Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
For the past two decades, Bob Sheets – along with Drs. Stephen McBride and Kim Arbogast McBride – has been discovering the remains of a pre-Revolutionary War fort known as Fort Warwick.
The fort is located on Sheets’ farm in Green Bank and played a pivotal role in the colonial history of Pocahontas County. The settlers who initially lived there were loyalist to King George III until the colonies chose to fight for freedom.
Then the fort, as Sheets says, “switched Georges” and joined in the fight to become a country free of the monarchy.
Joining Sheets and the McBrides in the past two decades have been more than 1,400 students – from third grade to college age – who have helped dig in the dirt to find artifacts from the past.
This educational outreach was the basis for the Preservation Alliance of West Virginia’s recognition of Sheets, who received the 2025 Archaeology Award.
“One of our first grants for our first excavations – we had students coming here,” Sheets said. “We had volunteers coming here and over the years, that just became an integral part of what we were doing.
“We wanted to do that for the education component because having kids on-site – having them deal with digging in the dirt, finding things and then having somebody stand there and immediately tell them what it was and how it connected to the nation’s history, the state history, the colonial history or pre-historic civilizations – that was a great learning experience for all those kids,” he added.
Through the years, Sheets realized students are the perfect archaeologists for a dig like Fort Warwick because they have keen eyes, small hands and an eagerness to discover something in the dirt.
“To be able to recognize something that’s different from the surround soil type, they got a hold of that concept pretty quickly,” he said. “They wouldn’t necessarily know what they found, but they would hold up a lot of things, asking, ‘what’s this?’”
Sometimes it would turn out just to be a rock, but there have been many times where the item they held up for a closer look was, in fact, an artifact.
As a retired teacher, Sheets knew the educational element of the digs was important for all age groups and is happy to say students from not just Pocahontas County, but surrounding areas have experienced the hands-on education at the fort.
“This was the Augusta County militia, so we reached out to Staunton High School and they brought students here,” he said. “Charleston Catholic got in touch with us. They brought students here and dug with us. We’ve had students from the governor’s science camp at GBO come and excavate with us.”
The most distant group was from Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.
“Their professor brought them here and they camped in the field because he wanted them to have a real field archaeology experience,” Sheets said. “They were here for about four days and helped us extensively on one of our excavations.”
The educational element of the fort doesn’t end with students. Sheets has hosted several events at the fort, including a 250th anniversary celebration last summer, which attracted hundreds of people of all ages who wanted to learn more about the history of the area.
“The colonial knowledge is sometimes quite way back in the mindset of individuals,” he explained. “They hear about the American Revolution, but looking at our forests around here, they don’t really think about this being a hot bed of that particular type of activity.”
While none of the fort’s residents were present for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, they were prepared to defend it and several of them walked from Pocahontas County to join in the fight.
There is still a lot to learn from the fort and Sheets said he and the McBrides are trying to determine the shape and positioning of the fort – a discovery they plan to present to the public in July.
“It’s not your classic four sided with bastions on each corner or even bastions on two corners,” he said. “We’ve got a very unique animal. Drs. McBride are both working on that, trying to put together all the data points we’ve got to establish the footprint of this thing.”
Although the date is not set yet, Sheets said the public event will be in July at the Green Bank Observatory.
The presentation will include the shape of the fort, as well as results from various excavations that have happened through the years.
