Archaeological Work at the Harding Home

When Warren G. Harding ran for president in 1920, he ran his entire campaign from his home in Marion, Ohio. It was known as the Front Porch Campaign. A couple weeks ago we received a call to asking if we wanted to participate in an archaeological project to excavate foundations of a kitchen addition that had been built on the house in 1920.

This week Jordan Menvielle and Neal V Hitch have been at the house working on the archaeological project which is being run by Dr. Craig Keener, of Professional Archaeological Services Team.

 

Dr. Hitch's academic specialization is the architecture of the 1920s and he had written about the modernization of the Harding Home during the campaign. The president had enlarged the kitchen, but no one knows exactly where or how big the addition was. This was a good opportunity to complete research Dr. Hitch started several years ago.

The archaeological company was looking for additional people as well, so Dr. Hitch contacted Jordan Menvielle, an El Centro resident and a recent graduate of the Anthropology program at UC San Diego. It is not everyday you get to do archaeology on a presidential site, so he jumped at the chance. Jordan will be working on the project for the next several weeks. This project is the first step of a plan to restore the presidential site for the 2020 centennial anniversary of the Front Porch Campaign.