1820's Slave Village Yields Its Past Beneath The Roots of a Giant Tree
04-19-07 - North America — , Maryland
Since beginning work at the farm near Easton in 2005, students in the archaeology field school have discovered three distinct structures, as well as artifacts that date to pre-historic times.
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When a team of archaeologists descended upon Wye House Farm, they discovered a few items African American statesman Frederick Douglass did not mention in his accounts of 1820s slave life there: a massive tulip poplar, its bulging roots sprouting through the center of a historic brick building, and an aggressive swath of poison ivy that inspired the use of long pants in the middle of a steamy dig season.
But much of what the slave-turned-abolitionist recalls in his biographies is still present at Wye, most notably the recently unearthed remnants of a slave village scattered just below the surface of the Long Green. The poplar was growing amid what was almost certainly one of the plantation’s slave quarters, a building whose rotting wood floor would have provided great organic matter for a sapling. The fact that history would have to fight its way out from under pesky weeds and twisted roots is not lost on Professor Mark Leone, who has for years worked to shed light on the buried history of African Americans through the university’s Archaeology in Annapolis program. “The treasure in this endeavor is that at Wye House, as in Annapolis, there’s a direct continuity from the 1700s to today,” says Leone. “Maryland has and can communicate its own deep past.” A laboratory in Woods Hall is now home to ceramic sherds, badly corroded metal blades and countless pieces of tobacco pipe. Each is washed, labeled and painstakingly identified by students. But the delicate handling doesn’t stop in the lab.
In tracing Douglass’ footsteps and reaching further back in time, the team is examining life as one of Maryland’s most famous residents knew it and providing fresh insights to the family of the farm’s original owners as well as to the relatives of the slaves they once owned. The challenge is to do so in a way that informs both descendant communities and provides historical context for university students.
“Most Maryland undergraduates are unconnected to the greatness of Maryland’s history,” Leone says. “They come from an institution that is closely connected to the founders of Maryland and the country.”
The Lloyd family, which built Wye House and at one point owned an estimated 1,000 slaves to support crop and livestock operations, still lives on the land. Theirs is one of the great names in state history, along with those of William Paca and Charles Carroll—whose properties Leone has also investigated.
Life on the Lloyd plantation helped shape Douglass’ story—his struggles in slavery, his eventual freedom and the insights the two provided when he became a noted orator, presidential adviser and ambassador.
Douglass described his early homes near Easton as unremarkable, dilapi-dated farms with worn-out soil:
“It was in this dull, flat, and unthrifty district or neighborhood, bordered by the Choptank River, among the laziest and muddiest of streams surrounded by a white population of the lowest order, indolent and drunken to a proverb, and among slaves who, in point of ignorance and indolence, were fully in accord with their surroundings, that I, without any fault of my own, was born, and spent the first years of my childhood,” he wrote in 1881’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. "
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