. Staff members are constructing the longhouse at the site this summer in collaboration with the museum’s maintenance department and volunteers.
Historic St. Mary’s City is a museum of living history and archaeology in St. Mary’s City. The witchott will be used in the site’s educational program about the Yaocomacos, who were the American Indian residents of the area at the time the English colonists arrived in 1634.
In addition to the cedar supports, which are secured with strips of rawhide, the witchott will be covered with woven phragmite grass, a common river grass, and outfitted with deer hides for bedding and door coverings. Mats made from natural materials also might be used to cover the structure.
A witchott was used for storage and shelter, for the Yaocomacos and for the colonists who lived in witchotts for the first several months after their arrival to the colony in 1634, a living experience described as “smoky” by several colonists of the period.
“Almost all of it” has been a learning experience, Coby Treadway, site supervisor, said of the building process, which the staff members are calling “the witchott experiment.” Treadway estimated that the museum is spending roughly $3,500 on the project.
To figure out how to construct the rounded structure, staff members are receiving information from Peter Rivers, Historic St. Mary’s City’s building curator They are also getting guidance from writings of the period, such as the journal of the Rev. Andrew White, a Jesuit priest who accompanied the first colonists to Maryland as head of the Jesuit mission, and from the current witchott at the site.
The new witchott will replace the larger and dilapidated one, which has been used as the central structure at the site since 1994 and which is more than 30 years old. The old witchott is listing to one side and its supporting framework is rotting at the ground level because of water damage.
Treadway suggested that a witchott that the Yaocomacos would have constructed probably would have been expected to have lasted for five or seven years, the amount of time the nearby fields would have remained fertile.
The staff members began work on the structure in mid-June and hope to finish by Sept. 9, so that the site will be ready for Woodland Indian Discovery Day, an annual event at the park that celebrates American Indian culture, which will take place Sept. 10. Although they have tried to use tools that would have been available to the Yaocomacos, such as using stones to strip the saplings of their bark, much of the work is being done with modern tools because of time constraints.
The building project is a significant departure from the staff’s normal work, which is explaining to visitors the American Indian portion of Historic St. Mary’s City, said Cathy Gallagher, of Lexington Park, the lead interpreter at the site.
“This summer is kind of an anomaly,” Gallagher said, as she said cross-legged on the ground with a knife in hand.
Because they are trying to use nearby materials, as the Yaocomaco would have done, the experience has made Gallagher understand the complexity of the American Indian’s relationship with natural resources, she said.
“It’s just interesting to think about the native materials and how you’d manage them,” Gallagher said. “Sometimes what you want is just not there.”
One lesson that the staff has learned is that the summer is not the best time in which to harvest cedar for the purpose of building a witchott, Treadway said. The best time is in early spring, when the trees’ sap is rising and the trees are at their highest moisture content, making them more flexible.
They’ve also learned through trial and error the ideal diameter for the cedar saplings they are harvesting for the project — between 2¼ and 5¼ inches in diameter, when the saplings are thin enough to bend and thick enough to support the structure.
Nat Salzman, a student at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and a Maryland Heritage student interpreter at the historic park this summer, also is helping with the new construction. He said the project has given him a fresh appreciation of the Yaocomacos’ skills.
“That’s definitely one of the things I learned . . . patience,” Salzman said, taking a break from using a draw knife to strip bark off a cut cedar tree. “When I think about doing this without metal tools, it blows my mind.”
Cedar was used for witchotts because once the bark is stripped off, a chemical in the wood repels bugs. The workers also are charring the ends of the cedar trees, which also helps protect against termite damage.
Chris Pasch, a fellow St. Mary’s College student and Maryland Heritage student interpreter, said the amount of work and set of skills required to build the structure are impressive.
“It’s not that easy,” Pasch said. “And I appreciate more what they had to go through.”
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