This report documents archeological
excavations conducted by the Midwest Archeological Center, National Park Service,
at two historic properties at Herbert Hoover National Historic Site (HEHO),
West
Branch, Iowa. This fieldwork occurred in 1989 in support of a major structural
restoration program at the Laban Miles and E.S. Hayhurst Houses. These late
nineteenth-century structures formed part of a West Branch neighborhood that
would
have been familiar to Herbert Hoover during his childhood years. Restoration
actions were aimed at returning the structures to an earlier appearance, while
adaptively restoring the structures' interiors for modern use. The 1989
archeological project was intended to collect data that might otherwise be
lost during components of the restoration program that included ground disturbance
around the
houses.
Those impacts were successfully mitigated through the 1989 archeological
data collection program.
This report documents the field and laboratory
archeological methods utilized in the project and describes the subsurface
features and stratigraphic profiles discovered at the sites. Large numbers
of recovered
artifacts in a range of functional categories spanning the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries are also tabulated and described. All artifacts
and
project records from the 1989 fieldwork are currently housed at the Midwest
Archeological Center (MWAC), Lincoln, Nebraska under MWAC Accession 345, which
is cross
referenced as HEHO Accession 81.