Finding the Battle

We've found musket balls, military buttons, fragments of cartridge boxes—the debris of the running battle. Every time someone digs a foundation in old Arlington, there's a chance of finding April 19 artifacts. The challenge is that the battle happened along a road that's been continuously occupied for 250 years. We're looking for traces of one violent afternoon buried under centuries of daily life. But the artifacts are there. The battle left its mark in the soil.