The
Quarterpath Road Site, an antebellum quarter and tenant residence
in Williamsburg, Virginia
Before entering
William and Mary’s graduate program in the fall of 2004, I was
employed as a project archaeologist for the Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation’s Department of Archaeological Research. Over the
course of several seasons of fieldwork in 2003-2004, I directed the
excavation of an antebellum quarter and tenant residence near Williamsburg
with the help of archaeologists from the CWF, graduate students from
the department of anthropology, and students participating in the
joint CWF/College of William and Mary field school.
The Quarterpath
Road Site, a field quarter that consisted of at least two substantial
dwellings, may have housed enslaved African Americans as early as
the 1840s. Nestled between Union and Confederate lines, the site survived
the Battle of Williamsburg during the Peninsula Campaign in 1862 and
was continuously occupied until the incineration of one of the dwellings
circa 1905, prompting the site’s abandonment. After Emancipation,
the residents, then freedpersons, remained at the site and most likely
found employment as tenant farmers or laborers. The site is significant
for it represents a period of time that has been largely overlooked
by archaeological investigations in the lower Chesapeake region. It
is the only example of an Emancipation-era field quarter/tenant residence
excavated by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
The site will
be the subject of my dissertation which will explore African American
efforts at self-determination through associated notions of protection,
spiritual and corporeal healing, and cultivation of self before and
after Emancipation in Williamsburg and elsewhere throughout the rural
South.
