Barkhamsted Lighthouse Village Grind Stone

Barkhamsted Lighthouse Village Grind Stone. A Connecticut State Archaeological Preserve. The residents of the Lighthouse community were largely self-sufficient when it came to their subsistence. Bone fragments found in their fireplaces show that they ate deer and small wild game. Gun flints (used in flint-lock rifles) and gun parts recovered in the archaeology of the site show that they used firearms to hunt that game. Archaeologists also found the bones of domesticated animals, including cow, so those too were part of the diet of inhabitants. . . We also know that they farmed the land. Just across East River Road, is a narrow island that early nineteenth-century land records describe as “James Chaugham’s plow land,” and other documents refer to a plot in the village itself as “Molly Chaugham’s garden.” . . We don’t know exactly what they were growing in the “plow land” or garden, but it is likely that corn was grown by the villagers and meal was produced on this grind stone. . . The grind stone you are looking at here was used to grind seeds or dried corn kernels; the flat, worn-down surface resulted from thousands of hours of grinding with a hand-held stone or “mano.”