BALTIMORE (WBFF) — Evan Woodard has always had a passion for finding artifacts, and he was magnet fishing in the waters of the Inner Harbor near Fells Point one day in 2023 when he got a strong hit.
Woodard, a self-described urban archaeologist, usually pulled discarded scooters, rusty lamps and other trash from the harbor with the powerful magnet at the end of his rope. But this was something different: a Victorian-era iron bench with a filigreed back.
He cleaned and restored the piece before learning that an iron foundry had stood just yards away from that spot in the 1870s.
“The bench probably fell or was pushed into the water sometime between 1870 and 1920, and we found it more than a century and a half later,” said Woodard, the founder and president of Salvage Arc, a nonprofit specializing in history and artifact recovery in Baltimore. “This bench told me a story I didn’t know before.”
Read the full story on the Baltimore Sun.
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