Newel K. Whitney Store

Imagine a contemporary grocery shopper buying household supplies such as brown sugar or molasses in a 15-gallon wooden keg. Cooking oil is available in a hand-thrown pottery crock. Herbs and spices appear in foot-long, tightly tied bundles while woven baskets display freshly harvested produce.

Ashery

So what is an ashery? “An ashery is just as it sounds,” says historian Steven Olsen, manager of the Historic Kirtland Restoration Project. “It’s a place where hardwood ashes were created, collected and processed. This ash was so vital to many manufacturing needs that it was a literal cash staple of the American frontier.”

Sawmill

“We found the sawmill by accident,” says anthropologist Mark Staker. “We were looking for the ashery. We knew approximately where it was and could see the indentation of a building on the ground surface.” So Staker and a colleague dug some test trenches, found a building foundation and excavated the site. “It took us almost two weeks to figure out it wasn’t the ashery,” he says. “It was the sawmill next door.”