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. Continue Reading…
Fall colors recently splashed the Montpelier landscape, but the Archaeology team is already thinking ahead to 2010. In fact the 2010 Archaeology Expeditions and Excursions schedule just came out. These week-long programs allow people at any experience level to unearth history side-by-side with Montpelier’s staff archaeologists.
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. Continue Reading…
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. Continue Reading…
In June, we briefly mentioned Paul Jennings, who was a slave of the Madisons and, after gaining his freedom, a notable member of the African-American community in Washington, D.C. Here at Montpelier, Beth Taylor has been conducting extensive research into the life of Paul Jennings. She will be periodically posting vignettes from her research, starting with this post on Jennings’ marriage.
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.
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 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).
The last full week in January we had our second annual ceramic work-study. This year we focused on ceramics recovered from the 2008 South Yard excavations. Our objective was to understand how many ceramic vessels were represented by the myriad of small sherds recovered during the excavations this past summer. Participants cataloged, labeled, and matched the ceramic sherds from across units into the various decorative categories. The first part of the workshop started out a bit rocky when Montpelier was closed due to a snow storm–but being hard-core ceramic enthusiasts, the group agreed to label ceramics over at Arlington House and we even had one lecture in the dining room while the snow piled up outside!The more exciting results of the week’s work was the discovery of the wide range of Davenport ceramics we had recovered at the South Yard over the course of the summer, in particular, those decorated with the Bamboo and Peony transfer print. These ceramics were part of a set owned by James and Dolley Madison and based on the excavation in 2007 at Dolley’s Midden, consisted of quite a massive set of china. The pieces recovered from the South Yard are exclusively serving pieces ranging from platters to gravy boats and even include a potential vase or dessert cooler. How these pieces ended up at the homes of the house slaves is likely once they were either chipped or broken at the main house they were deemed unsiutable for the table. With the request to dispose of them, house slaves could either dispose of them in the trash heap or make a decision to reuse them at their home. Such opportunistic re-use continued until they were finally broken at the quarters and made their entry into the archaeological record. With archaeologists recovering the broken pieces in the field, the vessels entered into their final opportunistic life cycle as Montpelier archaeology staff and volunteers cleaned and mended their shattered remains! The workshop also kicked off the addition of a new staff member, Christine Heacock. Christine has been hired to keep the archaeology lab open on the weekends and to help Kim Trickett complete an object inventory of all items recovered at the mansion through archaeological excavations. This inventory will be entered into the Curatorial Department’s database to aid in the furnishing of the mansion.
Winter for much of the Montpelier Archaeology Department has been spent in extensive Phase I (”shovel test pit,” or “STP”) survey of the areas of Montpelier in conjuction with developing long-range plans for the property. We have focused the majority of our energy on the area of the duPont barn complex – much of the area seems to have been landscaped or otherwise altered by the duPonts. Within this complex of early 20th-century structures, there is an island that harkens back to the Civil War era…The Izard map (left), circa 1864, indicates that a set of “Negro Quarters” were located in the approximate location of this Farm Barn complex. The evidence recovered from the Phase I and, recently, Phase II excavations confirms the survival of a mid-19th-century site in this area, primarily in the form of a historic road trace, what appears to be a yard surface, and the remains of a foundation for our tentatively-identified slave quarter. What makes the site such a spectacular find is that it is completely undisturbed (never plowed) and contains an incredible density of artifacts and features. While the site is bisected by a duPont era road leading from the Farm Barn to the Schooling Barn, excavations have revealed that historic deposits even survive below this 20th-century roadbed!
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.
A couple weeks back we wrapped up our South Yard excavations and have just a few tidbits to report. The main focus for the 2008 season had been one particular house where enslaved families lived, but during October, we took a sneak-peek at some of the other areas in the south yard.Specifically, we’ve excavated at one of the two smokehouses depicted on the 1837 insurance map, and at the northernmost of the houses.These excavations were limited in scope, and meant to provide a taste of things to come. Here’s what we found:Smokehouse East: Not to be mistaken for that great new Asian Barbeque restaurant your friends keep telling you about, Smokehouse East is part of the south yard outbuilding complex depicted on the 1837 insurance plat. Pig bones suggest that the smokehouse should be in the general vicinity of our excavations. To be clear, we weren’t using pig bones for divination, we just found lots of them in our units. Click on the photo to read about the structural evidence we uncovered. And for the record, we use dowsing rods here at Montpelier, in lieu of reading bones. Seriously.North House of the South Yard: This is one of three houses depicted on the 1837 insurance map where enslaved families lived. Excavations here were very limited (three units) so we had no luck actually finding the structure. However, we did find clear indication of the continuance of a brick path that, one might presume, could eventually lead us to the front door of the house. This path has previously been noted in units closer to the mansion, and extends all the way to the southern door leading into the cellar of Nelly’s wing.To sum up the remaining excavation areas, we were able to pick up both the paling-fence and rail-fence from the summer south yard excavations, leap-frogging a 50-ft gap to avoid the Cedar of Lebanon. Matt won a bet when a piece of preserved wood in this post-hole turned out to be a remnant of intact fence-post, and not a root. The loser of the bet shall remain anonymous.We have had the good fortune to work with some great volunteer groups this Fall. We wouldn’t have had nearly the success, or as much fun, without the help of these folks. So a special thanks to our annual work-study attendees (some of whom have been coming to dig at Montpelier for well-over a decade), as well as two Earthwatch groups (most of whom were here with us for the first—though hopefully not the last—time.)Finally, it is our distinct pleasure to introduce the two latest two crew members to join our department, Hope Smith and Stefan Woehlke. They were chosen from a pool of over 60 applicants to the position, and came to us well-experienced and impeccably-referenced. We have all made a pact not to use Hope’s name in any sort of pun, though one volunteer, upon being moved to a new unit, did accidentally declare that she did not want to “abandon Hope.” Hilarious. Having worked with Hope and Stefan over the past few weeks, it would certainly be unfair to say that they have both been abject disappointments. For the sake of clarity, the previous sentence might also read “It would be fair to say that they have both been the opposite of disappointments.” That still doesn’t sound quite right. Anyway, welcome to the Archaeology Department, Hope and Stefan!
This is going to be a rather long post, so make yourself a cup of coffee (or tea!) and make yourself comfortable. The first section is an introduction, while the second part, accessed by the “Read more” link, goes into greater detail.As you may notice from the title, I’m no longer just referring to the “South Yard” in its entirety. For month of October the Montpelier Archaeology Department has expanded the excavations to encompass the smoke house (structure 2), as well as to chase out the paling face and the formal fence that defined the end of the Madison formal yard. We’ll be making a separate post about what these excavations have revealed to use in the new few weeks.For now, this post is primarily designed to round out the Duplex excavations for the 2008 field season and excavation programs by pulling together all the separate threads of evidence. We do not profess to have a definitive interpretation, and it is only through further excavation that we will be able to prove or disprove our various interpretations. So, in brief, what did we find? (please click on the photo above for the location of the various features discussed in this post)The DuplexOne of the great successes of the excavations was being able to identify the location of the duplex. While the chimney base was constructed of a different material – stone rather than brick – the fact that it is symmetrical to the brick chimney base discovered in 1990/91 is highly suggestive that the structures are contemporary. Furthermore, the discovery of evidence of another structure to the north, possibly our smoke house, would imply that the insurance plate, while incorrect on the matter of scale and measurements, is otherwise fundamentally correct.The Post Fence LineLocated almost immediately to the south of the duplex, and extending east-west from the Madison garden to the front fence line, is the fence that defines the curtilage, or the edge of the formal yard. The spacing between the posts, and the size of the posts themselves, suggest a post and rail fence. This fence also appears to have been up for some time, with several posts in the duplex and other areas showing some indication of repair.The Paling FenceThe line of paling fence stake holes was found to continue in a line extending to a point just shy of the currently enclosed duPont formal garden, where it ends on a north-south line that is aligned with the brick pathway (see below). This line of the paling fence is also at right angles to the main axis of the Madison garden (the modern Annie duPont formal garden is a part of the larger Madison garden, suggesting that they are contemporary to each other.Based on the crushed brick rubble we located, for a brief time, both the post fence and the paling fence were standing in the landscape at the same time, which is surprising given how close they are to each other. It is possible that the paling fence line represents the edge of the curtilage, or edge of the Madison formal yard and was replaced by the post fence. Its orientation with the garden and other landscape features is suggestive that it is a part of the original early 19th century landscape.At the time of writing we have as of yet to determine whether the paling fence extends to the Boxwood Grotto-the symmetric twin of the Madison Temple, itself a 19th century structure installed with the 1809-1812 alterations to the landscape.The Brick PathAs of yet, little has been determined about the brick path other than it ends on the same approximate line as the paling fence, which suggests that they went up to or ended because of the presence of an undetermined landscape feature. While we have strong evidence to suggest that this path links up with other 19th century paths identified in the South Yard. However, discrepancies in the fabric of the path (brick in the southern-most area, stone in the northern-most area) mean that the area underneath the Spanish Fir tree remains a lynchpin in our interpretation of the South Yard.19th century Occupation SurfacesScattered over the entire site is what appears to be primarily a 19th century occupation surface that is formed of several deposits, of which the “crushed brick rubble” and “bat layer” are just two constituents. The crushed brick rubble layer, while probably being effected by close to 200 bracing Virginian winters, seems to be primarily the product of the occupation of the site—foot traffic served to scatter fragments of brick into the work yard behind the duplex, while the larger brick remains to the south of the post fence line.Sheet MiddenLying directly behind where the southern-most wall of the duplex would have been located, and mostly beyond the formal fence line, lies an rich concentration of artifacts that presumably formed a portion of the duplexes midden, or trash dump. Outside of the view from the main house, this midden contained artifacts that ranged from ceramics to glass, nails to keys and locks, and even the knife, fork, and mouth harp that we mentioned in our previous post. It is deposits such as these that will allow us to piece together the type of pots that the Madison domestic slaves were using to cook their food, plates and bowls they served it on, and even the type of music that they might have played.
The following post continues in further detail with the questions and complexities of the duplex excavations. To continue to read this this post, then please click the “Read More” link. To read older posts, either scroll down the page or click on the categories in the right hand column. These links will take you to a page which lists all posts made under that category. Click the title of the post and you will be taken to a dedicated page.
