Photo: Chris Hartlove

Relics from Hell

The shattered chimney bricks and rusty nails looked perfectly ordinary, just the sort of stuff you’d expect to find while poking around a crumbling pre–Civil War plantation in rural Maryland. But there was nothing ordinary about this dwelling, and as he watched his students sift through the rubble, Mark P. Leone, A63, felt his pulse kick up a notch.

Leone had led dozens of successful excavations in his 31 years as a University of Maryland archaeology professor—including a high-profile dig at Maryland’s historic Charles Carroll mansion that found West African “hoodoo” religious objects once used by slaves, and the recent unearthing of a downtown Annapolis house where one of Maryland’s few “free black” families lived around 1750. Exciting stuff, to be sure. But those projects paled in comparison to the excavation that was now under way. Leone and his crew were closing in on the remains of the notorious “Red Cottage” at the 42,000-acre Wye Plantation, east of Baltimore.

Close to 200 years ago, the Red Cottage was the home of a slave overseer. It was also the scene of horrific beatings that the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who lived from 1818 to 1895, witnessed as a boy and later described in his autobiography. “I have seen him whip a woman, causing the blood to run half an hour at the time; and this, too, in the midst of her crying children, pleading for their mother’s release,” he wrote in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845. For him, such incidents would come to embody the evils of slavery.

Douglass escaped to freedom in his twenties and went on to become a leading intellectual. A fiery orator and an ally of the Massachusetts abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, he was a key figure in the struggle for emancipation, and his autobiography became one of the most influential documents against slavery.

For Leone and his students, the Wye House dig has opened a new window on the world that Douglass described. As they sliced through the 350-year-old foundations with their trowels and hand shovels, they uncovered hundreds of relics from the daily life of the 700 slaves who worked on the sprawling farm.

“It was very exciting when our excavations began to unearth physical objects,” Leone says. “Using the writings of Douglass as our guide—along with several other slave narratives—we were able to retrieve many artifacts that gave us a fascinating look at the physical world the slaves inhabited. We found bricks, nails, fragments of kitchen bowls, pieces of blown-glass bottles, and beads that had been worn in bracelets and necklaces.” Other finds include buttons, metal combs, and hand tools like saws and hammers.

Leone points to battered kitchen spoons and shards of crockery—“These are some of the actual implements that were used by the Wye slaves at mealtime”—and then gestures toward dozens of brightly colored beads. “It’s remarkable to find jewelry that was worn by slaves, because we know so little about how they lived their private lives.”

But even better than the digging itself was what happened on a hot July afternoon in 2006, when he and his team hosted an exhibition of recently excavated artifacts at a black church hall in nearby Unionville, Maryland—a small town founded by freed slaves from the Wye Plantation and elsewhere who’d fought with the Union Army during the Civil War. Among the visitors to the exhibition that day was an amazed area resident whose ancestors had once been slaves at Wye House.

“Looking at those kitchen bowls and necklace beads was extremely moving,” recalls Harriette Lowery, a retired Baltimore city budget analyst in her fifties who grew up near Wye House, then returned to Unionville to live. “In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass describes the murder of a slave named Demby by a white overseer—and we think my great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Demby, was probably related to him. It’s painful to look at some of the artifacts that Professor Leone found, but it reminds you that the slaves at Wye House also had moments of peace, moments of joy and contentment in their lives, which is consoling to many of us who are descendants.”

For Lowery and her neighbors, the archaeological dig is part of a healing process that is essential to repairing racial relations in America: “We must never forget what happened to the slaves, even as we continue to heal from it.”

Such remarks are sweet music to the ears of Leone, who believes that “archaeology is about the living, not the dead,” and that its purpose is to get people talking about historical grievances such as slavery. In his view, the most valuable thing he and his students can do with their findings is to share them with descendants of the long-ago communities. “Hopefully, this can reconnect people with their pasts—while helping dissolve the racism that resulted from slavery.”

TOM NUGENT, a freelance writer in Hastings, Michigan, is the author of Death at Buffalo Creek: The Story Behind the West Virginia Flood Disaster of 1972 (W.W. Norton).