A Week at Montpelier

The week before classes started, CHARG took a week long visit to The Montpelier Foundation in Orange, Virginia. The former home of James and Dolley Madison, and over 300 enslaved Black Americans, Montpelier is a long-time partner of Dr. Brock, who worked as the Assistant Director for Archaeology there from 2014 to 2021. The visit was intended to provide training for the four new students who are working with CHARG this spring, so that they can get real-world experience in archaeological methods, and see how community-engaged archaeological practice works. We were also joined by an alum who had originally signed up for the spring Montpelier program that was canceled due to a fire at the lab.

The site that Montpelier was working on is a unique one. Recently, Montpelier received a significant grant from the Mellon Foundation to construct a memorial to the enslaved at Montpelier near the enslaved community cemetery. Part of this effort, therefore, has been to understand the extent of the cemetery so that the memorial does not disturb any burials. Montpelier’s archaeology department has been hard at work to determine the extent of the burial ground, using metal detecting and ground penetrating radar to identify some likely boundaries, and then this summer have been conducting targeted excavations to ground truth areas where the surveys suggest there are not burials. Our students were able to participate in these excavations, learning field methods while also thinking about and experiencing archaeological work at a cemetery. This is extremely important training, considering our upcoming work at Odd Fellows Cemetery this year in Winston Salem.

In addition to participating in archaeological excavation, the students toured a variety of archaeological sites and interpretations across the property. Archaeology has been happening at Montpelier since the 1980s, and particularly in the past 15 years those sites have been used to recreate and interpret the physical landscape. Tours included a landscape tour with Dr. Brock that introduced the grounds, and discussed the US Constitution, the Madisons, and the enslaved community within the context of US political history during the nation’s founding. They went through the award winning Mere Distinction of Color exhibit that includes the reconstructed South Yard buildings, as well as exhibitions in the main house cellars that examine the humanity of the enslaved and connect the past to the present. They walked the grounds of the Home Farm, where the archaeology department has conducted survey and excavation to understand the relationship of the overseers and enslaved Black laborers, a project of which Dr. Brock is a co-PI and which is supported by an National Endowment for the Humanities Grant. Lastly, they spent time exploring the Civil War and Emancipation landscapes at the Civil War Encampments and Gilmore Cabin.

In the evenings, students and alums had dinner together and worked to connect what they were learning at Montpelier to what was happening at Wake Forest University. This included watching the film Unmarked and discussing Black cemeteries in Winston Salem, talking about Wake Forest University’s role in slavery at the original campus, and discussing the ways that Wake Forest is seeking to address these issues through the Slavery, Race, and Memory Project and memorialization. While they made for long days, these evening conversations helped everyone connect Montpelier to the work that we would be doing during the year at CHARG.

Overall, it was an excellent week. Students gained an appreciation for archaeological fieldwork, built a deeper understanding of our nation’s founding, and received context for our work in Winston Salem. Upon returning to WFU, they began working on some digitization work to support the NEH Grant, and have been regularly referring to the Montpelier cemetery as we do background readings about Black cemeteries in preparation for our work at Odd Fellows Cemetery.