Month: November 2019

Museum acquires only known antebellum image of slaves with cotton

Modern(ish), Museums

The only known antebellum image of enslaved African-Americans with cotton has been acquired  by the Hall Family Foundation for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. The quarter plate daguerreotype was sold at Cowan’s American History auction in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 15th and blew past the pre-sale estimate of $100,000 – $150,000 for a hammer price of  $260,000 ($324,500 including buyer’s premium).

The daguerreotype, still in its original leather case, was taken in the 1850s and is a posed tableau centered on three slaves carrying large baskets of cotton on their heads. In total there are 10 African-American enslaved individuals in the image, including several children. Behind them is a two-story house with front and rear galleries supported by posts. A log cabin is in the front right, perhaps a smokehouse or slave cabin. A crude well with a large timber crank mechanism is in the front center. A man in a top hat on the left is likely the owner.

Images of enslaved people working on the cotton plantations of Georgia and the Carolinas are extant, but they were captured by photographers who traveled south with the Union Army. They were taken at the large coastal planters owned by the wealthiest elites and worked by hundreds of slaves. This daguerreotype depicts slavery at a rural holding, the type of small-scale operation that was typical for the vast majority of slaveholders.

The daguerreotype was discovered in estate of Charles Gentry, Jr., after his death in Austin, Texas, in 2012. It was in good condition, but needed conservation to remove tape residue and dirt and to re-glaze and rebind the plate. The hinges of the case were also repaired.

Gentry was originally from Polk County, Georgia, so researchers investigated the origin of the image, they turned to the census and Slave Schedule records pertaining to the Gentry family in Georgia. Of several Gentrys living in Georgia in the decade before the Civil War, only one owned at least 10 slaves: Samuel T. Gentry of Greene County. The Federal Slave Schedules list him as owning between 15 and 18 men, women and children between 1850 and 1860.

“This piece—a record of the historical crime of slavery—is remarkable both for the power of its content and for its technical and aesthetic sophistication,” said [Keith F. Davis, Senior Curator, Photography, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art]. “This is an unforgettable rendition of an era, and a way of life, that must never be forgotten or forgiven. At the same time, it markedly expands our understanding of the history of American photography. We have long believed that daguerreotypes such as this ‘should’ have been made in the 1850s; now we know that at least one actually was.”

240-year-old oak falls at Mount Vernon

Modern(ish)

A white oak at Mount Vernon that was a witness to history from the time of George Washington has fallen. The oak was 115 feet tall and 12 feet in diameter and was at least 240 years old when it fell down across a road through the woods on the night of November 4th. There was no storm, not even any wind.  The tree wasn’t rotten, damaged or diseased. It was the oak equivalent of dying peacefully in its sleep.

Dean Norton, Mount Vernon’s director of horticulture, counted the rings from the cut trunk and conservatively dated the oak to at least 1780. It might be even older. (Some of the rings blend into each other and can’t be precisely counted.)

Norton said there is also a possibility that Washington had purposely transplanted the tree from the local woods. It had stood in what looked like a man-made triangle of three trees, all the same age, all the same kind, and never cut down.

“To me, they were intentionally, not only planted, but saved,” he said.

The other two are already gone. The first fell about 40 years ago; the second in August of last year. The three were near a road about a half-mile west of the mansion, Norton said.

Mount Vernon was treated as neutral ground during the Civil War, but all three of these oaks were informally enlisted on the Union side. A star and a cross, insignia of two Union Army corps, were carved into the bark of the three oaks in 1865. The five-pointed star and Latin cross can still be seen on the fallen trunk, albeit less distinctly. An archival photograph from 1932 shows them more distinctly, and a curatorial note attributes them to a New York regiment that visited Mount Vernon while it was in Washington, D.C. for the Grand Review of the Armies in May 1865. This was the last tree still standing at Mount Vernon with Civil War carvings in its bark.

Mount Vernon was a mecca for soldiers on both sides of the Civil War. George Washington was a revered native son of Virginia as well as the first President of the United States, so Union and Confederate soldiers alike had reason to pay their respects. It was an immensely popular attraction for Union troops in particular. An estimated 200 Federal regiments visited Mount Vernon from 1861 to 1865.

The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which had acquired the dangerously dilapidated mansion and 200 acres of the property from John Augustine Washington III in 1858 and taken possession in 1860, had members from north and south and consciously eschewed all partisanship. Their sole goal was to repair the estate, which was literally falling apart and propped up by repurposed ships’ masts, and honor Washington’s legacy. When Civil War broke out and Virginia seceded from the Union in the spring of 1861, MVLA regent Ann Pamela Cunningham declared that Mount Vernon should be neutral territory, that any troops, Union or Confederate, who visited should not be armed or uniformed.

Her wishes were conveyed to all soldiers in the area and respected to the best of their abilities. In a May 2nd, 1861 letter to Cunningham, her secretary Sarah Tracy reported:

[The troops] have behaved very well about it. Many of them come from a great distance and have never been here, and have no clothes but their uniforms. They borrow shawls and cover up their buttons and leave their arms outside the enclosures, and never come but two or three at a time. That is as much as can be asked of them.”

Union General Winfield Scott made it a formal policy that Mount Vernon was to be left alone in General Order 13, issued on July 31, 1861:

Should the operations of our war take the United States troops in that direction, the General Officer does not doubt that every man will approach with due reverence, and leave undisturbed, not only the Tomb, but also the house, groves and walks which were so loved by the best and greatest of men.

The fallen oak will remain at Mount Vernon, indeed will become even more a part of it as it will be used by the preservation department to make necessary repairs.

Elite Anglo-Saxon burial found in Canterbury

Ancient

The remains of an elite Anglo-Saxon woman adorned with fine jewelry have been unearthed on the Canterbury Christ Church University campus.

The woman, believed to have been in her twenties, was found buried with a silver, garnet-inlaid, Kentish disc brooch. Scientific testing on similar finds has shown the garnets are likely to have come from Sri Lanka rather than a nearer source. Such brooches, crafted in east Kent from exotic materials, were produced at the behest of the Kentish royal dynasty and distributed as gifts to those in their favour.

She was also wearing a necklace of amber and glass beads, a belt fastened with a copper alloy buckle, a copper alloy bracelet and was equipped with an iron knife. Together, the items found in the grave suggest that this young woman was buried between AD 580-600. She would have been a contemporary, and likely acquaintance, of the Kentish King Ethelbert and his Frankish Queen Bertha, whose modern statues can be seen nearby at Lady Wootton’s Green.

Archaeologists from the Canterbury Archaeological Trust (CAT) excavated the site of the former Canterbury Prison in advance of the construction of new Science, Technology, Health, Engineering and Medical facilities at Canterbury Christ Church University. Between July 2018 and June 2019, the team unearthed a Romano-British cremation burial from the 2nd-3rd century, medieval trash pit full of animal bones, evidence of extensive post-medieval quarrying and a boundary ditch from the perimeter of St. Augustine’s Abbey, now a ruin after having been plundered for building material after the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

The Abbey was immensely important in its day. Founded in 598 by Augustine, the very first Archbishop of Canterbury who was sent by Pope Gregory the Great to Christianize the Anglo-Saxons, the monastery and its church were built on the grounds of the pagan temple at which Æthelberht, King of Kent, worshiped, or rather had worshiped before Augustine (doubtless heavily aided by Æthelberht’s Christian queen consort Bertha) converted him. The king commissioned construction of a church on the Abbey grounds dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul which was completed in 613. Archbishops of Canterbury and kings and queens of Kent would be buried within its masonry walls.

The newly-discovered grave almost certainly pre-dates the construction of Sts Peter and Paul Church and of the Abbey. We know the site was used as a burial ground in Roman times and held religious significance for pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons. This is now evidence that high-status Anglo-Saxons were buried there as well and that the Kentish royal family was continuing an established practice even after their conversion to Christianity. They just added the church.

Very little of her skeleton was recovered because soil conditions in the area are hard on bones, but there are a few surviving teeth which opens up the possibility of archaeological DNA and stable isotope analysis. Researchers hope to discover more about her life and death from further studies of her remains.

Whole historic log cabin found inside house during demolition

Modern(ish)

A whole log cabin dating to the Civil War or immediate antebellum period was discovered inside an existing house that was being demolished in Prescott, Arkansas. The 18 x 20-foot cabin was kept whole and encapsulated with new siding between 1953 and 1955 when it was moved entire to its current location on Greenlawn Street.

Property records indicate the log cabin originally built on Miller Hill on land belonging to one John Vaughn. The records would suggest it dates to 1850s or 1860s and the timbers are roughly hand-hewn, which dates them to before the arrival of the railroad and the mill-sawn timber it brought to the area in the 1870s. Miller Hill was next to the 30-square-mile plain that as of April 12th, 1864, would become known as the Prairie D’Ane battlefield, now part of the Camden Expedition Sites National Historic Landmark. This log cabin could well have been mute witness to the Union victory at Prairie D’Ane. An archaeologist has been enlisted to authenticate the building and date it as precisely as possible.

Demolition is obviously no longer on the cards. The Nevada County Depot & Museum has acquired the log cabin thanks to a donation from local residents Dr. Michael and Bo Young. The museum plans to dismantle the cabin piece by piece, number each timber, conserve and stabilize them and store them until the structure can be reconstructed on the Prairie D’Ane Battlefield. A new visitors center will be built at the site in the next couple of years. The log cabin will be reassembled inside the new building to keep it safe from the elements and open to visitors.

Nested Viking boat burials found in Norway

Medieval

Two Viking-era boat burials have been found, one inside the other, in Vinjeøra, central Norway. The graves were unearthed by a team from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) University Museum in October who were excavating a known Viking era burial ground in advance of highway construction. They first came across the burial of an elite woman dating to the second half of the 9th century. Then they found a second burial, this one for an elite man dating to the 8th century, under hers.

“I had heard about several boat graves being buried in one burial mound, but never about a boat that had been buried in another boat,” said Raymond Sauvage, an archaeologist at the NTNU University Museum and project manager for the excavation.

“I have since learned that a few double boat graves were found in the 1950s, at Tjølling, in the south of the Norwegian county of Vestfold. Still, this is essentially an unknown phenomenon,” he said

The man was buried in boat around 30 feet (9-10 meters) long. Interred with him were a spear, a shield and a single-edged sword. The style of the sword is what dates the grave to the 8th century, the Merovingian era. The woman’s burial boat was about 25 feet long (7-8 meters) and interred with her were a pearl necklace, two scissors, a spindle whorl and the head of a cow. Her garment was fastened at the chest with two gilded bronze shell-shaped brooches and a cruciform brooch that was originally a horse fitting of Irish manufacture likely taken in a raid and repurposed as jewelry.

The wood of both boats has almost entirely rotted away (a small piece of the keel of the woman’s boat was the only survivor), but the rivets were all in place and undisturbed. Archaeologists were able to determine the size and shape of the boat by mapping the rivets, and that’s how they realized instead of a single boat they had discovered a smaller one nested inside a larger one. This was not a haphazard stacking. The first grave had to have been painstakingly excavated so as not to disturb the remains and grave goods and then the woman’s boat carefully placed within.

The two boat graves were found on the edge of what had once been the largest burial mound on the site. The mound had eroded to flatness over the centuries of agricultural use of  the land, but archaeologists hoped to find artifacts, if not remains, from the central grave in the middle of the tumulus. They did discover an early Merovingian-era brooch, confirming that the mound pre-dates both the boat burials.

But what was the connection between the man and the woman? Sauvage says it’s reasonable to assume that the two were related. The Vikings on Vinjeøra probably had a clear idea about who was in each burial mound, since this information most likely was passed down for many generations.

“Family was very important in Viking Age society, both to mark status and power and to consolidate property rights. The first legislation on allodial rights in the Middle Ages said you had to prove that your family had owned the land for five generations. If there was any doubt about the property rights, you had to be able to trace your family to “haug og hedni” – i.e. to burial mounds and paganism” says Sauvage.

“Against this backdrop, it’s reasonable to think that the two were buried together to mark the family’s ownership to the farm, in a society that for the most part didn’t write things down,” Sauvage says.

While the soil is too acidic for good bone preservation, fragments of the woman’s skull and teeth were found in the grave. Researchers will attempt to extract DNA from the remains and perform stable isotope analysis to find out where she grew up and what she ate. Archaeologists will return to the site next year to continue the excavation of the mound. The goal is to unearth any artifacts associated with the central burial.

This brief but illuminating video recreates the boat burials and their contents as they would have looked originally. CGI rendering artfully illustrates how the two boat graves fit with each and in the context of the earlier burial mound.