FYI: News article covering site descendant angle
Unearthing Slavery, Finding Peace
A Dig at an Eastern Shore Plantation Could Help Local Blacks See Their Past
By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post
Friday, July 21, 2006; B01
(A series of 5 photos accompany this story. Look for the small text box
under the maps labeled: A dig at an eastern shore plantation could help
local blacks see their
past
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/20/AR2006072002041.html?referrer=emailarticle)
Mary Tilghman watches from her window as archaeologists sift the earth of
Wye House Farm, her Eastern Shore property. Buttons and an iron ring, pig
bones and a broken spoon: Over three centuries, her family helped the
growth of a new American economy and, on this plantation, built an empire
on the backs of slaves.
This is where the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass lived for a couple
of years, as a child slave of about 7. The work confirms his descriptions
of the physical place to a fault, animating the landscape with his words:
"Though crimes, high-handed and atrocious, may there be committed . . . it
is, nevertheless . . . a most strikingly interesting place, full of life."
Tilghman welcomed this search of her land and family records. Now 87, the
11th-generation heir to Wye House has "always been interested in the
history of this place," she said. But until now, the stories of hundreds of
people who lived steps from her front door have lain under a carpet of
emerald turf, their names stowed in boxes of family ledgers, with notes
gauging their fitness for work.
Down the road, in the hamlet of Unionville, Harriette Lowery waits for her
lost history to emerge from the clay and the files. The ancestors of
Unionville once toiled at Wye House Farm, and some of their descendants
work there today.
After the Civil War, Unionville was founded on plots granted by a
sympathetic landowner. Lowery's cousin works in Tilghman's home, and Lowery
sees nothing wrong in that. But she wants the generation coming up to know
how things were long ago on that land, in all its detail, and to be proud.
It is a delicate business, this recovery of history. As scholars reassemble
shards of lost memory, the white and black families of Wye House Farm work,
as neighbors this time, toward an acceptance of their shared and painful past.
"Because of the way we got here, it's hard for us to say where we came
from," Lowery said.
The research at Wye House, she said, "gives us a connection."
In shimmering heat this week, University of Maryland archaeologists
crouched amid twisted tree roots, scraping away layers of soil. This place,
they believe, was the Long Green, a mile-long stretch from the overseer's
red cottage to the Wye River.
In the late 1820s, when Douglass lived here for two years, the Long Green
was the 42,000-acre plantation's nerve center, "literally alive with
slaves, of all ages, conditions and sizes," Douglass wrote. From the 1660s
until emancipation, "the shoemaking and mending, the blacksmithing,
cartwrighting, coopering, weaving, and grain-grinding, were all performed
by the slaves on the home plantation," he wrote.
The archaeologists have exposed the foundations of several buildings and a
collection of pins and thimbles, crockery, blown glass and washers and
tools dating as far back as the 18th century.
The Lloyds, the plantation's early owners, like their contemporaries George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson, led a group of wealthy planters who "were
interested in a modern, scientific approach to farming," said Lisa Kraus, a
university anthropologist searching the family papers. "They had shipping,
distilleries, smoked meats, cattle, wool. . . . It wasn't a romantic, nice
place to live. . . . It was a business."
Wye Farm was also, according to Douglass's writings, a "full 300 years
behind the age, in all that relates to humanity and morals."
Kraus hopes by next summer, after combing through 400 boxes of Lloyd family
journals, letters and ledgers and examining oral histories from landowners
and slave descendants, to assemble "a history that speaks to all those
different perspectives."
She has found lists of scant rations and inventories of slaves whose names
match those of families in Unionville and nearby Coppersville. She has read
evidence of runaways and slaves exiled to plantations in the Deep South.
But she has also read about efforts to keep slave families together.
"I'm trying to take as many cues from Douglass's work as we can," she said.
"The Tilghmans know that, and they haven't kicked me off their property."
Mary Tilghman opened the kitchen entry to what Douglass called the "Great
House" one recent afternoon, asking, "You don't mind coming in the back door?"
Tilghman inherited the place, now 1,300 acres and still in production, from
an aunt in 1993.
She describes her ancestors as Welsh Puritans who were "autocratic, in a
way" but schooled in the liberal philosophy that underpins American democracy.
That they were arguably the state's largest slave owners, she said, is "one
of the very tricky questions."
It's a part of the past she rejects, but "neither do I think my ancestors,
who practiced an evil practice, were wicked people."
For at least two decades, Douglass's descendants, the Bailey family, have
had reunions in the shadow of the pale yellow estate house. Tilghman
frequently opens her farm to her black neighbors, who, out of politeness,
do not call it "a plantation," Lowery said. "I don't think people want to
conjure up bad memories on both sides."
Unionville runs along two country roads, a stretch of old houses punctuated
by low-income housing. Unionville was founded after the Civil War by 18
black Union soldiers. At St. Stephens AME Church, on July 29, the
archaeologists will meet privately with residents to tell them what they've
found.
Lowery, 55, whose great-great-grandfather Benjamin Demby was one of the
town's founders, said they wanted "to be free, to live freely and take care
of their families and practice their religion. Dwelling on the past was not
part of it."
At some point, Lowery and some of her neighbors decided that they ought to
remember a bit more about what brought them all there.
In 2003, they organized a committee and appealed to the county for a statue
of Douglass to be put up outside the Talbot County courthouse, where
Douglass spoke as a freeman. "There's a monument in Paris, but none in his
home county," Lowery said. There was a "big fight" that she called
"shocking, shocking, shocking," but in the end, county officials agreed,
with a few stipulations. Among them, she said: Any new statue could not
stand taller than the "Talbot Boys," a monument to local men who served in
the Confederate Army.
The Unionville community is still raising money to erect the monument.
When the University of Maryland archaeologists visited the church one
Sunday last year, asking what Unionville would like to learn from a dig at
the Wye place, most people said "history . . . that shows the strength and
courage of those who lived then," Lowery said. "We want to keep passing
that on.
The Tilghmans, she said, "have a strong sense of history themselves, and
they understand that it needs to be shared.
"There may be people who wouldn't like me to use this word, but I'm
grateful to them for doing it."
Tilghman calls the work on her land the university's "baby." As for her
hospitality, she said it is simply that. "This is a small community.
Everybody knows everybody down here."
Patrice L. Jeppson, Ph.D.
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