Wingos Quarter

• Overview
• Documentary Evidence
• Excavation history, methods, and procedures
• Research and analysis

Overview

Wingos site overview, facing north.

The Wingo’s site (44BE0298) is located in Bedford County, Virginia and was once a 1,000 to 1,400-acre quarter farm, part of the approximately 5,000-acre Poplar Forest plantation. Today it sits on the western edge of a modern farm and is presently in pasture. In 2000 and 2001, archaeologists affiliated with The Corporation for Jefferson’s Poplar Forest conducted testing to locate the site. They found a light scatter of historic artifacts in the southern portion of the 12-acre field where historic maps indicated the 18th-century Wingo’s quarter was located. From 2007 to 2012, archaeologists and students from the Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, conducted further excavations at the site. To date, 1.7 acres (approximately 10%) of the field have been tested. The remains of a single cabin and enclosed yard spaces were excavated. A total of 6,243 artifacts (excluding daub and a few other artifact types that were weighed), 4,498 faunal remains, and 4,668 seeds and plant parts have been collected and analyzed, along with 198 chemical samples from plow zone and subsoil sediments have been collected and analyzed to better understand the use of space by enslaved residents of the site in the late 18th century.

Documentary Evidence

Poplar Forest was patented by William Stith in 1745, and passed to two other owners prior to 1764, when John Wayles acquired it (Chambers 1993:1-4). Wayles lived in Charles City County and used the property, along with others that he owned in piedmont Virginia, as an outlying quarter. He died in May of 1773, and within months of his death, his estate was under division, much of his land was up for sale, and the enslaved men, women, and children formerly in his possession were transferred to his heirs. Wayles’ oldest daughter, Martha Jefferson and her husband Thomas, came into possession of 135 enslaved people and land near the James and Appomattox Rivers stretching from modern day Powhatan to Bedford County. Among these holdings was Poplar Forest at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in what is today Bedford County, Campbell County, and the city of Lynchburg.

In January 1774, Jefferson made a list of the enslaved people that he had inherited including those at Wingo’s.

All of these people were recorded as “laborers in the ground” except for Mary who Jefferson recorded followed “some other occupation.” A second census for that year lists 10 adults over the age of 16 and 5 children living at Wingo’s, many from Wayles’ Indian Camp property in Cumberland County (Jefferson in Betts 1987:7, 16, Marmon 1991: 28).

These people were likely resident on the property by early spring of 1774. Additional information about the enslaved residents at Poplar Forest is included in a list of tithables taken in 1782 and a slave census from 1783 (VAN 1981; Jefferson in Betts 1987:24). Neither list distinguishes between the quarters at Wingo’s and a separate quarter in an area known as the “old plantation,” located near the later brick mansion house built for Jefferson in the early 19th-century (Heath 1999).

The site of Wingo’s is depicted, along with an overseer’s house, on a series of late 18th and early 19th-century maps and plats. John Wingo, a white overseer, managed the farm for only four years, and he was likely replaced by hired overseers or enslaved headmen, who oversaw operations until 1790. In that year, Jefferson gave the land and people living on it to his daughter and son-in-law, Martha and Thomas Mann Randolph, on the occasion of their marriage. He also gave them one family living “at the old plantation” (Boyd 1961:189-190).

The Randolphs gave the property to their daughter and son-in-law, Ann Cary and Charles Lewis Bankhead, in 1808. In 1811 they sold the Wingo’s portion of the property to Jefferson’s overseer, Joel Yancey, and local businessman and planter William Radford. The land on which Wingo’s was located probably ceased to operate as a quarter around this time. Today, the Wingo’s property is owned by Radford’s descendants.

Excavation history, methods, and procedures

Gerald Schroedl metal detecting view southwest

In October 2000, Poplar Forest staff undertook a preliminary survey in a field adjacent to two springs feeding branches of Wolf Branch, a tributary of the James River. They excavated five north-south transects. Staff also conducted a metal detector sweep of the transects, moving both north-south and east-west along the established lines and covering a three-foot area centered on the transect lines.  Positive hits were flagged and mapped, and a sample was excavated to ensure the accuracy of the hits.

Following testing, Poplar Forest staff excavated three judgmentally-placed 5 ft. x 5 ft. quadrats in the survey area in November of 2000 and September of 2001. Two of the quadrats contained a variety of prehistoric and 18th-century artifacts in plow zone. Later testing indicated the presence of a large prehistoric component to the site in plow zone, but no prehistoric features were discovered. The quantity and date ranges of the historic artifacts suggested their association with the Wingo’s quarter. No further excavations were conducted at Wingo’s from 2001 to the spring of 2007.

A team from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville conducted a geophysical survey using a Geo-Scan FM36 flux-gate gradiometer at the site in spring 2007. The survey covered an area measuring of 100 m east-west by 80 m north-south and including the portion of the site that had previously been tested. The results show a mosaic of large and small anomalies that reflects magnetism in the underlying bedrock and cultural features associated with the historic site (Brock et al. 2010).

End-of-season photograph, 2008, facing north.

Excavations re-commenced at the site in the spring of 2007 and continued in the summers of 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2012. A block measuring 35 ft. east-west by 25 ft. north-south in its maximum dimensions was excavated; within and adjacent to it were a single post hole and a series of small stake holes that outlined two small enclosures. Subsequent excavations occurred around the block to the east and west. A second, smaller block, measuring 30 ft. east-west by 15 ft. north-south, was excavated in 2009 to expose two subfloor pits and the area immediately surrounding them. Quadrats excavated in 2011 and 2012 filled in gaps adjacent to and between the blocks. An area extending about 150 ft. north and 200 ft. east of the cabin was also tested. Systematic sampling of sediment from plow zone and subsoil resulted in a robust dataset of soil chemistry at the site that, in combination with artifact distribution maps and site features, has allowed for a fine-grained interpretation of the use of space at the site (Wilkins 2012; Heath et al. 2015).

View of Features 04 and 05 after excavation, facing south.

The two subfloor pits are four feet apart and both were part of a single structure, probably a log dwelling with a mud-and-stick chimney. The western pit was circular, ranging in diameter from 4.2 to 6.5 ft. and reaching a depth of approximately 1.5 ft. The deepest layer consisted of primary fill, while the layers above contained architectural material associated with the demolition of the structure. The eastern pit was oval in shape measuring 6 ft. x 4 ft. and was approximately 1.5 ft. deep. This pit also consists of multiple layers of fill, nearly all of which were deposited before the structure was abandoned. A rich botanical assemblage was recovered from both pits and analyzed in the paleoethnobotany laboratory at the University of Massachusetts, Boston (Trigg and Henderson 2012; Henderson 2013). A modest faunal assemblage was analyzed at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, using the extensive comparative collections held by the Anthropology Department.

Research and analysis

Testing north, south and east of the cabin, and limited testing to the west, failed to uncover any evidence of additional historic occupation. As an archaeological site, Wingo’s is a rare example of an  isolated 18th-century piedmont Virginia slave dwelling,occupied for a short duration in the 1770s or early 1780s as part of a quarter farm characterized by dispersed settlement. The micro-landscape of the quarter consisted of a single house, oriented east-west at the top of a slope. Residents maintained areas immediately south and east of the cabin as clean zones with relatively few artifacts dropped or discarded during the period that the site was occupied.

Button found at Wingos summer 2011

A large enclosure, divided into eastern and western halves, extended south and west of the cabin in a different orientation. An area west of the enclosure was also kept clean, with an arc-shaped midden defining its southern edge. Artifact and chemical deposition associated with portion of the enclosure suggest differences in use. The eastern half was used for outdoor food preparation, or the disposal of food-related trash, while the northern portion of the western half may have contained a garden, bounded to the south by an animal pen or henhouse. A midden stretched along the southern fence line.

The Wingo’s, North Hill and Quarter Site provide an important comparative dataset for understanding the development of the Poplar Forest plantation from the third quarter of the 18th- through the first quarter of the 19th centuries; for understanding Jefferson’s plantation management schemes at both Poplar Forest and Monticello; and for studying intra- and inter-plantation interactions between enslaved residents. More broadly, they contribute to a growing dataset that documents life for enslaved people in the Virginia piedmont after the American Revolution.