MINOT – There is a good possibility that within the month, archaeology students from the University of Southern Maine’s L-A College will uncover evidence of William Ladd’s life in Minot in the early 1800s.

Earlier this week, selectmen gave Pamela Crane and Peter Morrison, a husband and wife team of historical archeologists, permission to dig on the town-owned William Ladd homestead site.

Crane and Morrison want to use it as a classroom for their intensive four-week course, “Fieldwork in Historical Archeology,” which begins May 19, with students setting up digs in the old cellar hole and scattered points about the property.

“We have a painting that shows the layout of the farm buildings. We’d like to be able to identify the uses of the various buildings,” Morrison said.

Ladd, known in his day as the “apostle of peace” for his work establishing the American Peace Society, spent his productive years on his model farm on Center Minot Hill.

Morrison suspects that Ladd, who died in 1841, may have experimented with methods to increase farm productivity and evidence of his work may be, literally, just a spade away.

“This is truly a hands-on course. We won’t be telling students about someone else’s research, they will be doing it themselves,” Morrison said.

Selectman Eda Tripp, a student of local history who probably knows as much about Ladd as anyone, is thrilled at the prospect of new insight into Ladd’s life and time.

“It would be wonderful if we could get something from the property that belonged to Ladd,” Tripp said.

Morrison hopes enough students sign up for this year’s dig to proceed and that work at the Ladd site can continue for several years.

In addition to work on the hilltop Minot site, students taking the course will, as urban counterpoint, map the Libbey Mill foundations on the banks of the Androscoggin River at Island Point in Lewiston.