EASTHAM — John Doane, who emigrated from England to the Plymouth Colony sometime between 1628 and 1632, became the patriarch of one of the first seven families that settled in the land of the Nauset in what is now Eastham in the 1660s.

Doane was a planner of the town’s separation from the Plymouth Colony, was the town’s first deacon, and served at various times as constable, surveyor of highways, ratemaker, deputy to the colony court, and on the first board of selectmen.

His memory crops up in Thoreau’s Cape Cod, where Doane’s longevity — he died in 1686 at 94 — leads the author to compare him to Achilles. The Rev. Enoch Pratt’s 1844 history of Eastham, Wellfleet, and Orleans says of Doane, “few men have lived so long and usefully.” A plaque in Eastham Town Hall calls him “a man of wisdom, integrity, and deep piety.”

He has a namesake rock, the largest exposed boulder on Cape Cod, which is estimated to be 30 feet in diameter — 18 feet of which is above ground and 12 feet below, and which the Park Service does want you to climb.

But much is missing from the historical record, according to University of Michigan-Dearborn anthropologist John Chenoweth.

Chenoweth was the lead archeologist on an excavation at the site where Doane’s house once stood. The excavation took place in 2019 and 2022, but the report on it wasn’t published until Aug. 1 this year. The building itself no longer stands, but artifacts remain, which Chenoweth and his team were able to use to draw conclusions about the life of a man who played a big role in defining Eastham’s early history.

Wealth and Piety

The area where Doane’s house stood overlooked the north end of Nauset Bay, which according to Chenoweth was the “main highway” through Eastham in that era. Eastham houses at the time were surrounded by farm fields, so the Doane house was likely the only house for a mile or two.

Even from a distance, though, the Doane house must have been arresting. Chenoweth and his team collected thousands of brick chips from the site, which they estimated to come from at least 150 bricks. Bricks at the time were likely imported from off-Cape and were extremely expensive. They were probably used to make a hearth, a cellar, footings, and a full chimney — impressive accoutrements compared to those of the quickly made, brick-free houses of the period, Chenoweth said.

The house had glass windows, as evidenced by flat glazed glass fragments and X-shaped lead window frame used to hold pieces of glass together.

“Glass is a real status symbol in 17th-century New England,” Chenoweth said. It had to be imported from England, which meant it had to survive a voyage in the hull of a rocking ship. Plus, “once you break a pane of glass, it’s useless,” he said. A house with glass windows, then, would be evidence of disposable income.

Conveniently, in addition to demonstrating his wealth, Doane’s house also demonstrated his piety. In the 17th century, “material success was connected to living your life in the right way religiously,” Chenoweth said.

Warding Off Witches

Another key component of this display of wealth and godliness was the presence of blackened or “vitrified” bricks at the site. These bricks were considered “the first and best sort,” according to Chenoweth’s paper. But they may have also had another function: to ward off witches.

Throughout colonial New England, vitrified bricks were thought to have non-Christian magical properties that could help protect a house from evil spirits, Chenoweth said. The fact that the house was full of these bricks suggests to the archaeologist that Doane may have used them for that purpose. It’s just a theory, Chenowith said, and more evidence is needed to support it, but he hopes future archaeologists will pursue the idea.

There’s an apparent contradiction in the idea of a Calvinist preacher warding off spirits with magic, but these ideas coexisted widely, said Chenoweth. Other colonial New England sites included shoes in chimneys, bullets buried under doorsteps, and “witching bottles” full of magical items sealed in the wall, all of which were seen as deterrents of evil spirits.

“People would go to church on Sunday and follow all the rules and think of themselves as perfectly good Christians,” Chenoweth said. “But they also thought, ‘It can’t hurt to have something in the corner to keep witches away.’ ”

Doane appears to have been an upstanding sort. There was nearly no bottled glass found in the dig, which suggests that Doane hardly ever drank. The archaeologists also found only 23 pipestems at the site, suggesting minimal tobacco consumption: for comparison, the nearby Great Island Tavern site in Wellfleet turned up 9,000 pipestems.

Industrial Experiments

Despite the extravagance of Doane’s house, its contents appear to have been meager. Ceramics were rare at the site, and nearly none were English in origin. In his will, Doane’s estate was valued at only a little over 10 pounds sterling, which would have made it one of the smallest in all of Plymouth Colony.

The lack of available trade in the region may have contributed to this lack of accumulated goods, as Eastham was quite far removed from the rest of Plymouth Colony. The distance may have also have driven Doane to experiment with industry, Chenoweth said.

During the excavation, his team found several pieces of iron slag as well as poor-quality molten glass “like you might make the first time you try making glass,” Chenoweth said. He believes that these are evidence that Doane was trying his hand at glass production and smithing or refining iron.

Industry in the early colonial period is thought to have been rare, Chenoweth said, but historical records show that a pine tar kiln was part of Doane’s property, and other industrial practices may have been valuable in a society so cut off from the rest of the European world. In a place like this, “you’re going to need to find a way to repair your tools or to make new tools,” Chenoweth said.

As Doane neared death, his daughter Abigail was living with him. His other children had moved away by then, and his second wife, Lydia, had died. He left the house to Abigail, who not long after married a man in Connecticut. It’s likely Abigail salvaged the house and moved its pieces with her, Chenoweth said, leaving behind a few decades’ worth of trash for archaeologists to uncover.