The fact that we were removing, by hand, almost eight feet of sand, dirt and heavy clay from the top of the wheel was hard enough, but to make matters worse there were three fast flowing springs feeding directly into where we dug. As you can see in the images, there was always a nice "pond" of water on top of the wheel while we were digging. The suction created by this mixture of clay and water made every step challenging. A few times we went to step and had already shifted our weight forward, but our feet decided not to move with our body. The result was our upper body splashing in the mucky mixture. It was unpleasant, to say the least.

Our next couple of days of digging were very productive. We had to build a ramp to wheelbarrow the dirt and clay away from the site. We figured a wheelbarrow full of this heavy mixture weighed a couple of hundred pounds or more and we must have moved at least a couple of hundred wheelbarrow loads, so you can see this was no easy task.
The water flowed from the springs at a greater volume as we removed the clay and dirt. This made it even more difficult to move and made the mixture very, very heavy.

Volunteer Dino Dunning from Rustburg, Virginia helps Bobby Ricketts on the second weekend of excavation as Joey Ricketts walks the creek looking for arrowheads. Joey suffered a bad case of poison ivy from the first weekend of digging so he was staying far away!
Note the wooden remnants of the dam across the creek in this photograph. Many dams in the 1700s and 1800s were constructed entirely of wood. The dam created a mill pond which supplied water to the flume which was located under the mill to turn this massive wheel. Placing the waterwheel outside of the main water flow protected the wheel from damage by flooding. When the recovered part of the wheel sunk into the clay after a fire, another mill was built which was powered by a smaller wheel which was probably located within the flow of the creek. Upstream in the background is the present-day Beavers' Mill Road bridge across Sandy Creek. The 1740s bridge abutments are located downstream about the same distance from the mill.