The lost French fort that Niles digs up every summer

For most of a century, one of the most important French sites in the Midwest was simply lost. Fort St. Joseph was a French mission, garrison, and fur-trading post that stood on the lower St. Joseph River from 1691 until 1781 — long enough that its flag changed hands among the French, the British, and briefly even a Spanish raiding party, which is part of why Niles calls itself the City of Four Flags. Then the fort was abandoned, the river was later dammed and raised, and the exact spot slipped out of memory. Some of it likely sits underwater now.

A survey in 1998 finally pinned the location down on the south side of town, in low ground near the river. Western Michigan University took it from there, and since 2002 the school has run a public archaeology field school at the site nearly every summer. Students and visitors dig side by side in the mud, and the haul has been staggering: well over 300,000 artifacts — trade beads, gun parts, religious medals, animal bone, the dropped and broken everyday stuff of a frontier outpost. Diggers have traced the outlines of several small buildings, each roughly sixteen by twenty feet, read as fur traders’ houses.

What makes the project unusual is that it’s built for the public to watch. The annual field school draws thousands of visitors over its open days, with tents, demonstrations, and a chance to peer into the open units while the excavation is live.

The fort itself is gone — no walls, no reconstruction to walk through. What you get instead is rarer: a roped-off patch of riverbottom where, on a summer weekend, you can stand at the edge of a square hole and watch someone lift a 300-year-old bead out of the ground with a trowel and a toothbrush.