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Some Greensboro people are going to feel extra old when they learn that an archaeological dig will seek the exact site of their birthplace.

The Aycock Neighborhood Association has chosen as a 2008 Greensboro Bicentennial project to probe beneath Sternberger Park at 715 Summit Ave., next to Dewey Street and Fifth Avenue.

From 1930 until 1953, Sternberger Hospital for Women and Children occupied, on a spacious lot, a large, beige brick house with a green roof.

Hundreds of babies came into the world there, including Jim Melvin, who became the city's longest-serving mayor and remains active in civic affairs.

Aycock will have other bicentennial projects, but professional archaeologist Shawn Patch and librarian Jennie Hunt wanted one to be archaeological in a high-profile place in their historic neighborhood.

They knew a dig would attract scores of volunteers eager to get their hands dirty.

"Archaeology is exotic and fascinating to people," Hunt says.

The mill-owning Cone family developed most of Aycock (later named for the school on Cypress Street) in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Ceasar Cone had the city build Summit Avenue to connect downtown and his mills.

After Cone built an enormous mansion at Summit and West Bessemer avenues in 1896, Emanuel and Bertha Sternberger erected a stately home two blocks away.

Emanuel and his brother, Herman Sternberger, were partners with brothers Ceasar and Moses Cone in 1898 in starting Revolution Cotton Mills. Revolution became part of the vast Cone Mills factory network. Bertha Sternberger became the first woman on the city school board and later was the namesake for Sternberger School.

The late Ed Benjamin, founder of the Starmount Co. and Friendly Shopping Center, married the Sternbergers' daughter, Blanche.

Before his death in 1980, Ed Benjamin said the Sternberger home was like a salon. Every Sunday, Greensboro's leading families gathered there for conversation.

After Herman died in 1924 and Bertha in 1928, Ed and Blanche Benjamin gave the house for a 60-bed hospital and created a supporting endowment. The hospital closed 23 years later when Moses Cone Hospital opened in 1953.

After that, the county welfare offices occupied the Sternberger house. The department, which changed its name to Social Services, left in 1972 for bigger quarters downtown.

The house was demolished in 1973. In 1978, Sternberger Park was dedicated. Blanche Benjamin rode by occasionally and noticed the park looking shabby. She donated $25,000, and the Greensboro Beautiful organization and the neighborhood made improvements.

The only reminder of the house are steps off Summit and a walkway that led to entrance.

Patch wants to find more than the house's foundations.

"Neighborhood lore," he says, has the grounds including a swimming pool. Very few homes had pools back then.

If a pool is there, Patch says it could yield items perhaps tossed in with the fill dirt.

Blanche Benjamin, who died in 1995 and who gave birth to one of her sons, Jonathan, in Sternberger Hospital, made no mention of a pool in interviews in the 1980s. She did mention a tennis court and cows.

Digging at the house site, Patch says, might yield artifacts from the Sternberger era and old hospital instruments.

The project should correct an erroneous assumption of some Aycock residents. They think another Sternberger house of the same style and size, still standing across from the park, was Emanuel and Bertha's house and later the hospital. They assume it was moved to create the park.

In fact, the surviving house was built by Sigmund Sternberger, son of Herman Sternberger. A bachelor, Sigmund lived there until he died in 1964.

Sigmund's house is now where writers go to work on their prose and poetry.

Patch says before the dig he'll use ground-penetrating radar to pinpoint the house's foundations, the carriage house and the swimming pool if one existed.

The dig will take place May 17, the date the neighborhood picked and submitted to the Bicentennial Commission. Other neighborhoods also will have project days.

Patch and Hunt hope to attract Boy Scouts (it could help toward an archaeology merit badge) and others. Volunteers don't have to live in Aycock to participate.

The neighborhood seeks a grant for the dig from the Cemala Foundation to cover equipment and conservation costs. The foundation was started by the children of Ceasar Cone II. The children and their parents lived awhile in Ceasar Cone's mansion, which was torn down in the early 1960s.

"This is their old stomping ground," Hunt says.

Patch all but promises results.

"I expect,'' he says, "to find good stuff."

Contact Jim Schlosser at 373-7081 or jschlosser@news-record.com