Sometime around 1700 the terrace on which the plantation had been built was abandoned. Whether all of Cupids was deserted at this time we cannot say, it may be that the focus of settlement simply moved to another part of the harbour, but there is a definite gap in the archaeological record extending from the time of the second destruction until sometime in the second half of the eighteenth-century. The earliest artifacts we have from this later period are several fragments of an English “scratch blue” stoneware bowl with a date range of between 1760 and 1775. Hundreds of fragments of creamware have also been recovered some of which may date to as early as the 1760s.

However, it appears that the main reoccupation of the site began sometime after 1780. It was around this time that a building with a substantial stone cellar (Structure 4) was erected at the north end of the site. Part of the seventeenth-century stone wall located here was removed prior to the construction of this building and the stone was almost certainly recycled to construct Structure 4's cellar walls. At around the same time, two smaller root cellars were dug, one to the east and the other to the west of Structure 4. Clearly these building were in use throughout the nineteenth-century. Literally thousands of artifacts, including fragments of creamware, pearlware and other refined earthenwares, nineteenth-century bottle glass and nineteenth-century clay tobacco pipes have been found around these buildings and in the upper layers all over the site. A photograph of this area taken from across the harbour in 1910, or shortly before, shows several buildings and one of these must be Structure 4. Since we know that this land belonged to the Spracklin family during the nineteenth-century, these buildings must also have belonged to them.

While Structure 4 was still standing around 1910, it is unlikely that it stood for much longer. Beneath over a metre of recent fill, we uncovered a destruction layer inside the cellar that could not have dated to very long after that. In it was a wide range of artifacts including hinges, stove parts, a set of metal scales, a coal bucket and late nineteenth and/or early twentieth-century bottle glass and stoneware. The latter included a liquor bottle dating to between 1870 and 1900; two stoneware blacking bottles dating to circa 1880; and a small, wide mouth stoneware jar dating to either the late nineteenth or early twentieth-century. Aside from a house belonging to the Norman family located about 10 metres northeast of the site, once Structure 4 was destroyed the terrace remained unoccupied until the current owners, Garland Baker and William Norman, placed trailers at the north end of the site in the 1970s.

Images (left to right, top to bottom) 1. Excavating the cellar inside Structure 4. 2. English "scratch blue" stoneware bowl fragment, 1760-1775. 3. Part of the cellar wall inside Structure 4. This cellar was built sometime after 1780 using stones that were probably recycled from seventeenth-century structures. 4. Part of a feather-edged creamware plate, circa 1760-1820. 5. Artifacts found in the destruction level inside Structure 4. Left to right: Liquor bottle, 1870-1900; two stoneware blacking bottles, circa 1880: a wide mouth stoneware jar, late- nineteenth or early twentieth-century. 6. Nineteenth-century clay pipe from the bottom of the cellar inside Structure 4. 7. Nineteenth-century bowl from the bottom of the cellar inside Structure 4.