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“Culture
of the Earth”
The Archaeology of the Ornamental Plant Nursery and an Ante- bellum Slave Cabin at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest
BY JACK GARY, ERIC PROEBSTING, AND LORI LEE
A Legacy Of Research
As a boy growing up in Shadwell, Virginia, Thomas Jefferson was fascinated by the Native Americans he saw passing by his home and by a large earthen mound he saw them visiting. His childhood curiosity led him as an adult to conduct one of the first studies of another culture through careful scientific excavation and analysis. Examining the layers of soil and ma- terials he found within the mound, Jefferson was able to show that ancestors of the local Monacan Indians had created these ceremonial places many years ago. This disproved the popular myth that these mounds were created by a long-vanished civi- lization. He then published his results in his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia.
While today’s techniques are much more refined than they were 200 years ago, the goal of archaeology remains the same: to learn about people from the past. Archaeologists working at Thomas Jefferson’s Bedford County retreat home, Poplar Forest, have recently excavated two sites that are revealing new information about this property in both Jefferson’s time and the years leading up to emancipation. One site has been identified as Jefferson’s ornamental plant nursery, where many shrubs and trees were raised to create the grounds of his re- treat. The second site was created after Jefferson’s death, when
the plantation was owned by the Cobbs and Hutter families. This site is the location of a cabin inhabited by enslaved Afri- can Americans from the 1830s to emancipation. By studying the features, artifacts, animal bones, and even the microscopic remains of plants from these two sites, the archaeologists are better able to understand life at Poplar Forest in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Historic Background
Settling and Planting the Piedmont Frontier
(1760–1805)
In the mid-1700s, tobacco planters in eastern Virginia began to look to the west for new lands on which to grow their lucrative cash crop. The rolling hills of the Piedmont became the next frontier, and soon small groups of enslaved workers began clearing forests for new tobacco plantations. A particu- larly well-watered tract of land called Poplar Forest, located in present-day Bedford County, was first settled in the 1760s by a small number of slaves owned by John Wayles, a lawyer living in Charles City County. Under the direction of a white overseer, these slaves cut down trees to create fields and began planting hills of tobacco around the stumps.
When John Wayles died in 1773, his land and slaves passed to his son-in-law, Thomas Jefferson. The Poplar Forest plantation encompassed 5,000 acres at this time. Ten years after Thomas Jefferson took over the plantation there were thirty-five enslaved men, women, and children living on the property, most of whom worked in the fields raising tobacco. Small log barns for drying the crop dotted the ridgetops, and forested areas continued to be cleared for new fields as the tobacco quickly drained the fertility from the soil. Thomas Jefferson attempted to stop the devastating effects on the land by introducing wheat as a second cash crop and utilizing a system of crop rotation after 1790. He ran the agricultural operations at Poplar Forest through letters to his overseers, whom he trusted to bring crops of tobacco and wheat to mar- ket on time to make a profit.
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