Archaeologists Unearth Abolitionist Home

[Omaha Steve]

Full story: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20060812/D8JF5V3G1.html

Archaeologists Unearth Abolitionist Home
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Aug 12, 7:09 PM (ET)

By ALEX DOMINGUEZ

EASTON, Md. (AP) - The Great House still stands on the plantation where Frederick Douglass spent his childhood. But the quarters where the famed abolitionist once lived along with other slaves are long gone from the 350-year-old estate.

While the history of the Lloyd family, which has owned the property since the 1600s, is well documented, much less is known about the daily lives of their slaves.

University of Maryland archaeologists hoping to flesh out the story of those who built and worked on the estate are wrapping up their second season at Wye House, guided in part by Douglass' account of his childhood in slavery.

Jennifer Babiarz, a university archaeologist supervising the dig, said slaves such as those who worked at the plantation were the backbone of Maryland's early economy.

[baldguy]

1. Local GOPrs will probably bulldoze it & build a WalMart.

[Raine]

2. Glad they are trying to dig out

the whole story, it's a shame that more is known about those who held other human beings in slavery than the ones that were enslaved. x(

[bleedingheart]

3. I remember visiting the Carter plantation down in Virginia and asking

"where were the slave quarters?"...and the woman taking us on the tour looked at me as though I had just said something awful....and then a bunch of other people asked too...and she explained that all the "slave cabins had fallen apart"...and went on...

Funny how the "big houses" remain and they forget who built them and whose labor maintained them...

[Igel]

4. Maryland, esp. the eastern shore and

the southern portions (those south of Baltimore) were much more southern, culturally and linguistically. I grew up in the wilds of near-suburbia, a backwater (a spit of land, surrounded on three sides by water). Accent is a bit different from Baltimore, and we had a few strictly southern expressions. The situation in Maryland changed post Civil War, when Baltimore was pulled in the northern sphere of influence.

In any event, my HS chem teacher's house dated from just after the war of 1812. The British were happy enough to use it as a temp base of operations when they were in the area in 1812 or 1813, but they were pissed by their humintel reports: the house happens to have a direct line of sight to nearly the mouth of the Chesapeake, and was where spotters were staying so as to provide an early warning that the British were coming. Actually, the house no standing is a rebuild, the British torched the former one as they retreated and got back on their ships; the house they burned dated from the late 1600s. To just after the time the slave quarters were built.

The slave quarters were still standing, since the main house was separate and the slave quarters were inconsequential. They started off--as slave quarters in Texas and other newly settled areas did--as the joint slave/non-slave quarters. I guess the non-slaves lived upstairs and the slaves/help lived downstairs. But as soon as the main house was built, it was all slave, with the downstairs being mostly kitchen and workshop. The house (re)built in 1814 wasn't separate; it was attached to the slave quarters. By then slavery was a bit on the outs, more profitable things were happening in the area. But there were still large farms. Slavery wasn't as large scale as in many parts of the south--you could work a huge amount of land with a handful of slaves.

The house was rumored to be haunted. Never understood why only white people came back as ghosts, though.

[Spider Jerusalem]

5. Yeah, Maryland was a much more southern state...

the Eastern shore especially (my family settled in Somerset County back in the 1660's; some of them still there, I should imagine); lot of tobacco plantations in the area. I'd guess that part of the reason slavery was on a smaller scale was because tobacco is a less labour-intensive crop than cotton (the main cash crop in parts of the south where some plantation owners had a hundred or more slaves).