Montpelier archaeologists and James Madison University Field School students originally discovered this slave quarter back in 1992.  We returned to the site this past spring to define its exact size and location. Then at the end of June, we began to excavate the site.  What we have found so far has blown us away!

Overhead shot of Stable Quarter site showing location of hearth and borrow pits (click image to enlarge).

We began our first task: to relocate all the old excavation units placed at the site in the 1990s. This was no easy task.  Twenty years obscured the units’ exact location. It became a dig within a dig!  We finally located the units and began to decipher some of the features the previous archaeologists had located– especially the pit features that were full of hearth ash that mystified the archaeologists back in the 1990s.  A wonderful brick feature just outside of the old 1990s units put these features in perspective.

We also located an incredible find of an area of brick pavement that measures 9 feet by 4 feet.  This brick pad turns out to be the hearth for the slave quarter based on the brick and stone having evidence for burning and the fire crazing of the brick. Given that the hearth is at grade, the quarter likely had a clay floor, not a wooden floor set on joists (as found in the south yard–quarters for field slaves).

The hearth also highlighted another notably absent feature of the quarter which is no evidence for a brick or stone chimney base such as found in the South Yard.  This absence of a masonry base suggests this structure had a stick and mud chimney–a common chimney for 18th and early 19th century slave quarters.  The design for a stick and mud chimney is much as it sounds–sticks stacked to make the flue and then plenty of clay used to line the interior to reduce the risk of fire.  Such chimneys were typically associated with log structures–and the absence of any piers or foundations for our structure suggests it was built of log with the base log set right on the ground.

Exposed profile of deposits found in the borrow pit (click image to enlarge).

All of these structural features (stick and mud chimney and log structure) needed lots of clay to create–and this brought us back to the pit features found by archaeologists back in the 1990s.  We have a hunch that these pits began life as borrow pits or pits used to obtain clay for daubing the log structure and lining the wood chimney.  After these pits were used for their clay, they became trash pits where the ash from the hearth was deposited.  What is wonderful about the hearth ash is it is loaded with the remains of slave households food remains–animal bone, charred seeds, and lots of ceramics!  This provides archaeologists with a literal treasure trove of information about slave diet and insight into their daily life. In addition to the food remains, we are also finding burnt clay in the ash deposits which support the idea of a clay-lined chimney (the fire from the hearth would bake the clay and then rain storms would wash loosened clay into the hearth).

We still have much to discover at the Stable Quarter site and will be continuing our excavations into October.  We have found many more features (similar to the borrow pits) that await excavation.  In addition, all the artifacts are being washed and examined at the lab and we are just beginning to assess the finds from the borrow pits.  These finds have much to reveal about the sequence of events for the construction and use of the site–so stay tuned!

More importantly, we still have slots available for our week-long expedition programs in October–so please sign up for an experience of a life-time excavating at this exciting and important site!

The Running of the Montpelier Hunt Races will celebrate its 75th anniversary this Saturday, November 7. Marion duPont Scott founded the Hunt Races at Montpelier in 1934. Today, the Montpelier Hunt Races remain a beloved tradition in Orange County, Va.

Saturday’s races will feature an outstanding lineup. In fact, all but two of the seven races have already reached their entry capacity of 14. Two races are on the flat and five are over fences. The premier race is the sixth race, which is run over Montpelier’s signature live brush fences. These are the only live brush fences in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Most races are more than two miles and the horses make more than two turns around the course.

In addition to the great racing action, attendees are looking forward to tailgating, another great Virginia tradition! In fact, the renowned Chef Patrick O’Connell, the proprietor of the acclaimed Inn at Little Washington, will serve as the celebrity judge for the Dolley Madison Tailgate Competition.

On the weekend after the Races, we will welcome visitors to step back into a different period of Montpelier’s history. Our quarterly Freedman’s Farm Tour, and Confederate Winter Campsite Walking Tour is scheduled for 2 p.m. on November 15.

George Gilmore was born a slave at Montpelier in 1810 and was emancipated at the close of the Civil War in 1865. He built his own farm only a mile away from Montpelier. Here, he and his wife, Polly, raised their five children. Ironically, Gilmore built his farm from the remains of Confederate camp, just to the north of his homestead. Montpelier has restored and interpreted the Gilmore Cabin: A Freedman’s Farm and is pleased to be able to share the story of another member of the Montpelier community.

The tour also includes a visit to Montpelier’s Civil War Encampment Site. General Samuel McGowan’s South Carolina Brigade occupied this area during the winter of 1863–1864, prior to the 1864 Battle of the Wilderness.

Montpelier’s archaeology department located and surveyed seven Civil War regimental camps and 12 company camps within the area occupied by General McGowan’s troops. From this discovery, the archaeology team could determine the structure of both officer and enlisted huts that were once there. The team also discovered the types of materials the troops used to survive the harsh winter of 1863–1864. Re-enactors from the 3rd Regiment of the Army of Northern Virginia rebuilt some of the huts this past summer.

As the leaves fall from the trees and the air becomes crisp, we’re reminded that winter and the holiday season are right around the corner. This season there will be anew, memorable way to celebrate with the Christmas Candlelight Tour at Montpelier. The tour will take place on December 5 at 5:00 p.m.

Guests will see the gate draped in greenery as they stroll the candlelit path to the mansion. Civil War re-enactors will be outside to teach visitors about 19th Century Christmas traditions, and share period holiday music, and stories.

After an evening mansion tour, visitors can enjoy holiday music, wassail, wine, and light refreshments around the Christmas tree in the William duPont Gallery. Free wrapping will be available for Museum Shop gifts. Please call 540.672.2728, x109 or e-mail basher@montpelier.org to make reservations.

Montpelier will offer an additional Christmas Candlelight Tour for members on December 6 at 5 p.m. Please contact Karen Costello at 540.672.2728, x108 if you are interested in membership.

Area south of mansion--Stable Quarter Complex

Next season, we will focus on the area between the Visitor Center and the mansion’s South Yard. During the early nineteenth century, this area housed several outbuildings including the Madisons’ stable and at least one slave quarter.  Previous surveys show several promising spots to excavate.  The team will hit the dirt in this area starting in March 2010.  We expect  to locate structural features and artifact concentrations including ceramics, glasswares, and iron tools.  We’ll also uncover the yards the Madisons’ slaves used for daily work activities.  Next year’s work will contribute to Montpelier’s efforts to interpret the lives of all of the Montpelier Community members.

The Montpelier Archaeology Expedition Program began a decade-and-a-half ago.  In fact many of the same participants return year after year. We are always looking  to add new faces to the program. Participants gain  actual excavation experience on an archaeological site.  Our staff of eight archaeologists works with participants both in the lab and in the field. This allows participants to work on sensitive features, artifacts, and deposits that are not normally available to the public. In addition to the archaeology experience, guests attend special lectures, take tours of various archaeological sites on the property, and of course get a tour of the newly-restored mansion.

Session dates are:

• Session 1: March 28-April 2
• Session 2: April 11-16
• Session 3: April 25-30
• Session 4: August 1-6
• Session 5: August 8-13
• Session 6: August 22-27
• Session 7: September 5-11
• Session 8: October 3-8
• Session 9: October 17-22

For more information on the program shedule, or to learn more about the Archaeology Expedition and Archaeology Excursion, programs please click on the following link on Montpelier’s main website: Archaeology Programs 2010.

Red clay surface at kitchen as revealed at the end of June

At long last, we are just about finished at the North Kitchen.  With the season winding down, we are starting to finally find some resolution to questions that have been plaguing us all summer–chief of which is why we have not been able to locate the hearth for the kitchen!  By the end of June we had completely removed all of the duPont fill at the kitchen and had finally revealed all of the red clay fill that covers the site (click on photo to the left). At first we had assumed that the bright red clay in which was set river cobbles was the Madison-era surface as it was very similar to other Madison-era surfaces we had found around the mansion.  When we started to excavate this material, however,  we realized that the artifacts coming from below and within the deposit were much too late–dating the 1880s.  Given our hypothesis that the kitchen had been removed at that time, we figured the red clay was put down as a cap layer following the removal of the structure.  In turn, we hoped that removal of the fill would reveal the much desired features at the site.  What we found, however, was a thin layer of buried topsoil that quickly came down to subsoil and that the area to the north (where we thought the hearth would be located) had been cut down in the 1920s for the installation of a boiler room by the duPonts.

North Kitchen Site Bucket Shot, August 27th

There are, however, intriguing clues we have located to the west of the 1908 foundation.  Located between utility lines, we have found several features that appear to be pier basins (footers for piers) that are possibly related to the kitchen (click on photo to the right).  Work to the west of the kitchen has also uncovered several layers of fill in the area of the Temple Allée, within and under which we are hoping to find the remants of the pine trees planted by Mr. Madison in the 1808-1812 time period.  Over the next month, Adam Marshall is going to be analyzing these features in relationship to the soils found below the 1908 duPont addition to determine the answer to several questions:

• Are the cobble-filled basins the piers for the kitchen?  How do these relate to the position of the kitchen as shown on the insurance plat?
• Is the surface found below the red clay under the 1908 duPont addition a cut surface following the removal of the kitchen in the 1880s?
• How do the kitchen deposits relate to the fills located to the west in the area of the Pine Allee?

Potential positions of the North Kitchen

The ultimate site would be such as what we found in the South Yard, where at the end of the dig, we get into the bucket truck, take a picture from 30 feet in the air and the picture showing the chimney base, scatters of stone and brick holds the key to the interpretation of the site.  With the North Kitchen, it is the post-excavation analysis of the site that will provide the main body of data–and hopefully the kitchen might be able to rise out of the ashes of its shattered tomb!

Next week will complete excavations at the North Kitchen and the next Expedition Program to be held on August 31st will initiate our focus on the next project–the NorthWest Yard–which contains a trash deposit placed to the north of the mansion during the late 18^th century.   During these excavations we will also be exploring the 18^th-century brick landscape walls that surround the mansion and the evidence for the early 19^th-century Pine Allée.

One of Paul Jennings’ duties as a manservant was to accompany the retired James Madison wherever he went. This meant that Jennings met his counterparts at the various plantations to which they traveled, and that these same manservants and lady’s maids would accompany their masters and mistresses to Montpelier. This may well have been the way in which Paul Jennings had the opportunity to meet and court his future wife, Fanny Gordon.

When Paul Jennings met her, Fanny Gordon was lady’s maid to Mrs. Charles P. Howard. Mrs. Howard was born Jane Taylor at Greenfield outside the town of Orange, the daughter of Erasmus and Jane Moore Taylor; Fanny was born at Greenfield, but some three decades after Jane. Erasmus Taylor died in 1794, a year after Jane married Charles P. Howard. In the 1795  inventory of slaves following Erasmus’ death, there is no mention of anyone named Fanny. However, in a document establishing the final distribution of slaves in 1800, the name Fanny appears along with a few other new names clearly belonging to children born in the five years since Taylor’s death. Judging by her listed worth at £18, Fanny was probably born about 1798.

After his marriage, Charles P. Howard, a Quaker from Philadelphia, found himself not only living in the south and husband to a Virginian but the owner of ten slaves. As the years went by, that number grew as children were born, and the Howards and their enslaved families settled on an 890-acre estate known as Howard Place, which bordered Montpelier.

Paul and Fanny, therefore, were about the same age and travelled in the same social circles. They married in 1822. Fanny’s brother Edmund later recalled,

“They were married according to the manner of slave law in Virginia. Each master gave consent. Paul Jennings and Fannie Jennings were given a marriage supper at her master’s home.”¹

Despite the fact that the marriage had the consent of their masters, the couple did not live together. Paul at Montpelier was an hour or more walk from Fanny at Howard Place. With his attendance on Mr. Madison so constant, it is likely that he only traveled to see her once weekly, probably on Saturday evening to spend all of Sunday together. Traditionally, Sunday was the one day slaves did not have to work.

Paul and Fanny’s marriage persisted, despite these challenges, and they had children. Keep an eye on the blog for more on Paul Jennings and his family as Beth Taylor continues her research.

1Deposition of Edmund Spotsey, 1896, Franklin Jennings vs. Elizabeth Webb; Case File #470; General Docket Records; Records of the United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia; Record Group 276; National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

The New York Times, that is. Last Friday’s paper featured a column in the Art and Design section about historic sites interpreting slaves and servants in addition to the homeowners. We are mentioned and there are audio links to an actor speaking the words of Paul Jennings; this is the same audio which you can hear during tours of the house. The first recording, “I was always with Mr. Madison,” can be heard in Mr. Madison’s study (M104), the room in which Madison died.

Jennings was a slave of the Madisons who worked in the White House during Madison’s presidency and later returned to Washington, DC, with Dolley Madison after James’ death. It was in Washington that Jennings earned his freedom. At the end of his life, an interview with him was turned into a short book, A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison. Our own Beth Taylor is currently conducting extensive research into the life of Paul Jennings; you can buy a copy of A Colored Man’s Reminiscences in our gift shop to help support her research.

Mr. Madison's Study

Shutters
All of the shutters have now been fitted, hung, and stamped with their location information. However, before we can hang them permanently, they need a little more work. We are sending them off to have all newly cut and fitted edges primed and top-coated and for all shutters to receive a copper cap, to get a final coat of paint, and then dry over the next couple of weeks. We will let you know when they come back and are hung again.

In Brief: Court Records
Another area of research we are investigating is court records. These can be helpful in a number of ways: to find lists of Madison property; track family inheritance and land ownership; and trace social and business connections by looking at who was involved in suits with, or against, the Madisons.

We started by looking at the records for the county in which Montpelier is located – Orange County, Virginia. The county courthouse has copies of the original deed and will books, which recorded the wills, inventories, and deeds of sale for the whole county. However, we are also searching through court proceedings to find mentions of the Madisons, some of which were moved to Richmond during the 20th century. There is a lot of material to sift through, complicated by the fact that how courts were organized changed more than once during James Madison’s lifetime. So far we have found some good leads, which are followed up by even more research in the court records!

The North Kitchen site (annotated)

The archaeology season is upon us again!  We began excavations at the North Kitchen in April and have already hosted our first three expedition programs this year.  So far, we have been removing the duPont layers that have protected this site for the past 100 years.  We are very confident in our identification of a Madison surface.  With all the rains we have had this April, it is appropriate that the first feature we identified was a Madison-era drainage ditch–apparently the Madisons’ slaves suffered from the same amount of wash coming from the mansion that we have and necessitated the excavation of a shallow ditch between the kitchen and the mansion.  The other possibility for this shallow ditch is that it might represent a drip line from the roof of the kitchen.Despite all the rains, we got quite a bit of soil moved during April.  We mostly were uncovering 20th century ditches (a 1908 sewer line, a 1929 water line, and a 1992 drainage line).  These lines have provided us with “sneak peeks” into the stratigraphy at the site and have also contained lots of artifacts.  Some of the more interesting finds include several porcelain plate fragments (which match pieces recovered from Dolley’s Midden), a complete skeleton key (which the crew jokingly refers to the as “key to the kitchen”, a fragment of a carpet bowl, and a beautiful yellowware bowl.  If anyone has any idea of when carpet bowling became popular in America, please leave a comment.

We should make lots more progress over the next month–we have 24 students out for our annual James Madison University Field School!  We will be using this bumper crop of students to complete the removal of duPont-era fills and fill from various 20th-century trenches.  By the time the field school arrived last week, we had already developed an excellent understanding of the site’s 20th century stratigraphy from the three Montpelier Expedition programs that we held during the month of April.  These programs added to our understanding of the site provided by the 2008 excavations (see recent report by A. Marshall).

Slave Quarters?

To the north of the duPont road came the first clue to the survival of the potential slave quarter.  This clue consisted of a greenstone foundation within an artifact-rich STP that was almost immediately beneath the topsoil (approximately 2-3″ beneath the ground surface).  The stone feature was more fully exposed within an excavation unit placed around the STP.  As can be seen from the photograph (right), we have a clear distinction between what appears to be the greenstone foundation/pier base and a brick rubble layer (which is being brushed by Steve).  Could the area of brick represent the inside of the structure?Approximately 15′ to the north of the unit within which the foundation/pier-base was identified is an artifact-rich area that appears to be a yard surface related to the structure and which may also help define the size of the building. The large number of mid-19th-century artifacts being recovered from the units in this area confirms the incredible preservation of the structural remains–all of which exist just 15 feet from the duPont-era Secretary’s Barn (the current fuel shed)!

Historic Road Trace

Located in the area south of the duPont road and closest to the old archaeology laboratory (which offers pleasant respite from the seasonal weather–we have set up our screens within the warmth of the old lab!), is the remains of a historic road trace.   Orientated 45° to the structures in the farm barn complex, it also lines up with an old road trace that extends to the east into the surrounding wooded area behind House 11 (the old main office). The orientation of this road in relationship to the early 20th-century structures in the area suggests the road trace predates the duPont farm complex. An excavation unit placed atop this road revealed a surface covered with clinker/slag and metal working debris, a common surface for 19th-century roads.  This surface treatment also differentiates its from early duPont roads which were graveled with limestone.The relationship between this road and the structure identified in this area remains a mystery, and can only be explored with more extensive (Phase III) excavations.  It would be interesting to note whether the structure is on the same orientation as the road, which would confirm their association. Once more we hear the familiar refrain that we will only understand more about this area with future excavations.  Once excavated and interpreted, this area offers yet another insight into the nature of slavery at Montpelier just before emancipation, contrasting with the 18th- and 19th-century slave quarters around the mansion, and the trials that the Gilmore family faced in the antebellum years.

And next…?

With the successful identification of the slave quarters in this area as well as where archaeological deposits survived the construction of the duPont’s Farm Barn Complex, the archaeology department will return to the Phase I survey in areas planned for expanding Montpelier’s existing septic fields. Following that we shall return to the woods for more detailed survey of the various Civil War camps located around the Gilmore Cabin.