NEW ORLEANS (AP) - A hole nearly 5 feet deep behind a restaurant in the Lower Garden District is the latest sign of owner David Baird's continuing efforts to learn the history of the building he bought in 2003.

In 2004, the architectural historian of the New Orleans Historic District Landmarks Commission concluded that the building - two Creole cottages under one massive hip roof - was probably built in 1810-13. That would make it the oldest known structure on the upriver side of Canal Street, Eleanor Burke wrote.

Baird said his own research indicates that it could date back to just before the Jesuit order was expelled from the colony of Louisiana in 1763-64, and all of their lands and possession sold at public auction.

He contacted state historic preservation officials, who put him in touch with Andrea White, director of the Greater New Orleans Archaeology Program at the University of New Orleans.

White, who has been working as an urban archaeologist for 15 years and has taken part in digs at more than a dozen other sites in New Orleans, excavated the pit in Baird's rear yard.

As she wrapped up her work earlier this month, she pointed out the series of unusually intact strata she and her crew found as they dug down, including a layer of bricks from what was probably a mid-19th century outbuilding.

Below that they found a midden, or layer of trash such as broken ceramics, charcoal, animal bones and bone buttons, that White said could have been deposited anywhere from the late 1700s to 1850. One tantalizing find was a piece of a smoking pipe whose style suggests it could have been made anywhere from 1720 to 1820.

Finally, the diggers uncovered bands of alternating silt and clay showing how the site - which was under the Mississippi River until sometime in the mid-1700s, when the river's course shifted - was repeatedly flooded as the river overflowed its banks.

White will do further study of the objects she found before reaching any final conclusions.

But Baird said that. in his view, the dig "is confirming a lot of things we had suspected, particularly that there was some sort of habitation here before 1800.''

When he bought the rundown building, he said, he had no knowledge of its history.

Now, the more he learns about it, the more convinced he becomes that it is a significant historical treasure.

He muses over the possibility of turning it into a museum.

"It's bigger than me," he said. "Bigger than the restaurant."

His most immediate problem, however, is that since 2002, Religious Street has been a designated truck route, traveled by hundreds of heavy trucks bound for the Uptown wharves of the Port of New Orleans.

The trucks' vibrations, he said, "are ripping this building apart."
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Information from: The Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com

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AP-WS-05-16-09 0015EDT