Houses project, joined by several archeologists and preservations and a team that came to document Brandon Plantation with a series of 3d laser scans. Were here to do laser scanning and documentation of a slave house that is here. This is part of an independent project i am doing thats called saving slave houses, which is a database of all the known slave houses in the united states. It is a staffing central postory of instrumentation and documentation of slave houses in the united states. I have partnered with turnbull, the company that makes the survey equipment that i use, to do kind of the highest level documentation that is available to us today, which is 3d laser scanning. Its important to do this because one documentation is a type of preservation. Slave houses are buildings that are disappearing from the landscape, so by documenting them, thats one way of preserving them. Documenting them and through my database is also a way to share information and get it out there and learn from them. So this is a way for people to learn about these buildings and study them. Make them available to a wider audience without having to necessarily come out to the sites because a lot of these sites are hard to get to and a lot are privately owned, so, you know, Property Owners dont necessarily want people constantly coming out to their sites to look at these structures. But the Property Owners have been very helpful wanting to work with me. At the same time, its easier to have something Available Online somewhere you can get to. In total i have done survey work at about 150 sites and 120 to 30 have been in virginia. Ive been focusing on virginia the last couple of years. I found this place through a coworker and mentor of mine, who has originally he worked in williamsburg and did documentation there and now hanes architectural historian and works for a private architectural firm, practice, but he knew about the site and knew it was one i would want to check out. Hes here today. Could you tell us what the two of you are going to do . Yes. His name is mark wenger. This site is special because it has a subfloor pit. A subfloor pit is a hole in the ground. You find them in enslaved places. They are in front of the fire place or hearth. They were used both as root cellars and also storage and personal items enslaved people may have had. They range in size and shape. Theres a wide variety of them. Some are wood lined and some are brick lined. Some are holes, just dirt. This one is special because this building is stone lined and part of it is above the ground because the building is raised on piers. Today, in addition to 3d laser scanning, were also going to open the pit, to protect it, protect the pit, the floorboards were nailed closed to keep things out of it. Were going to open it to look at it and also to scan it. I think thats original. That framing is . Huh. How can you tell . The fact that the saw marks on this framing go straight up and down. Thats a reciprocal waterdriven saw. That would sort of put it in the 19th century sometime. They start circular sawing lumber close to the middlie of the 19th century and this was before that. It was build before that . Yes. The opening is so large. I dont know why you might necessarily need such a large opening. This one looks like it was intentional and was constructed at the same time as the building was constructed, so when they built the floor they framed out to have this hole. They knew that they wanted this hole, this opening in the floor because they provided framing for it. Underneath of it because the building is on piers and raised off the ground, when you look to the edges, there is stone so you can see its lined with stone on the outside of it. Its protected from the outside. I cant tell how deep it goes into the ground in relation to the grade outside. It looks like it goes into the ground a little bit. This is basically storage, i mean, a big hole used for storage of things. Do you know where the kitchen would have been . No. Unless they were using this space for the kitchen. So, mark, is this the original flooring . All that, all that nailing looks pretty convincing. This floor, its pine. It has texture, it has wear. Its got wear, a lot of wear up by the hearth. That has a lot more wear. Yeah. Its the same on the other side. Uhhuh. This looks like it might be the original floor, yes. What would be in there . Im guessing primarily like a root cellar. Food items. It would be a cooler space, but also maybe personal items that they would have had. Its hard to say. Hard to say without doing archeology. Thats when its important to do archeology in these spaces because then you have a much better understanding of what was in there. What kind of things had they found in these holes when they have done archeology . Well, pass it to an archeologist. Personal items, buttons, buckles, beads, fragments of ceramics. More refined. Lots of evidence that theyre keeping root vegetables in these root cellars. It really helps understand the daily lives of these people when you get chance to excavate these hidden spaces. My name is crystal paycheck. I run the archaeological field work here. Why are you here today . Jodi invited our department to come to the spaces shes surveying and we really wanted to come to experience this space, feel what these cabinets would have been like, to walk through, live in, walk up and down the steps. We often at montichello excavate a lot of spaces once theyre not on the landscape any more, to be apt one Still Standing, at a slave camp Still Standing is a different experience. We wanted to be here today for that. When you reflect on what youve seen, what are your thoughts . Its a good question. Its really humbling to be in these spaces of these people that were slaves. They were here living and working, didnt get a break. They werent paid for their services but they still eked out and existence to navigate through those spaces in the 21st century, its humbling. I think i get a better sense of what the room would have felt like. Obviously, theres nothing in it today. To feel this space and walk through it gives me a better idea what it was were looking for not on the landscape any more. I think its important to come to these plantations and record whats here because one day this building may not be here. Its important to record our past and know what it is that makes us who we are today as a nation and as a people. Its important to remember these people that lived here, too, to be able to document their experience in the building in which they lived, to compare this building with what we had at montichello, get understanding across time and across space it really helps in form archeologists at montichello across the south and east coast. Its important to document these spaces for sure. So this is the equipment i use from turnbull and this coordinates gps coordinates and completed a digital Archaeological Survey form im interested in and it links to that gps coordinator. When i map these out where the building is, all this information i put in comes up to that point. This project started as part of my masters thesis project. Im a masters architect and went back to get my degree in Historic Preservation. When i had been in the real world practicing a while the type of architecture i wanted to do was Historic Preservation and went back to school with my masters degree. When i was in school for my masters thesis i started doing research with the Historic American Building survey collection, which is wpa program that started in 1936, to get architects back to work. A thousand architects were hired to document significant Historic Structures all across the united states. Part of that documentation was slave houses, not necessarily intentionally, but they did document slave houses and sometimes a lot of times it was just you got like one photograph or you would see that a slave house in the background of a picture behind the main house. So for my masters thesis i looked at that collection and identified all the sites that had a slave house in them. The American Building survey has 485 sites that have a documented slave house. Then i also looked at the wape slave narratives done at the same time in the 1930s hoping there would be some relationship between the two, although there was no coordination between the two projects because the slave narratives were to get them back to work and they were doing their own thing and architects were doing their own thing. In my mind, there had to be some overlap by chance. I did research with the slave narratives, and so there are about 3500 slave narratives. I went through all of those and identified the ones that described their house during slavery. There are 1,010 slave narratives that described their house during slavery. I went through those and of those and the 485 documented slave houses, there are five that overlapped. So you have five slave narratives that describe specific documented slave house. You have the actual words of the People Living in these spaces, describing these space. Its amazing. Thats the interpretation we should be using when we interpret these spaces. So from that, that just you know, i used the slave narratives to interpret and understand these spaces, like to guide me to what should i be looking for in these spaces and, you know, what were they how were they using them and can i see any of that in these spaces im going back to look at . My field work of going back and doing my own documentation in these buildings started when i was working on my project in school, the i was a summer intern. Theres some architect and that helped with my research and had access to the collection and they said, how many have you seen . Im like, none. Im in archives doing research. They said, you should go out and see some of these. When i was interning for the summer with them we went out and saw some of them, they helped me get started. Once i started visiting these i didnt stop. I kept going. Knowing that, one, i really everyone joyed it. Seeing these space in person is not the same as seeing the pictures, although the documentation is amazing and photographs are amazing. Its completely different to visit the structures and stand inside the space. So i kept doing the field work. Its exciting. I enjoy it and it also answers a lot of questions for me and others, how many of these buildings still exist, an open question. In order to further the preservation of these buildings we have to answer these questions, get support from others, answer how many are we looking at . Are we dealing with . Im trying to answer that question, how many are still out there or at least provide a case study, so in 1936 there were this many in the state and now theres only this many left. Thats what im working on. To fund this, its funded by me, but i look for grants to do a lot of my survey work and things like that. Grants that go to individuals and things like that. Usually, theyre just smaller ones. I can make a small grant go a long way. 3 feet 7 inches. So. This plan type is called the saddlebag plan or saddlebag partition wall. Theres two variations of a saddleback. Primarily it has an essential chimney and rear one on ooitsz side, has a back to back fireplace. This is the planned type. Either side. Because of the side of the opening of the fireplace and location to the main house and the factory theres a subfloor pit on the other side and maybe this side, we think this might have functioned as a kitchen because of the opening of the fireplace is larger on this side. But that made us question, well, why would a root cellar be on the other side if this space was used as a kitchen. Maybe because if this was primarily where there was a lot of cooking it would have been a lot hotter. If youre going to have a root cellar, the point is to keep things cool, so they used the other space and this is where a lot of cooking may have taken place. How old do you think this pot is . That middle piece is a crane. Im guessing thats original. The pots are it wouldnt surprise me if theyre probably original, too. Theyre at least fairly old. The crane is because thats kind of part of the fireplace. So would people have lived in here . Absolutely. I and how would that work . Where would they is the upstairs original and they would have slept up there . It was original. There are not hearths in the upstairs. A lot of times in the loft space you find hearths, a fireplace opening definite indication people were living up there. This one does not have that. That doesnt mean they werent living up there. They were living up there and why there is a partition wall and door opening up there and a staircase. An enclosed staircase leading up there. That was living space upstairs. You can never really tell for sure without documentation and where people were sleeping or how many people were living in these spaces. For kitchens, those were always living spaces, at least my understanding because kitchens were always used and kind of just the what you kind of learn or hear from things, once you lit the hearth in the kitchen it never went out, just because, you know, it took so long to light back then the fireplace and get it running, it took so long to do everything, it was running, you always had to have hot water on hand that someone had to be there to watch that fire. Also, just from the slave narratives they always talk about, if they were the cook or their mother was the cook, they always say we lived in the kitchen, like my mother lived in the kitchen and she was the cook. Theres also evidence in the narrative that support that, kitchens were also living spaces. The other room over there . Without knowing exactly how many people were being fed out of this kitchen, you know, its hard to i cant say what was being cooked or how often and exactly how much you needed to be cooking at one time, im guessing that was also probably a secondary kitchen or Cooking Space for them. Without all the modern technology we have today theres no way i could do survey work on my own. Thats why im very thankful we have all this and i have access to it. Otherwise, even the digital measuring device i use, i cant hold the end of one tape measure and walk the other so i use a laser measure to measure things. So now i am taking some measurements of the room and the doors and the windows. I just finished measuring the fireplace. Ill do this for each of the different space in this building. I take overall dimension of the building, too. Thats parts of my Digital Survey form i have linked to the gis coordinates, so when i map it all this comes up. Im richard hasler. I work at trumble as a market manager. I have been working on the atlantic slave trade project three or four years and as part of that project, jobie has asked us to help document some slave houses in the virginia area. With this particular house were trying to capture laser scans of the entire exterior and interior of the house. When we laser scan, we run it on a tripod and replace it with a cram that can take panoramic slr images and we can map the color from those images onto the laser scanned provides a threedimensional point cloud we can use our models and sketch software and other packages to pull measurements and other kinds of useful information out of it. How did they get involved in doing this project . One of the Vice President s, foster, is very passionate about south africa and spent many years there. Because of that he has the ability to help trimble choose which philanthropic projects to do. We got together in the past with a company that documents World Heritage sites around the world digitally and we got with them to use our technology to document sites important to the slave trade. We hit some in mississippi, south carolina, Virgin Islands did a Sugar Factory down there. We continue to do that. Were building a relationship with educators and academics to continue the project and find cofunding with different grants working with the Academic Community and several historians making sure we have some ties with them to help get us into Different International locations but make sure the projects we choose are of historical interest. In the Boulder Valley School District in colorado weve been working with the educators there to add this information into their curriculum which theyve successfully done last year. They have as part of their curriculum the impact on education has worked to get this kind of material on slave trade into their curriculum. Talking about the 19th century, probably tobacco at this point. Thats certainly what it is now. The tide water was big in tobacco in the 18th century. Im not so familiar with the history in the antebellum period. I would guest tobacco was the mainstay. Youd also have wheat and grain and soy. Those would be the three main crops. Is there any way to know how many slaves lived in here or how many they needed . I dont know. Im not sure how many that would be. To have a house of that substance youd have to have quite a bit of acreage under cultivation to make that possible. This was a substantial house for the period, even in the antebellum period, this was a substantial space. I actually dont know as much about this plantation as other plantations. I do know this is a brand new plantation the last name of the family that owned it. Even today, the current owner, she is part of the brandon family. Her last name is also brandon. Theres other plantations with the same name, upper bran do and lower brandon nearby. Those plantations have been more heavily studied and documented than this one. This one has not been as heavily studied or documented. I dont know why that is the case but also another reason i think it is important to document these structures because it hasnt been as heavily studied. There isnt existing documentation out there so its important someone like myself come along and document it, it doesnt exist yet and one of the reasons im excited doing that today. I have to remind myself and others that when you come back to see its, youre missing a lot of the buildings. In order to paint a clear picture what life is like you have to be able to identify what buildings are missing. Here, you usually have the main house. Here we have the main house, this structure may have possibly been used as a kitchen, also living space for enslaved people, kitchen quarter. We have a smokehouse, we have a well, a smokehouse and a wellbeing next to a building, often next to a kitchen. Certain buildings clustered together because of their functions. Smokehouses, dairy, a source of water you typically find next to a kitchen because they rely on those things. Kitchens are usually close to the main house because they service the main house. At this site, also now across the road are two tobacco barns originally part of the original plantation but look disconnected from it now. You have to in order to get a good picture, understand how people would have been moving around the site and where the farm the crop would have been, you have to know where all those kind of buildings would have been. I just dont know where that would have been for this plantation. Its been divided. This road is cutting through a lot of spaces now definitely not there historically. Its kind of hard to paint a good picture what it would have been like. I also dont know how many people were even here either built at the main house or enslaved community. Without knowing that, its hard to say i can paint an accurate picture. One of the questions people have talking about enslaved house, how many people lived there . Thats what they want to know. A lot of times these spaces were more heavily populated than we think of today for a traditional family, mother, father, two to three children. Thats not what it was like historically for enslaved families or slave owning families. The families were larger and they had more children. Families were bigger back then. Either a Single Family or multifamily housing, more People Living in it. Its automatically a different picture. I just dont know exactly how many people were here. Its hard to paint that picture. The status of it now . The status of it now is its just i guess you could say its stabilized but no one is living the main house is not used on a regular basis. Its used when, i think the family comes out to do some hunting in the area. But no one is living in this structure. I dont know exactly the last time they lived in this structure. Im happy to say this is not being used for storage. A lot of places, the outbuildings are used just for storage. Storage of furniture and just big things that clutter the space. When that happens, that accelerates the deterioration of the spaces. When you have clutter, thats when animals and rodents nest and live in there. It invites them in and thats what starts to accelerate the deterioration. Luckily this one is nice and cleaned out. You have cobwebs and other things like that, but otherwise its in really good shape. I think thats helped preserve the building the fact there is no clutter in it. This is a long days work and its hot out here. When this is all done, what would this look like, as far as your records go . Lots of photographs. There will be ill have jazz coordinates. There will be a lot of data that needs to be processed. Then it can then be exported into different types of final products, both the information i have and information trimble has compiled. That buries what we need and want. The 3d models will be generated. With those 3d models, theres different programs to accept those and get different versions. These buildings and the people that lived and work in these buildings are a very important part of our history. I think its important to tell their story truthfully. One way of doing that is through their architecture. Part of the material that still survives today you can visit, you can experience and its kind of a vehicle to tell their story. Thats how im using the architecture. Its also the work is also important because when i started doing this research i found there is information both about these structures and these people but its everywhere. Theres little bits of everywhere. I have taken a lot of time, years, to compile it and get it into one place and also to make it digital and its taken me a long time to do this. Id like to be able to share it with others. Not everyone has to do back and do the same thing im doing. It has taken me so long to do it i want others to benefit from it and have access to it so they can then move forward and do research wit and produce Meaningful Research studies from it and not have a spend a lot of time compiling, doing the research, although i love it. I enjoy doing it but it does take a lot of time and energy to do. Every site i go to, i learn something new. Ive met a lot of great people doing it. Visiting these structures and being inside of them is a lot different than seeing a picture of them. Also, the private properties im going to, recently, i mean, ive always, you know, discovered interesting things about the buildings but Property Owners are opening up to me and sharing things that they have with me. So, for example, i just went to a site and the man there has coverlets, blankets from two of them from an enslaved woman. Theyre in really good condition. Theyre amazing to see. When i was there he showed them to me. I never would have known about them unless i went out to the site, spent the time with the Property Owner and talked to him, and thats why he shared them with me. Thats amazing. To be able to see things like that, that you never would have even known about or seen because theyre not in a museum, theyre not anywhere i would have known about publicly, sitting in someones private home. Thats truly amazing im getting to see things private Property Owners have and are willing to share with me. You can learn more about jobie hills project at her website, savingslavehouses. Org. You can learn more about this and other American History programs at cspan. Org history. This weekend on the cspan networks, saturday at 9 15 p. M. Eastern on cspan, former president ial speechwriters for president s 96ston obama. Sunday at 6 30 p. M. , dr. Anthony, how your zip code impacts your health. Book tv, saturday, 9 00 p. M. Eastern, Daily Caller News Foundation editor in chief, christopher bedford, on his book, the art of the donald, lessons from americas philosopher in chief. And Rebecca Frazier and her book, may flower and the founding of america. Penn State University history professor matthew restal on the u. S. Capitols art and architecture and sunday, the dwight d. Eisenhower memorial. This weekend on the cspan networks. American history tv is on cspan3 every weekend. Featuring medium tours, archival films and the presidency, the civil war and more. Heres a clip from a recent program. The spanish inquisition calls larry parks. I will tell you everything that i know about myself. I would prefer, if you will allow me, not to mention other peoples names. Dont present me with this choice of either being in contempt of this committee or going to jail, or forcing me to crawl through the mud and be an informer. I dont think this is american. More akin to what happened under hitler. I beg you not to force me to do this. Who remembers the sale of the communist party you were signed during the period of 1941 on up to the time you disassociated yourself from the party about 1945 . This is what ive been talking about. This is the thing, that im no longer fighting for myself, ill tell you frankly, that i am probably the most completely ruined manu ha ruined man that you have ever seen. I am fighting for principle, i think. If america is involved in this particular case, this is what i have been talking about. I do not believe it benefits this committee to force no do this. I do not believe it benefits this academy or its purposes to force no do this. This is my honest feeling about it. I dont think this is fair play, i dont think that it is in the spirit of real americanism as we know it. These are not people that are a danger to this country gentleman, they are people that i knew they are people like myself. I direct the witness to answer the question i do not refuse to answer the question. I feel that the committee is doing a really dreadful thing that i dont believe the American People will look at kindly. This is my opinion. I dont think that they will consider this as honest, just and in the spirit of fair play. If you will just answer the question, please. You can watch this and other American History programs on our website where all our video is archived. Thats cspan. Org slash history. Sunday or cspans q a, journalist murray on the impact of the century. He was a very effective president and you cant figure out how he was able to accomplish why he was able to accomplish what he was able to accomplish because he was indirect. He was instrumental. He was a manager. He was not a man of force. It turns out without that force he had amazing capacity to manipulate people and manipulate them into doing the things that he wanted them to do while they thought it was their idea. Sunday night at 8 00 eastern on q a on cspan. Next on the president joe wegend gives portrayal. He recounts the 26th
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