Database of former slave dwellings in the united states. Her interdisciplinary work includes architectural documentation, photography, interpretation and preservation of slave history. Up next on american artifacts, we travel to southern virginia near the North Carolina border to visit the former Brandon Plantation with joe b. Hill and learn about her saving slave houses project. Shes joined by several archaeologists and preservationists and a team from trimble, incorporated who came along to document the plantation with a series of 3d laser scans. We are here 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 known slave houses in the united states. It is a repository of information and documentation of slave houses in the united states. I have partnered with trimble, 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. It is important to do this because documentation is a type of preservation. Slave houses are buildings that are disappearing from the landscape, and 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 save them and make them available to a wider audience without having to necessarily come out to the sites because a lot of the sites are hard to get to and a lot of the sites are privately owned. Property owners dont necessarily want people, you know, constantly coming out to their sites to look at these structures. But the Property Owners have been very helpful but at the same time, you know, its easier to have something thats Available Online somewhere that you can get to. In total, i have done survey work at about 150 sites, and about 120 to 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 coworker and mentor of mine who originally worked in Colonial Williamsburg and did documentation there and he is now a historian and does architectural work. He knew about the site and told me i should check it out. So he is here today. And what are you going to do today . His name is mark winger, and this is a special site, because it has a subfloor pit which you will find in front of the slave houses that would be found in front of the fireplaces or hearth, because they would be used as root cellars and food storage, and also storage items for things that people would have had, and they range in size and shape and theres a wide variety of them. Some are woodlined, some are bricklined. Some are just, you know, just holes, just dirt. This one is special because this building is raised on piers, and so this one is stonelined and part of it is above the ground because the building is raised on piers. So today in addition to the 3d laser scanning of the building, we are also going to open the pit to protect it, protect the pit, 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. That framing is . How can you tell . The fact that the saw marks on this framing go straight up and down. And this is a reciprocal waterdriven saw and that would put it in the 19th century when they started the circular sawing lumber close to the middle of the 19th century. This would seem to be before that. So it was built at the time of construction . Probably, yeah. One thing i find interesting about these is that the opening is so large. I mean, i dont know why you might necessarily need such a large opening. This one looks like, i mean, intentional and it 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 it, because the building is on piers and raised off the ground, when you look to the edges, theres stone. You can see that it is lined with stone on the outside of it. So its protected from the outside. I cant tell kind of how deep it goes into the ground in relation to the grade outside. It looks like it goes into the ground a little bit. So this is basically storage. I mean, a big hole that was to be used for storage of things. Do you know where the kitchen would have been . No. I mean, unless they were using this space for the kitchen. Mark, is this the original flooring . All of that nailing looks pretty convincing. And this floor, its pine. It has texture, it has wear, and 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. So this looks like it might be the original floor, yes. Yeah. What would be in there . I am guessing primarily like a root cellar. Food items, because it would be a cooler space, but also maybe personal items that they would have had. Yeah. Its hard to say. Its hard to say without doing archaeology. Thats when its really important to do archaeology in these spaces because then you have a much better understanding of what was in there. What kind of things have they found in these holes when they have done archaeology . Well, pass it to an archaeologist. Personal items, buttons, buckles, beads, fragments of ceramic. Earthenwares. Lots of evidence that they are keeping root vegetables in these root cellars. It really helps understand the daily lives of these people when we get a chance to excavate she these kind of hidden spaces. Im crystal and i run the monticello field work. Archaeological field work. Why are you here today . I was invited with my colleague to come to the spaces shes 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, to live in, to walk up and down the steps. And we often at monticello excavate a lot of these spaces once theyre not on the landscape anymore, so to be able to be at one thats still standing, be in a slave cabin thats still standing, its a different experience. We wanted to be here today for that. So when you reflect on what youve 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 working, and they did not get a break. They werent paid for their services, but they still eked out an existence, so to try to navigate through those spaces today 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, but to just feel the space and walk through it gives me a better idea of what it is that were looking for thats not on the landscape anymore. I think its really important to come to these spaces, to come to these plantations, record whats here, because one day this building may not be here, i think its important to record our past and to 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, so to be able to document their experience and the building in which they lived, to compare this building with what we have at monticello, try to get some understanding of the slave experience across time and across space, i think it really helps inform archaeologists of sites like brandon can really help inform us at monticello and across the south and across the east coast. I think its important to document these spaces, for sure. So this is the equipment that i use from trimble and this collects gps coordinates of a building so i have already collected it for the building, then i have created a Digital Survey form that has the information im interested in, and i can fill it out and it links to that gps coordinate so then when i map these points out where the buildings are, when you click on that point, all this information that i have put in comes up for that point. This project started as part of my masters thesis project and i went back to school to get my degree, my masters degree in Historic Preservation after having been out in the real world practicing for awhile, i realized that i wanted to do the type of architecture i wanted to do was Historic Preservation. I went back to school to get my masters degree and when i was in school for my masters thesis, i started doing research with the historic american fielding survey collection which is a wta program that started in 1936 to get architects back to work. So 1,000 architects were hired to go out and 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. 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, so the american Historical Building survey has 485 sites that have a documented slave house. Then i also looked at the wta slave narratives that were done at the 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 projects. Because the slave narratives were to get writers back to work and they were doing their own thing and the architects were doing their own thing. But in my mind, i was like there had to have been some overlap just kind of by chance. So i also did research with the slave narratives and so there are about 3500 slave narratives. I went through all of those on identified the ones that described their house during slavery. There are 1,010 slave narratives that describe their house during slavery. I went through those and of those, and of the 485 documented slave houses, there are five that overlap. So you have five slave narratives that describe a specific documented slave house, and so you have the actual words of People Living in these spaces, describing these spaces which is amazing. Like thats the interpretation that 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, and 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 now that im going back to look at, and my field work of going back and doing my own documentation of these buildings started when i was working on my project in school, i was a summer intern, summer architect, because that helped my research because i had access to their collection, but they asked me, they were like how many of these have you seen. I was like well, none. I was like im in the archives doing research. Theyre like well, you should go out and see some of these. So when i was interning in the summer with them, i went out to see some of them. They helped me kind of get started. Once i started going out and visiting some of these, i just didnt stop. I just kept going. And knowing that i really enjoyed it because seeing these spaces in person, its not the same as seeing the pictures, although the documentation is amazing. The photographs are amazing, but its completely different to actually visit these structures and stand inside the space. So i just kept doing the field work because its exciting, i enjoy it and it also answers a lot of questions for me, and others like how many of these buildings still exist. Thats an open question. And in order to further the preservation of these buildings, we have to be able to answer those questions, you know, to get support from others, you have to be able to answer well, how many are we looking at, how many are we dealing with. Well, im trying to answer that question, how many are still out there or at least provide a case study of, you know, so in 1936, there were this many in the state and now theres only this many left. So that is what i am working on. Yes, so 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, and usually theyre just smaller ones but i can make a small grant go a long way. Three feet, seven inches. Oh, three feet. Yeah. So this plan type is called a saddle bag plan or saddle bag partition wall. Theres two variations of a saddle bag. Primarily it has a central chimney and room on either side and has a backtoback chimney backtoback fi fireplace, sorry. Thats the plan type. This room were standing in right now, because of the size of the opening of the fireplace and also the location to the main house and the fact that theres a subfloor pit in the other side and maybe this side, we think this might have functioned as a kitchen, because the opening at the fireplace is larger on this side but that kind of made us question, well, why would a root cellar be on the other side if this space was used as a kitchen. But maybe because if this was primarily where theres a lot of cooking, then it would have been a lot hotter in this space so if youre going to have a root cellar, the point of the root cellar is to keep things cool so they used the other space for the cooler side to have the root cellar and this is where a lot of the cooking may have taken place. How old do you think this pot is . So that metal piece is a crane but im guessing thats original. Probably the pots are, it wouldnt surprise me if theyre probably original, too. Or at least fairly old. Yeah, the crane, the crane is because thats kind of part of the fireplace. So would people have lived in here . Absolutely. And how would that work . Is the upstairs original and they would have slept up there . Yes. So the upstairs is original. But there are not hearths in the upstairs. A lot of times in the loft space you do find hearths, or also fireplace openings which is a definite indicator that people were living up there. But this one does not have that. But that does not mean they werent living up there. They were living up there which is why theres a partition wall up there and a door opening up there and a staircase, you know, an enclosed staircase leading up there. That was living space upstairs. You can never really tell for sure without documentation of exactly where people were sleeping or how many people were living in these spaces, but for kitchens, there is always, those were also always living spaces, at least my understanding of them, because kitchens were always used and just kind of the, what you kind of learn or hear from things is that, you know, once you lit the hearth in the kitchen, it never went out. Like just because, you know, it took so long to light, you know, back then, the fireplace and get it running and it took so long to do everything, that it was always running, you were always, you always had to have hot water, whatever, on hand that someone had to be there to watch that fire and also, just from the slave narratives, they always talk about, you know, if they were the cook or their mother was the cook, they always say we lived in the kitchen. Like my mother lived in a kitchen and she was the cook. Theres also evidence in the narrative that support that kitchens were also living spaces. And 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, you know, what was being cooked or how often and exactly how much you needed to be cooking at one time, but im guessing that that was also probably just like a secondary kitchen or Cooking Space for them. Without all the modern technology they have today, theres no way i could do like survey work on my own. So thats why im very thankful that we have all this and that i have access to it, because otherwise, even just like the digital like measuring device that i use, like i cant hold the end of one tape measure and you know, walk the other so i i dont use a laser measure to measure things. Now im taking some measurements of the room and the doors and the windows. I just finished measuring the fireplace. I will do this for each of the different spaces in this building. And also, i take overall dimension of the building, too. Thats part of my Digital Survey form that i have thats linked to the gis coordinates so when i map it, all this comes up. Im richard hasler. I work at trimble as market manager. I have been involved in atlantic slave trade project which is a philanthropic project trimble has been working on for three or four years now. As part of that project, jobie has asked us to come and help her document some of the slave houses in virginia area. So with this particular house, were trying to capture laser scans of the entire exterior and interior of the house, and when we laser scan, we run our scanner on a tripod and then replace it with a camera that can take panoramic slr images and we can map that as the color from those images on to the laser scan and that provides a point cloud of threedimensional point cloud from which we can pull models using our Sketchup Software or we can use our other Software Packages to pull measurements and other kinds of useful information out of it. How did trimble get involved in doing this philanthropic project . One of the men is very passionate about africa and spent many years there. As part of that, he has the ability to kind of help trimble choose what kind of philanthropic projects to do. This is one he was very passionate about. We got together with an organization in the past which documents World Heritage sites around the world digitally and started to work with them using our technology to document sites that were important to the atlantic slave trade. We have hit some sites in mississippi, south carolina, the virgin islands, did a Sugar Factory down there, and we will continue to do that. Now, we are building a relationship with both educators and academics to continue the project and find some cofunding through different kinds of grants, working with the academic community. We have several historians who have been kind of tying in with us lately, including unesco. We were talking to them about making sure we have some ties with them to both help us get into Different International locations but also to make sure that the projects we choose are of historical interest. Now, in Boulder Valley School District in colorado, we have been working with the educators there to try to add some of this information into their curriculum, which they have successfully done last year. So they have as part of their curriculum now some of the impact on Education Organization there has managed to work with Boulder Valley to get the atlantic slave trade or this kind of material into their curriculum. What kind of crops, talking about the 19th century, probably tobacco at this point. Thats certainly what it is now. The tidewater was big in tobacco in the 18th century. Im not so familiar with the agricultural history in this area, in antebellum period but i would guess tobacco was the mainstay. You would also have grains, wheat and corn in addition. Those would probably be the three main crops. How many is there any way to know how many slaves lived in here or how many they needed for that . I dont know. Im not sure how many that would be. But to have a house of that substance, you would 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 pretty substantial place. So i actually dont know as much about this plantation as i do other plantations, but i do know that so this is Brandon Plantation which is the last name of the family that owned it, and even today, the current owner, she is part of the brandon family. Her last name is also brandon. But theres other plantations with the same name. Theres an Upper Brandon and lower Brandon Plantation that are also nearby, and those plantations have been more heavily studied and documented than this one. This one has not been as heavily studied or documented. I dont necessarily know why that is the case, but thats also another reason why i think its important to document this, these structures, is because it hasnt been as heavily studied so there isnt already like existing documentation thats out there so its important that, you know, someone like myself come along and document it, because it doesnt exist yet. Thats why, one of the reasons im excited about doing that today. I always have to kind of remind myself and others that when you come back to sites, you always have to remember youre missing a lot of the buildings. So in order to paint a clear picture of what life is like, you have to be able to identify what buildings youre missing. So here, you usually always have like the main house. Here we have the main house, this structure, which was may have possibly been used as a kitchen. Also living space for enslaved people so kitchen quarter. We have a smoke house, we have a well, a smoke house and well being next to a building are often next to a kitchen. There are certain buildings that are kind of clustered together because of their functions so smoke houses, dairies, a source of water, you typically find next to a kitchen because kitchens rely on those things. Kitchens are also usually close to the main house because, you know, they service the main house. At this site, also, now across the road is our two tobacco barns that were also originally part of the original plantation. But look disconnected from it now. You know what i mean . So you have to just kind of, in order to kind of get a good picture and understand how people would have been moving around the site, and where the farm, like where the crops would have been, you have to know where all those kind of buildings would have been and i just dont know where that would have been for this plantation. Its been divided, theres roads cutting through a lot of the spaces now, which were definitely not there historically so its kind of hard to paint a good picture of what it would have been like. I dont know how many people were even here, either both at the main house or at the enslaved community. Without knowing that, its hard to be able to really say i can paint an accurate picture, because one of the questions that people always have is when youre talking about slave houses, how many people lived here. Thats what people always want to know. Because a lot of times, you know, these spaces were more heavily populated than like what we think of today for a traditional family of mother, father and two to three children. Like thats not what it was like historically for either enslaved families or, you know, slaveowning families. The families were just larger and they had more children. So families were just bigger back then. So if it was even like a Single Family or multifamily housing, there were just usually more People Living in it, so its just kind of automatically a different picture. I just dont know exactly how many people were here. So its hard to kind of 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 when the last time people were actually living in the structure, using the structure, but i mean, i am happy to say that the structure is not being used for storage. I mean, a lot of places, the outbuildings are used just for storage, but storage of like furniture and just kind of big things that clutter the space and when that happens, that accelerates the deterioration of the spaces because when you have clutter, thats when animals and rodents and stuff nest in there, it invites memo in and thats what starts to accelerate deterioration. Luckily this one is nice and cleaned out so you have cobwebs and other things like that but otherwise, its in really good shape. So i think thats really helped preserve the building is the fact theres no clutter in it. So this is a long days work and its hot out here. When this is all done, what will this look like as far as your records go . Well have lots of photographs. There will be, ill have coordinates that there will be data that needs to be processed. There will be a lot of data that needs to be processed, then it can then be kind of exported into different types of final products, both the information i have and the information that trimble has compiled. Than really just kind of buries what we kind of need and want. 3d models will be generated with those 3d models, theres different programs that can accept those, so you can get different versions. These buildings and the people that lived and worked in these buildings are 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. The architecture is, you know, part of the material culture that still survives today that you can visit and you can experience and its kind of a vehicle to tell their 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 to 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 American History tv programs at cspan. Org history. And join us tonight for American History tv in prime time. From our american artifacts seary, well visit the Herbert Hoover president ial library and museum to review the american president s life portraits exhibit and the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in michigan to see the president ial vehicles. American history tv is in prime Time Beginning at 8 00 p. M. Eastern here on cspan3. Tonight book tv is in prime time with a look at after words. The son of the Late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Christopher Scalia shares speeches by his father in his book scalia speaks, and then womens march cochair linda sarsor discusses her book, together we rise. Republican Committee Spokesperson kailey mcmainy reviews the american revolution, and scott kelly in his book endurance, book tv in prime time on cspan2. Also tonight epa administrator scott pruitt and Fox News Channel host janeane pirro addressed the Political Action conference and well have live coverage beginning at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on our companion network cspan. Theyre gathering in washington, d. C. For their annual winter meeting and throughout the day saturday the National Governors association will host panels to talk about jobs and the Opioid Crisis as well as a future of agriculture and food availability. Cspans live coverage begins tomorrow at 10 00 a. M. Eastern after washington journal on our companion network cspan. Located about a hundred miles from washington, d. C. , on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay the Harriet Tubman underground
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