What can a snaffle bit or a butt plate tell us about the Battle of Ridgefield? Quite a lot, apparently. (One is part of a bridle, the other, part of a rifle.) To the Heritage Consultants LLC team now doing a hi-tech archaeological survey in Ridgefield artifacts like those can confirm they’ve found a skirmish site.

Heritage, working under the Ridgefield Historical Society’s direction, has made several exciting discoveries during its first weeks in town. The goals of their survey, supported by a second prestigious National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program grant awarded to the Historical Society, are to pinpoint the sites of key engagements and the boundaries of the Revolutionary War Battle of Ridgefield in April 1777.

The Ridgefield Historical Society and the Heritage Consultants encourage property owners whose land may be part of the battlefield landscape to participate in this important project by giving Heritage permission to survey their land. Information is available at https://ridgefieldhistoricalsociety.org.

The Heritage teams, using metal detectors and ground penetrating radar to find artifacts, believe they have established the location of the Second Engagement of the battle (the First having been along North Salem Road near Lake Mamanasco). Both of these attacks on the British forces of General William Tryon were led by General David Wooster, who was mortally wounded in the Second Engagement.

Dr. Kevin McBride, a Principal Investigator for Heritage, explained how the artifacts they found confirmed the Second Engagement’s location: “…We’ve been finding a lot of battle-related objects, maybe a dozen musket balls, a lot of buttons, non-military, which suggests they’re militia buttons. We found a couple of musket balls we think are American. …

The density of battle objects is really high. It’s not an occasional musket ball sniping. … There’s too much other material … associated with the musket balls… There are buttons all over the place. But these are all 18th century musket balls right around it. We found some other interesting things, like a watch winder for a pocket watch, 18th century. … You can imagine the Americans are being attacked and routed. They’re panicked, and they’re dropping a lot of things. They’re running, they’re getting wounded, they’re getting killed.”

At another location recently, Ridgefield Historical Society members watched as the team did its work and discovered items that included a button from the uniform of a Continental Line soldier.

Dr. David Leslie, Director of Archaeological Research for Heritage, spent a day operating ground penetrating radar near Main Street, searching for evidence of burials associated with the Battle of Ridgefield. Working in a busy town presents technical challenges but the exciting discoveries the team is making prove the hurdles have not stopped them.

“One of the hardest challenges of a battlefield survey like this one in Ridgefield is that it’s not Gettysburg. It’s not this preserved landscape… Instead, this happened in a town where people lived. And so we have this urban and suburban landscape where people have been depositing their detritus before the battle, after the battle. …That’s why we’re using so many different lines of evidence. We're using historical documentation. We're using the written record, mapping documents, geophysical surveys in the form of ground penetrating radar, metal detector surveys…”

Heritage will also use standard archaeological methods like excavation and shovel testing to expand its investigations. The archaeologists’ efforts are painstaking, but breakthroughs like finding the never-before-pinpointed location of the Second Engagement are tremendously exciting and make the effort worthwhile.

Giving the Heritage archaeologists permission to conduct non-invasive surveys using metal detection contributes greatly to the success of this project. If homeowners are interested in joining this historic effort, information and permission forms are available here.  

Any artifacts relating to the Revolutionary War that are discovered will be added to the National Park Service collection and preserved locally in the Ridgefield Historical Society’s climate-controlled vault at the Scott House. They will serve the Ridgefield community as an educational resource for current and future generations.