What we're excavating right now is the trash
bin. This is the downslope trash deposit where
slaves are throwing the broken refuse from
the household. And it makes sense it's downslope
because it's away from the yard, away from
the house. Looks like we've got a little
bit of a pin there. That's pretty cool.
I swear I didn't put that there before you
guys got here. A lot of times people get focused
on the fourth president of the United States,
America's first first lady Dolley Madison.
I'll move over to a foot and a half. But
we know that at any one time there would have
been a hundred enslaved community members
living here, and it would have been children
and grandmothers and fathers and all kinds
of multi-generations making this place possible.
This is pretty interesting because it's
indicative of you know either women sewing
out in this area or just being present out
here in the field which is pretty cool. What
we're trying to do is understand three different
aspects of the site, where the structure is,
where the yard area is and then also recover
trash deposits for the household items. It
was abandoned in the 1840s. It's basically
been untouched. Every nail, piece of glass,
ceramic that we find we have the utmost certainty
it belongs to the folks that were living here,
which were Madison's enslaved workers. This
is the south yard domestic quarter complex
at Montpelier. This would have been the homes
of all the domestic servants that worked and
lived in President Madison's house. We started
the excavation process with the understanding
of an insurance map that was drawn up in 1836
that laid out where the majority of these
buildings were. The guy who came out to draw
the insurance map was a little bit off in
his dimensions so the archaeology really bore
out the true locations of some of these buildings.
Proximity to the house is really shocking
to people. People lived in each other's
back pockets. When Madison was in the house,
maybe writing his notes from the Constitutional
Convention, he would have smelled the fires,
he would have heard the cooking, he would
have heard the children. It was a very integrated
society in some ways and yet also very very
separate and you can see that juxtaposition
here at Montpelier. Let's go inside here
and you can take a look at some of these architectural
features that would have been here.
They were duplex quarters so there were two
separate dwellings here for two separate families
with a central chimney with a hearth on each
side. Anywhere between eight and 16 people
might have been living in one of these structures,
probably a family on each side. They had sash
windows which we know from the immense amount
of window glass that we found through the
archaeology. But that's not what life was
like for the people who worked and lived in
the craft complex or further afield in the
field quarters. Here there's no window glass.
Window glass is something typically that an
enslaved household is not going to invest
in. We've located two structures and possibly
evidence for at least two or three others.
You would have had maybe six to eight people
living in each one of these houses, so you're
talking about you know anywhere from 35 to
50 people. This project is a four-year grant.
It was funded by the National Endowment for
the Humanities and it's focused on comparing
the households within the enslaved community
here at Montpelier. We first found this transfer
print pattern in what's called Dolley's
midden. It's a trash deposit just down from
the mansion. This ceramic was throughout the
slave quarters. We're thinking that it might
be a way of maybe perhaps getting rid of the
evidence of the breakage of a vessel. This
kind of decoration is something we don't
find in any of the Madison household deposits
whatsoever. This is an item that was being
purchased by an enslaved individual for their
household. Before these timber structures
were built this was a very pristine but very
false landscape. And with the archaeology
we've been able to rebuild a far truer landscape
and we hope to be able to continue that with
the craft complex and the field quarters.
Knowing the story of James and Dolley Madison,
we know a lot from letters, from people writing
about them. But there's this much more intricate
and in some ways much more interesting and
a fuller American story when you can use archaeology
to reveal what
have been these hidden lives.
