Is There a Doctrine in the House?
Field archaeologists from the William and Mary Center for Archaeological Research establish a metric control grid across the Monroe birthplace site prior to systematic shovel testing.
That's James Monroe clutching an American flag, standing just abaft the commander-in-chief, in the iconic painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware.
The painting has a reputation more for its patriotic and emotional symbolism than as a historic illustration, but nevertheless, James Monroe was indeed a member of the force that crossed the Delaware and beat the Hessians at Trenton. Until just months before he crossed the Delaware in December of 1776, Monroe was in more congenial and no doubt warmer surroundings, as a student at the College of William and Mary. He was listed on the bursar's books as "Mr. James Monro," from June 20, 1774 to March 25, 1776.
It's the same James Monroe who became the fifth president of the United States, fathered the Monroe Doctrine and became the proprietor of Highland Plantation near Charlottesville. Now called Ash Lawn-Highland, Monroe's former home is now owned by the College of William and Mary, which has opened it to the public for tours, demonstrations, and workshops centered around period crafts such as lantern-making and candle dipping.
Summer Shoveling
In contrast to Ash Lawn-Highland, the birthplace of James Monroe, on the Northern Neck, is an overgrown piece of property in rural Westmoreland County. The James Monroe Memorial Foundation hopes to change all that as it moves forward with plans to build a replica of the Monroe farm on the site. As a preliminary step to establishing a historical attraction, the foundation brought in the Center for Archaeological Research from the College of William and Mary to uncover the history that has lain buried on the site and within archival documentary records. Joe Jones and David Lewes of the center are directing the project, which began in the summer of 2006 with systematic shovel testing of the site."We're taking a standard archaeological survey approach, beginning with shovel testing, which is essentially digging dinner-plate sized holes into the topsoil at regular intervals," explained Jones, who is director of the Center for Archaeological Research. "You set up a grid so that you have mapping control over where these holes are located across the landscape. The holes are 15 meters, or 50 feet, apart--a standard interval for a survey like this."
Jones said that they will respond to any hole in which period artifacts are found by digging a supplemental set of shovel tests at half the standard interval around the initial positive shovel tests to gain a more refined understanding of the content and extent of any subsurface artifact scatters.
"Then we'll select four or five of the hottest spots--the ones that hold the best potential for being Monroe-era activity areas, and we'll come back and do a more intensive controlled excavation within those areas," he said. A typical excavation at the "hot spots" will be a one- by two-meter rectangular test unit, excavated with careful attention to soil stratigraphy, so that the workers can keep track of where the artifacts are found both horizontally and vertically. The results should provide an informed sense of activities represented and various processes affecting the formation of the site deposits.
"That gives you an objective source of information about what the archaeological integrity is and its research potential. Once we get down to the underlying subsoil, essentially the clay below the topsoil that has not been affected by plowing after the site was abandoned, we hope to find features like post holes or root cellar pits, for example, that extend into that subsoil clay," Jones explained. He added that such holes and pits would contain deposits that offer undisturbed information about the resources they represent.
"Ultimately, we hope that information from features across the site will help us understand the farmstead layout and activities during the Monroe occupation," Jones said.
The site was partially excavated in 1976, but Jones explained that the previous work concentrated on the foundation remnants of the house itself, only one of several buildings that made up what might be called the Monroe farmstead. Much of the activity within such an agricultural entity would have involved a number of outbuildings on the property.
Eleventh-grade students in John Lewis's AP history class at Washington & Lee High School in Montross, Virginia, help screen the soil for artifacts during the Virginia Archaeology Month public dig at the site of Monroe's birthplace.
Beyond the House
"These types of farmsteads would have comprised a cluster of buildings, with the house being the core of that cluster. You'd expect to find other components of the domestic complex in that time period--the kitchen would have been a separate building, for instance. There could have been slave quarters, barns, little outbuildings like smokehouses, and such," he explained. There is archival evidence of the presence of such work buildings, including a 1780 classified ad from the Virginia Gazette listing the property for sale. "One of our aims is to take a careful look at this property immediately adjacent to the house, to see if we can find the remains of some of these other activity areas and outbuildings."The Center for Archaeological Research has been planning the testing phase of the field work as an opportunity for what they call a "public dig." Effort will be devoted ahead of time to advertise the field work and invite interested public to participate in the excavations. David Lewes, project manager at the center, said the testing phase of field work at the presidential birthplace was scheduled to take place in October. It will be among a series of public archaeology events scheduled to coincide with what is celebrated annually as Virginia Archaeology Month.
As information on the Monroe property comes to light and the James Monroe Memorial Foundation comes closer to their goal of building a reproduction, the archaeologists caution the public not to expect a Tara, a Monticello or even a Carter's Grove. Considerable evidence compiled by researchers indicates that the Monroes were "what we might call upper middle-class today," Jones said.
Virtues of Plainness
"You might have expectations of kind of a grand house, a brick structure, that's very commanding," he said. "By all accounts, however, this was a more common type of farmstead for a fairly well-to-do family in Tidewater Virginia in the mid-eighteenth century. The dwelling was a wood-frame structure that would probably appear to be surprisingly modest on the inside and out by today's standards, especially for a family who owned as much land as the Monroes."The comparative "plainness" of the Monroe farmstead may lend itself, in a way, to a unique interpretive opportunity, when compared to the grand, high-style homesites more typically associated with the various founding fathers, the archaeologists said. At the same time, however, an informed interpretation of the Monroe site could fill an existing gap in the current range of colonial house museums by offering an important and yet overlooked example of a type of farmstead that was common throughout Virginia during the late Colonial era, establishments that straddled the definition between farm and plantation.
"It is a plantation in that they were growing cash crops," Lewes said. "And there's an aspect of it where they are striving for self-sufficiency; it's not just a dwelling but it's kind of a little miniature community. Often, these places were not only involved with cash crops, but also food crops and domesticated animals. In Virginia Tidewater, especially, there was that ideal of striving to make the place self-sufficient. For example, many of the crafts were produced on site by the slaves of the landowners."
"Another plus to this study," Jones said, "is that unlike many Virginia counties from which most of the older county records were destroyed during the Civil War, the records of Westmoreland County survived largely intact. Such records are helpful in providing context to the archaeology. There is, for instance, an inventory of the estate made in 1774 after Monroe's father died, and a nearly complete chain of title tracing the Monroe family's ownership of this particular property, and the division of the land among the various Monroe heirs.
"Some of the information you get from a site is kind of site-specific, and it's specific to the individuals that lived on the site; but the archaeological information from a site like this can also contribute, by comparison and contrast, to other sites across the region, to the identification of broad anthropological patterns that may be significant but otherwise overlooked by folks who lived during that time as well as scholars of today."
By Joe McClain for Ideation magazine
©2009 · Arts & Sciences at The College of William and Mary