ARCHAEOLOGISTS FIND EVIDENCE OF SLAVE CABIN
Poplar Forest Newsletter, Fall 2003

Delving further into the probable building site they had discovered during their survey southeast of Jefferson’s house, archaeologists have identified the artifact-rich site as an antebellum slave cabin.

In addition, tantalizing initial evidence leads to hopes that a Jefferson-era site sits below it.

During 2001, archaeologists launched the last major portion of their survey of the core area of Poplar Forest, hoping to find evidence that would broaden the understanding of the plantation’s landscape design and its functionality in Jefferson’s time. 

Early finds hinted at the promise of the site, about 100 yards southeast of Jefferson’s house. Further excavations this year have revealed a large deposit of building stone, suggesting that the dwelling had a stone chimney. Archaeologists also uncovered a sub-floor pit adjacent to the chimney base. Slaves often dug pits inside their houses and used them to store food and personal belongings.

Based on the sub-floor pit and the artifacts retrieved, the evidence points to the site once being home to a cabin inhabited by enslaved workers from about the 1840s to right before the Civil War, says Barbara Heath, director of archaeology and landscapes.

Archaeologists place soil samples in the flotation tank to filter out tiny artifacts such as fish bones and button pieces.

The artifacts and architectural remains are providing rich information about the slave community during that first generation after Jefferson. However, the site is significant for comparison, too, with the Jefferson-era slave quarters excavated at Poplar Forest in the mid-1990s. “We are very excited that we now have the opportunity to trace how enslaved people’s private lives and the conditions under which they lived changed at Poplar Forest during this pivotal period of American history from the Revolution to the Civil War,” says Heath. The previously excavated slave quarters, which also had sub-floor pits that yielded diverse artifacts, dated from two periods of Jefferson’s occupancy, 1770s-1780s and 1790-1812. At the antebellum cabin site the artifacts found included a nearly intact egg, coins, marbles, tools, parts of a pair of scissors, ceramics including fragments which mended into two whole plates, and a lot of fragments of bottle glass and tumblers.

“We’ve taken the pit apart layer by layer and floated all of the soil to capture tiny artifacts,” says Heath. “We’ve recovered glass beads, hooks and eyes, straight pins, fish scales, burned seeds, and thousands of bones. We usually don’t find many small bones at Poplar Forest because they typically aren’t well preserved in this soil. The number and variety of bones in the pit is really exciting. They give us excellent information about what people were eating and how they were preparing their food,” Heath says.

Artifacts found covering the chimney base date to the 1850s, indicating the building was torn down sometime around the time of the Civil War.

“This is one of the best preserved sites we’ve found at Poplar Forest,” says Heath. “Because there are deeply buried layers of cultural material that have escaped plowing or other modern disturbances, we have the potential to see the site much as the people who lived and worked here left it.”

Archaeological testing and excavation in 2001 indicated that deeper layers exist beneath the antebellum cabin site. Excavating further this year in one area directly adjacent to the cabin, archaeologists found concentrations of building stone in a deeper layer, suggesting that the cabin might have replaced an earlier structure on the same site. This earlier structure is most likely from Jefferson’s era.  Once the cabin site is documented, Heath says, archaeologists will dig deeper.