Transcripts For CSPAN3 American Artifacts Saving Slave Houses Project 20180223

Project. She is joined by several archaeologists and preservationist, and team of tremble incorporated who came along to have a series of 3d laser scans. We are here the to do laser scanning and documentation of a slave house that is here. This is part of a independent project that i am doing that is called saving slavehouses which is a database of all of the slavehouses in the united states. It is a acting as Central Depository of documentation and information about slave houses in the united states. I have partnered with turnbull which is the company that makes the survey equipment that i have used to do kind of the highest level of documentation that is available to us today which is 3d laser scanning. It is important the to do this, because one, documentation is a type of preservation. Slave houses are buildings that are disappearing from the landscape, and so by documenting that, that is one way of preserving them. And documenting them 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 save them and make them available for a wider audience without having to necessarily having to come out to the sites. A lot of the sites are hard to get to and a lot of the sites are privately owned, and so the Property Owners dont necessarily want people, you know, constantly coming out to the their site s s to look at t buildings, even though the Property Owners have been quite easy to allow these buildings available. In total, i have done survey work at 150 sites, and about 120 or 130 of those have been in virginia. I have been focusing in virginia for the last couple of years. I found this place through a rk worked in williamsburg and did documentation there, and he is an architectural historian and works for a private architectural firm, but he knew about the site and told me that i should check it out. So he is here today. A and what are you going to do today . His name is mark winger, and this is a special site, because it has a cellular pit which you will find in front of the slave houses that would be found in front of the fireplaces, because they would be used as food storage, and also storage items for things that people would have had and they range in size and shape and a wide variety of them, and some of them are woodlined, and some are brick lined and some are just, you know, just holes. This one is special because this building is raised on piers, and so this is stone thelined and raised. So today in addition to the laser 3d scanning, we are are also going to open up the pit to protect it, to protect the pit, and the floorboards were nailed closed to keep things out of it. So we are going to open it back up to look at it, and also to scan it. That is original. How can you tell . The fact that the saw marks on the framing is up and down, and this is a reciprocal waterdriven saw and instead of putting it in the 19th century when they start ed the circular sawing lumber close to the ones in the middle of the 19th century, and it would seem to be before that. So prior to the construction . One thing that is interesting about these is that the opening is so large. I mean, i dont know why you necessarily would need a large opening. This is looking like it is intentional and constructed at the same time as the building is constructed and so they, when they built the floor, they framed out to have this hole, and they knew that they wanted the hole and this opening in the floor, because they provided framing for it. Underneath it, because the building is on piers and raised off of the ground when you are looking to the edges, there is stone. You can see that it is lined with stone on the outside of it. So, protected from the outside. I cant tell how kind of how deep it goes into the ground in are relation to the grade outside. So this is basically it is storage and the big hole that was to be used for storage of things. You know where the kitchen would have been . Kn no, unless they were using this space as the kitchen. Mark s this the original flooring . All of that nailing looks pretty convincing. And with the floor and it has got a lot of wear by the heart, and it has a lot more wear by the hearth. It has more wear on the other side. It is looking like it is the original floor, yes. Why was he in there. I am guessing primarily at root cellar, and food items to be a cooler space, and also maybe personal items that they would have had. Yeah, it is hard to know, because it is important the do to do archaeology. What types of things have they found . Buttons, evidence that they are keeping root vegetables in these root cellars. It h helps to understand the daily lives of these people when we have a chance to excavate these places. Im crystal and i run the monticello field work. Why are you here today . Well, i was invited from my colleague and i from the Archaeology Department to come to these spaces that she is surveying, and we really wanted to come to kind of experience the space to feel what these cabins would have been like to walk through and to live in, and to walk up and down the steps, and we often at monticello excavate a lot of the spaces once they are not on the landscape anymore. And so to be able to be at one, a slave cabin that is Still Standing is a different experience and we wanted the be here today for that. So when you are reflecting on what you have seen, what are your thoughts . It is a good question. It is really humbling to be in the spaces of these people that were slaves. They were here living and wor g working, and they did not get a break. They were not paid service, but they eked out of those space, and today in the 21st century, it is humbling. I think that i get a better sense of what the room is like and obviously today but just to feel the space and walk through it is a better idea of what we are looking for that ist not on the landscape anymore. I think it is important to the come to the spaces, these plantations and record what is here, because one day this building may not be here, and it is important to record the past and makes us what we are today as a nation and a people. It is important to understand these people to document the experience and the building where it is, and to compare this building with what we have in monticello to try to get some understanding of the slave experience across time and space, and i think it is really going to help inform archaeologists of sites like this to inform monticello and other spaces along the east coast and document the spaces for sure. So this is the equipment that i believe is turnbull, and this is the building and i have collected it for the building, and i have created a Digital Survey form that, archival Information Form of the information that i am interested in, and i can fill it out and link to it the gps koocoordinat so when you map out the points, all of the information that i have put in comes up to that point. This project started as part of my masters thesis project and i went to go back to school to get my masters degree in Historic Preservation after being vn o b out there in the real world i knew what type of architecture i wanted the do with the Historic Preservation, so i went back for my masters degree, aed when i was in school for the masters thesis, i started to do reserch with the American Historic Building reser switch a wta program that started in 1936 to get architects back the to work. So 1,000 architects were hired to go out to document significant structures across the united states. Part of the documentation was slave houses, and not necessarily intentionally, but they did document slave houses, and sometimes a lot of times they would just, you got like one photograph or you would see that a slave house in the background of the picture behind the main house. And so, for that, my masters thesis, i looked at that collection and i identified all of the sites that had a slave house in them, and the american Historical Building survey has 485 sites that have a documented slave house. And then i also looked at the wta slave thenarrative done at same time in the 1930s. Just kind of hoping that there would be some relationship between the two, although there was no coordination between the two project, because the slave narratives were to get the writers back to work and they were doing their thing and the architects were doing their own thing, but in my mind, i said there has to be some overlap if by chance. So i did research on the slave narratives, and so there are about 3500 slave narratives. I went through all of them and identified the ones that described the house in slavery. So there are 1,010 slave narratives that described the house in slavery. I went through those. Of those, and of the 485 slave house, there are five that overlap. So you have five slave narratives that describe the specific documented slave house, and so you will have the actual people of the inhabitants of the spaces, and that is the interpretation that we need to be using when we interpret the spaces. So, so from that, that just, i used the slave narratives to interpret and understand the spaces, and like to guide me of what i should be looking for and how i can see that in the spaces now that i am going back the look at, and my field work of going back and doing my own documentation of the buildings started when i was working on the project in schools, and i was a summer intern at the project, and i had access to the research. Ta we they were like, how many have you seen . I said, nuchblt i have been in the archives doing research. So when i was interning in the summer with them, i went out to see some of them. They got me started. So when i started to go visit some of them, didnt stop. I just kept going. And knowing that i did it in person was not the same as the documentation which is amazing, but it is completely different to visit these structures and stand inside of the space. So i just kept doing the work because it is exciting and i enjoy it, and it answers a lot of questions for me, and others of how many of these buildings still exist which is an open question, and in order to further the preservation of the places, we have to answer those questions and get support from others to answer, well, how are we going to be dealing with, and im trying to answer that, and how come you are still out there or providing a case study of, you know, 1936 there were this many in the state, and now there is only this many left. So that is what i am working on. And to fund this, it is funded by me, but i am looking for grants to do a lot of my survey work and things like that, grants that go to individuals and thing likes that, and usually just smaller ones, but i can make a small grant go a long way. 37. And this is a plan type called the saddlebag plan or the saddlebag partition wall, and so there are two variations of the saddlebag, but hate as chimney and then a room on ooeither sid and backtobackfireplace on either side. So, that is the plan type, and this room that i am standing in right now, and buzz of the size of the opening of the fireplace, and also the location to the main house, and the fact that there is a circular pit on the other side and maybe this side, we think that it might have functioned as a kitchen, because of the opening of the fireplace which is larger on this side, and then kind of made us question, why would a root cellar be on the other side if it is used as a kitchen, and so if this is primarily a lot of cooking, then it would have been a lot hotter, and a point of the root spot is cooler so they have the root cellar there where a lot of the cooking may have taken place. And also, that metal piece is a crane, but that is original, and so, i wouldnt surprise it there, but it is original, too. It is fairly old, which the crane is, because it is part of the fireplace. And people would have lived in here . Yes, absolutely. And that work there, where would it be . Originally upstairs. So the upstairs is original . Yes. But there are not parts in the upstairs and a lot of time hs in the loft spaces, you can find openings which is a definite indicator that people were living up there, and this is not going to have it, and it does not mean they were not living up there, and they were living up there which is why there is a partition wall up there and the door openings up there in the staircase and you know, in a closed staircase living up there, and so, you can never really tell for sure without documentation of exactly where people were sleeping or how many people were living in the spaces, but for the kitchens, there is always also Living Spaces at least my understanding, because kitchens were always used, and kitchens is what you hear from the things is that the once you have lit the hearth in the kitchen, it never went out. And just because it took so long to light, that, you nknow, back then, the fireplace to get it running, and took so long to do everything, it was always running, and you always had to have hot water or whatever on hand that somebody had to be on hand to watch that. That fire. And also from the slave the narratives they talk about if they were the cook or if their mother was the cook, we lived in the kitchen or my mother lived in the kitchen and she was the cook. So there is also evidence main e narratives that support that the kitchens were also Living Spaces. And the other room over there . Without knowing exactly how many people were being fed out of this kitchen, and it is a hard to i cant say what was being cooked or how often and how much you needed to be cook at one time, but that, that was the almost secondary kitchen or Cooking Space for them, and without the modern technology today, there is no way to do the survey work on my own, and that is why i am thankful that we have all of this and that we have access to it, because otherwise, just the digital like measuring device that i use, i cannot put the tape measure to metrically measure things. So now i am going to be taking some measurements of the room and the doors and the windows, and i just finished the fireplace and i will do itt for each of the different spaces in this building, and also, i take overall dimension of the buildings, too. And that is part of the Digital Survey form that i have that is linked to the gps coordinates and so when i map this, it can be documented. I am richard trumball and i have been involved in the plantation slave trade project that we have been working on for three or four years now, and as part of the project jobe has asked us to help her document some of the slave houses. And the exterior of the house, and when we run the laser scan on the try poth, we replace it with panoramic camera to take images and map the colors on to the images of the scan and that provides us with a cloud from which we can pull a models using the sketching software or the other Software Packages to pull the measurements in the project. How did you get involved . One of the Vice President s has spent many years in africa, and as part of that, he has the ability to kind of help choose which projects to do, and this is one that he was very, very passionate about. So we got together with the organization in the past who documents World Heritage sites around the world digitally and we started to work with them using our technology to document sites that were the important to the atlantic slave trade. We have hit sites in mississippi, carolinas, and the Virgin Islands where we did a Sugar Factory there, and we will continue to do that. We are building a relationship with educators and academics to continue the projects, and find some cofunding through different grants working with the academic commu community, a community, and we have several historians tied in with unsco to make sure that we have ties with them help us to get into Different International locations, but also to make sure that the projects that we choose are of his or thele cal interest. Now in Boulder Valley School District in colorado, we have tried to add some of this information noin the curriculum which they have successfully done last year. So they have as part of the curriculum now, some of the impact of the education of the organization there has managed to work in bowl Boulder Valley to get this slave trade material into the curriculum. What kind of crops . Talking about the 19th sen clishgs it would be tobacco at that point, and certainly what it was, and i am not familiar with the agricultural history here in the antebellum period, but tobacco would be the main stay and grains and wheat and corn in addition to that. Those would be the three main crops. And how many is there any way to know how many slaves lived in here or how many they needed . Well, i dont know. I am not sure how many that would be. But to have a house of that size, you would need a large amount of a acreage to make that possible. This is a substantial house even in the antebellum period, that is a substantial house. So i actually dont know as much about this plantation as i do other plantations, but i do know that this is Brandon Plantation which is the the last name of the family that owned it, and even today, current owner is part of the brandon family, and last name is also brandon, but theres other plantations with the same name. There sanis and Upper Brandon a lower Brandon Plantations nearby and they have been more heavily document and studied and documented, but this one has not been as heavily studied or documented and i dont know why that is the case, but it is also a another reason why i believe it is important to document these structures, because it has not been as heavily studied and so there is not existing documentation out there, and so it is important that someone like myself come along to document it, because it does not exist yet. So that is why i am excited about that today. I have to remind myself and others that when you are coming back to sites, you have to remember that you are missing buildings. So in order to paint a picture of what life was like, you have to identify what buildings are missing. So here, you usually always have the main house, and here we have the main house, this structure which was, may have possibly been used as a kitchen and also the living space for people in the kitchen quarters, and we have a smokehouse and a well, and a smokehouse and a wellbeing next to the the building. And often next to the kitchen, and there are buildings that that are kind of clustered together because of the funct n functions, and smokehouses, and dairy, and sources of water next to the kitchens, because they rely on those thing, and also, the kitchens are going to be the main house because they service the mainhouse and that site is across the road is the two tobacco barns that are originally part of the original plantation, but look disconnected from it now. And so, you have to kind of in order to get a good picture of how things would have been moving around the site, and where the farm, like where the crops would have been, you are to know where the kinds of buildings would have been and i just dont know where that would have been for this plantation. It has been divided and roads are cutting through a lot of this, the spaces now which are not, definitely not there historicall historically, and so it is hard to paint a good picture of what it would have been like. And i also dont know how many people are here and built in the mainhouse in the slave community, and so without knowing that, it is hard to say that i can paint an accurate picture, because one of the questions that you will have is when you are talk about the slave houses, how to live here sh, and that is what people want to know, because a lot of times, you know, the spaces were more heavily populated than where we think of to today for a traditional family of mother, father, and like two the three children. That is not what it is like historically and even enslaved families or the slaveowning m families, and the families are larger and have more children and so you would soak it for a Single Family or the multi family housing, and usually more People Living in it. And so it is just kind of automatically different picture, and i just dont know exactly how many people were here and so it is hard to paint that picture. The status of it now . The status of it now is that it is just, i guess that you could say that it is stabilize, but no one is living ashs on the main house is not used on a regular basis, but it is used when the family comes out the do some hunting in the area, but no one is living in the structure. I dont know exactly the last time that people were living in the structure and so i am happy to say that it is not used for storage and a lot of places that the outbuildings are used just for storage, but storage of like furniture and just kind of the big things that kr clutter the space, when that happens that accelerates the deterioration because of rodents and other animals live in there and accelerate the deterioration, so this is nice and cleaned out. So deterioration. So luckily, this one is nice and cleaned out and so you have cobwebs and, you know, other things like that, but otherwise this is in really good shape and so i think thats really helped preserve the building just the fact that there is no clutter in it. So 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 . Well, we have lots of photographs. There will be theyll all have coordinates. There will be data that needs to be processed. There will be a lot of data that needs to be processed and then it can then be kind of exported into different types of final products both the information i have and the information that tremble has compiled and that really just kind of varies and, you know, what we kind of need and want, but 3d models will be generated with those 3d models there are different programs that can accept those and so you get different versions. These buildings and the people that lived and worked in these builds are a very important part of our history and so i think its important to tell their story truthfully and one way of doing that is through the architecture and the architecture is, you know, part of the material culture that still survives today that you can that you can visit and you can experience and its kind of a vehicle to tell their story and so thats how im using the architecture, but its also the work im doing is also important because like when i kind of started doing this research i found that theres information about these structures and these people, but its kind of everywhere and theres little bits of it everywhere and so ive taken a lot of time, years to compile it and kind of get it in one place and also to make it digital and its taken me a long time to do this and id like to be able to share it with others and so not everyone has to go back and do the same thing im doing because its taken me so long to do it that i want others to benefit from it and have access to it so they can move forward and do research with it and then, you know, produce Meaningful Research and studies from it and not have to spend a lot of time doing compiling and doing the research that im doing. I love it. I enjoyed doing it, but it does take a lot of time and energy to do. In every site i go through i learn something new. Ive met a lot of great people doing it, visiting the structures and being inside of them is just a lot different than just seeing a picture of them. Im also, for the private properties that im going to, recently i mean, ive always discovered like 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 or blankets from two of them from an enslaved woman that and theyre in really Good Condition and theyre just amazing to see and so when i was there he showed them to me and i never would have known about them unless i went out to the site, you know, and spent the time with the Property Owner and talked to him and thats why he shared them with me, and thats amazing. So to be able to see things like that that i never would have known about or seen because theyre not in a museum. Theyre not anywhere that i would have known about publicly. Theyre just sitting in someones private home so thats truly amazing that im getting to see things that private Property Owners have and are willing to share with me. You can learn more about jobe hills project at her website, saving slave houses. Org and you can view this and all other programs at cspan. Org history. Heres whats ahead. Up next, well take you to the Harriet Tubman underground Railroad Visitor Center and a look at the drafting of the u. S. Constitution. A little later a visit to the Herbert Hoover president ial library. Join us tonight for American History tv in prime time from our american artifacts series, well visit the Herbert Hoover president ial library and museum to review the american president s life portrait exhibit and the innovation in michigan to see the president ial vehicles. 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Cspans live coverage begins tomorrow at 10 00 a. M. Eastern after washington journal on our companion network, cspan. Located about a hundred miles of the Chesapeake Bay the Harriet Tubman Visitor Center opened in 2017. Up next on american artifacts, a halfhour tour of the grounds and exhibits to learn about the life of