photos by Chad Lundquist/Nevada Appeal Elizabeth Lee, 19, a University of Nevada, Reno student, sifts dirt through a screen on the Scales excavation Monday looking for artifacts that might help uncover the history of a small section of the Virginia & Truckee Railroad.
Layer by dusty layer, excavators in the desert of American Flat are sweeping away long-held misconceptions about the rugged life of rail men, and telling a story about the women who loved them.
They are love stories without the words. The only thing remaining are the artifacts. The shards of glass, baubles and beads are being unearthed from an unforgiving stretch between Gold Hill and Silver City along a section of the historic Virginia & Truckee Railroad right-of-way - a place where women did not often live, historians have believed.
"Typically the only presence of women in the section camp environment was the foreman's wife," says Stathi Pappas, the University of Nevada, Reno doctoral student who is heading the project. "However, our excavations are yielding artifacts more attuned to the presence of women and domesticity at the bunkhouse, which typically is viewed as a place for single-male transient laborers."
The $30,000 project is funded in part by the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office, Nevada Archeological Association and the Society for Industrial Archeology.
The scene is a camp called Scales, named after the historic V&T train car scales once located nearby. The time frame is 1900-1938. The people who lived there were mostly Italian.
Work on the 200-yard site began June 13 and ends this week. The team of seven students and graduates are all women, and have endured back-breaking labor in high temperatures for five weeks to uncover a small section of the V&T's past.
"By asking these questions and finding out how it was, we find out how we got to where we are today," he said.
Pappas said his dissertation covers a history that hasn't been told thoroughly. He became interested in excavating section camps after he met a former Southern Pacific section foreman named Amadus Drews. His knowledge of the rails impressed an 11-year-old child who grew up to become an archeologist.
"Nobody has really ever done section camps," Pappas says. "They were people like Amadus and it'd be nice to tell their story."
Digging up what turn-of-the-century rail workers left behind reveals a domestic existence complete with olive oil cans and tea cups.
The most impressive find of the dig: the wooden cellar floor of the foreman's house. It was believed to have been constructed in 1906 and last inhabited in 1938. Pappas said the foreman's family was tidy within their white rail fence - right down to the outhouse. The small home was shaded by a cove of cottonwood trees irrigated by a hilltop spring.
"This was very much what a farmstead would've looked like," he says. "It was full of trees and watered and had gardens. It was an oasis within an inhospitable landscape."
The house was torn down before the 1960s, he doesn't know exactly when. Without irrigation, the trees died and the sagebrush took over.
"Section foremen were considered to be one step up from the lowest of the low, but this family viewed itself as more than that," he says. "The consumer goods they purchased were more akin to middle-class patterns of consumption."
From the bone found in the cellar they can tell the family ate basic cuts that were moderately priced. Parts of a porcelain doll and marbles were found by team members.
While digging out the privy - really "a great source of information"- they found window pane glass, ceramics and a porcelain doll's glass eye, Pappas says.
The excavation has revealed puzzling details about the immigrant laborers who lived in a bunkhouse near the foreman. Historical documents, mostly written by the railroad companies, described section-camp inhabitants as low-class immigrant transients, Pappas said. He believes women and children may also have lived there.
"We've found beads, marbles, brass dangles from women's clothing or lamps, decorative items that don't seem appropriate," Pappas said. "Meaning, you don't figure you'd find that if there was just men living there."
Lara Mather, of Carson City, an undergraduate anthropology student, found an ornate bottle top, from what may have been a perfume bottle, and a blue glass bead.
"It makes you wonder what future archaeologists will be looking for," she says while sweeping her rectangle-shaped site.
• Contact reporter Becky Bosshart at bbosshart@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1212.