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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