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Overview
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| Overview of excavation at Building
t |
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Excavation in 1984-85 of the
1192 square foot
Building t site exposed
features associated with two phases of slave quarter construction on Mulberry
Row. As expected, mechanical removal of early 20th-century roadwork revealed
evidence (F05), albeit scant, of the easternmost of three log dwellings built
in the mid-1790s and recorded by Jefferson on his 1796 Mutual Assurance
Declaration as
Building t. The
unanticipated discovery of a cluster of four sub-floor pits (F01-04)
representing an earlier barracks-style quarter, named the Negro Quarter, offers
a rare insight into the conditions of enslaved laborers living on Mulberry Row
between the 1770s and 1790.
Documentary Evidence
Negro Quarter
In January of 1773, Jefferson purchased three slaves, Ursula and her
sons, Bagwell and George. He probably also bought her husband Great George
about this same time, but no record of the transaction survives (Bear and Stanton
1995:334). Their third son Isaac Jefferson, born at Monticello in 1775,
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| Isaac Jefferson (1775-c.1850), c.1847 (courtesy of
the University of Virginia Library)
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recalled in 1847 that
“the feedin’ place [for Jefferson’s deer park] was right by
the house whar Isaac stayed” (Bear, ed. 1967:21-22). This house could well have been
the Negro Quarter, located 200’ from the Park gate of the 1770s and 1780s
(N-131, N-132, N-221, N-130, N-522-6, MHi). If Isaac did live there,
archaeological evidence tells us that his family shared these quarters with as
many as three other families, each with access to their own sub-floor pit
(F01-04).
Building t
On his 1796 Mutual Assurance Declaration, Jefferson described three
buildings on the south side of Mulberry Row between the new log stables and the
extant 1770s stone Workmen’s House (now called the Weaver’s
Cottage):
r. which as well as s. and t. are servants houses of wood with wooden
chimnies, & earth floors, 12. by 14. feet, each and 27. feet apart from one
another. from t. it is 85 feet to F. the stable [subsequently replaced by the
stone stables, which still stands at the eastern end of Mulberry Row]
These
three log cabins were constructed no earlier than the winter of 1793-94 and
formed part of Jefferson’s preparations to rebuild his house after his
first retirement in 1794 (Hill 2002a and
b).
In September of 1792, Jefferson wrote from Washington to his overseer
Minoah Clarkson:
Five log houses are to be built at the places I have marked out, of
chesnut logs, hewed on two sides and split with the saw, and dove tailed...They
are to be covered [i.e., roofed] and lofted with slabs...Racks and mangers in
three of them for stables. (Boyd 1950-, vol. 24:412-414)
In August of 1793, his
son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph wrote Jefferson that work on the “two
houses for the servants are not yet built” but declared his intention to
begin construction “as soon as the fall of the leaves commences”
(Boyd 1950-, vol.
26:667). By 1796,
Buildings r,
s, and t
were evidently in place: three dwellings, rather than the two originally
planned.
Excavation history, procedure, and methods
Exploration of the presumed location of
Buildings r,
s, and t
began in the spring of 1983 with the mechanical removal of the modern
overburden: a 1934 paved parking lot; a layer of furnace detritus; and rubble
from a 1925 parking lot (Sanford 1995:196). Archaeologists plotted the
probable locations of the three buildings using measurements provided by
Jefferson’s 1796 Mutual Assurance Declaration. Kelso treated each
projected house site and its surrounding yard as a separate excavation. He
undertook work on the
Building t site last, in
1984-1985.
Negro Quarter
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| Negro Quarter sub-floor pits |
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Four features (F01-04) discovered at the
Building t site provided a
surprising revelation. These shallow, partially graded, depressions contained
fragments of ceramics dating to c. 1770-90, wood, ash, charcoal, and brick.
Based on his experience at sites in the Chesapeake Tidewater, Kelso determined
that these were the remains of sub-floor pits (F01-04) and evidence of an
early, previously unknown slave quarter, which he named the Negro Quarter based
on a notation in a Jefferson document (N-87, N-88, MHi).
Building t
Exposure of the
Building t site revealed
that 20th-century roadwork had graded away most of the architectural evidence
of
Building t. Only the lower
portion of its sub-floor pit (F05) remained intact, along with four post holes
(F13-16) of the 1809 garden fence. The dating of this fence is well documented,
as is the activity of enlarging and leveling the vegetable garden which
immediately preceded its construction (Betts 1976: 359-382).
In 1984, excavation proceeded within a 10' X 10' grid oriented on axis
with the Monticello mansion. Quadrats of 8' X 8' were opened initially, leaving
2' balks on two sides. Subsequent removal of the balks resulted in the
excavation of units of varying sizes, from 2’ X 2’ to 2’ X
10’. Within units, excavation proceeded in natural levels. Opening and
closing elevations were recorded, but measurements were not related to a fixed
datum point. Excavators used a method of careful troweling to recover
artifacts, but they did not use screens.
Summary of research and analysis
Excavation of the
Building t site recovered
not only the anticipated remains of the documented mid-1790s single-family
slave dwelling—Building t—but also features associated with
an earlier, undocumented multi-family quarter, which Kelso named the Negro
Quarter. DAACS completed recataloguing of the
Building t site assemblage
in early 2003, but reanalysis of the data has not yet been undertaken.
Negro Quarter
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| Artist's reconstruction of Building
s based on historical records and
archaeological evidence.
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In addition to the sub-floor pit (F05)
associated with
Building t, excavation
revealed a cluster of four sub-floor pits (F01-F04), which Kelso recognized as
the remains of an earlier, barracks-style slave quarter. Ceramics recovered
from these sealed contexts bracket the occupation of the Negro Quarter between
the early 1770s and c. 1790 (cf. 1776/78-1790 acc.
Kelso et al.
1985:37;
Sanford
1995:180). Numerous lumps of fired clay and fragments of burnt wood
indicate that, by intention or accident, flames destroyed this log dwelling.
These artifacts also provide clues about the manner of its construction.
Burning preserved pieces of chinking that bear the impressions of the debarked
trees used to construct the house’s log cribbing. Once in place, builders
apparently crammed clay from the inside against riven clapboards applied to the
exterior. Marks of the fingers of enslaved workmen and the reverse mold of
overlapping sheathing boards are evident on several large fragments of
chinking. Many pieces of burnt clapboard were recovered from the sub-floor
pits, including a recognizable portion of a tapered or ‘feathered’
end (Hill
2002a and
b).
Kelso:
Kelso presented his conclusions about the appearance of
Building s and, by
extension,
Building t, in an
isometric drawing published in 1997 (p. 60, fig. 21). It illustrates a 12’ x
14’, one-room cabin crafted of logs squared off on four sides. The
windows of s are depicted with wooden
shutters. However, window glass from the sealed context of the sub-floor pit of
Building t (F05) and the
1809 postholes (F13-16) indicate that the structure had glazed fenestration
during the first ten years of its occupation (Hill 2002a and
b). In
Kelso’s rendering of
Building s, a single door
stands in the northern gable end opposite an exterior wattle-and-daub chimney.
The sub-floor pit (Building s
site, F01) is centered in front of the hearth. In contrast, the sub-floor pit
of
Building t appears to have
been placed off-center within the building. These deviations suggest that,
although
Buildings r,
s, and t
may have begun life together, they had distinct occupational histories.
Sanford:
Twentieth-century road work graded away nearly all the structural
evidence of
Building t. Only the lower
few inches of a 3’ X 3’ 6” sub-floor pit (F05) survived.
Consequently, conclusions about the appearance of
Building t rely on
inferences based on the better preserved features of
Building s. The Jefferson
documents noted above strongly link the timing and manner of the construction
of these two dwellings. Sanford (Kelso et al. 1985) initially dated the destruction
of
Building t to c.1810,
twenty years earlier than
Building s. He based his
estimate on ceramics that had been recovered from the adjacent garden bed
excavation prior to the work at the
Building t site (p. 24). He later
revised his estimate to 1820 (Sanford 1995:181). Preliminary DAACS analysis extends
the date of occupation forward another decade to the early 1830s.
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| Martha Hill |
| Thomas Jefferson Foundation |
| October 2003 |
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