Halchin, Jill Yvonne, August 1985 - HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY OF HOUSE C OF THE SOUTHEAST ROWHOUSE, FORT MICHILIMACKINAC Abstract: Research on House C of the Southeast Rowhouse provides a view of life inside the 18th-century fur trade and military post of Fort Michilimackinac, in present-day Mackinaw City, Michigan. The excavation reported in this thesis was carried out under the Mackinac Island State Park Commission, which operates the fort and other local sites as historic parks Fieldwork and analysis served as an internship/master's thesis project at the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida. Analysis of House C included the use of a large number of historic documents and archaeological data from several seasons of fieldwork. In the resulting interpretation, these two types of data were used to complement and to test each other The history of the fort, the fur trade, and the house owners were traced as far as records permitted and this information was correlated with the artifact assemblages -- both in terms of content and spatial distribution -- to provide details about activities inside the house and part of its garden. It was concluded that the owners and residents from around 1733 until 1765, were the Parants, a large family of French ancestry and probably Roman Catholics, who used the house primarily as a domestic dwelling. Pierre Parant apparently worked as a fur trader employee and may have done some trading for himself. The house was rebuilt, most likely in the early 1760s By 1765 the fort was under British control and House C was purchased by two Jewish fur traders, Ezekiel Solomon and a partner named Levy For the next few years, the structure functioned each summer primarily as a trader's warehouse and secondarily as a dwelling. Refuse patterns and the effect of the installation of a wooden floor are apparent in deposits of this period. The house was razed around 1780, before the final demolition of the remainder of the fort in 1781.