by Kimberly Marselas

PHOTO COURTESY OF MIKE HISCHAK

When a team of archaeologists descended upon Wye House Farm, they discovered a few items African American statesman Frederick Douglass did not mention in his accounts of 1820s slave life there: a massive tulip poplar, its bulging roots sprouting through the center of a historic brick building, and an aggressive swath of poison ivy that inspired the use of long pants in the middle of a steamy dig season.

But much of what the slave-turned-abolitionist recalls in his biographies is still present at Wye, most notably the recently unearthed remnants of a slave village scattered just below the surface of the Long Green. The poplar was growing amid what was almost certainly one of the plantation’s slave quarters, a building whose rotting wood floor would have provided great organic matter for a sapling. The fact that history would have to fight its way out from under pesky weeds and twisted roots is not lost on Professor Mark Leone, who has for years worked to shed light on the buried history of African Americans through the university’s Archaeology in Annapolis program. “The treasure in this endeavor is that at Wye House, as in Annapolis, there’s a direct continuity from the 1700s to today,” says Leone. “Maryland has and can communicate its own deep past.”

Since beginning work at the farm near Easton in 2005, students in the archaeology field school have discovered three distinct structures, as well as artifacts that date to pre-historic times. A laboratory in Woods Hall is now home to ceramic sherds, badly corroded metal blades and countless pieces of tobacco pipe. Each is washed, labeled and painstakingly identified by students. But the delicate handling doesn’t stop in the lab.

In tracing Douglass’ footsteps and reaching further back in time, the team is examining life as one of Maryland’s most famous residents knew it and providing fresh insights to the family of the farm’s original owners as well as to the relatives of the slaves they once owned. The challenge is to do so in a way that informs both descendant communities and provides historical context for university students.

“Most Maryland undergraduates are unconnected to the greatness of Maryland’s history,” Leone says. “They come from an institution that is closely connected to the founders of Maryland and the country.”

The Lloyd family, which built Wye House and at one point owned an estimated 1,000 slaves to support crop and livestock operations, still lives on the land. Theirs is one of the great names in state history, along with those of William Paca and Charles Carroll—whose properties Leone has also investigated.

This towering poplar tree held buried treasure in its roots.

Life on the Lloyd plantation helped shape Douglass’ story—his struggles in slavery, his eventual freedom and the insights the two provided when he became a noted orator, presidential adviser and ambassador.

Douglass described his early homes near Easton as unremarkable, dilapi-dated farms with worn-out soil:

“It was in this dull, flat, and unthrifty district or neighborhood, bordered by the Choptank River, among the laziest and muddiest of streams surrounded by a white population of the lowest order, indolent and drunken to a proverb, and among slaves who, in point of ignorance and indolence, were fully in accord with their surroundings, that I, without any fault of my own, was born, and spent the first years of my childhood,” he wrote in 1881’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

Mrs. R.C. Tilghman, an 11th generation descendant of settler Edward Lloyd, has known her waterfront estate as a bucolic home, its yellow and white main house just 100 yards or so from where university students spend the summer digging.

“The history here is of intense personal interest to me, and I’m dedicated to its preservation,” says the 87-year-old. “This land has been part of my life for so long that I feel a duty to preserve the heritage it holds.”

Descendants of the slaves Douglass lived among as a boy also consider the land part of their heritage. On a Sunday morning after Tilghman gave him permission to dig, Leone shared a pew with parishioners at St. Stephen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Unionville. Members of the congregation descend from families who had lived in the region for decades, and some still had the same last names.

Leone asked what they wanted to know about the Lloyd family property. The response from a senior member was central to the work to take place: Tell us, she said, about slave spirituality and what the Lloyd family did for slaves’ freedom.

In summer 2006, Leone and his graduate students attended the Roberts family reunion and shared their findings with as many as 150 people. In a profile of the project that appeared in Archaeology magazine, William Roberts said he found strength in the domestic remains discovered at the site.

For instance, most of the ceramic pieces found so far match pottery still owned by Tilghman, a sign that the slaves got their supplies as handouts from their owners rather than at an independent market.

“They did so much with so little,” says Roberts, president of Verizon Maryland. “If we’ve overcome this, there’s no excuse for us not being able to overcome anything today.”

Students label their finds in the archaeology lab.

In excavating about 40 sites in Annapolis over 25 years, Leone has inspired similar reactions among the capital’s African American community. Although the population has been one-third African American for centuries, the role those residents played in making the city successful has just begun to emerge in the last two decades.

“The work that Mark is doing is one way of examining what their lives were like,” says Judith Cabral, director of programs for the Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Foundation. The organization recorded oral histories in Parole last year, a predominantly African American section of Annapolis where Leone trained his eyes and his students. “Without his work, we’d have a big hole … in knowing what occurred here 150, 200 years ago.”

Leone will be back in Annapolis next summer, and his team will also return to Wye House for a third and final year of excavation. The focus will once again be on the expansive Long Green, particularly on two buildings whose functions aren’t readily known, including one whose size is thought to be substantial.

Though some of Douglass’ later homes were restored and opened to the public—including the Frederick Douglass Museum and Hall of Fame in Washington, D.C., and a Highland Beach home he never lived to see completed—the land where he spent his formative years will remain private.

Still, Leone expects his work to build a greater understanding of Douglass, as he continues to share his finds with volunteers, the local communities and regional and national media. He has been contacted by the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco about a collaboration and would be willing to interpret and display artifacts at an established museum with Tilghman’s support. After all, information is what Douglass would likely have wanted the world to have.

“What we’re interested in doing is building on Douglass’ legacy of enfranchising the world,” Leone says. “We are educating, which is the university’s mission.” -TERP

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