I stopped by the Crownsville lab yesterday afternoon where Pete, Maxine, and Steve were working. Maxine was washing several large (more than one-inch square) aboriginal pottery sherds with well-placed, sharp-edged cord marks. The remarkable state of preservation suggests that they were not subjected to motorized plows, and possibly not even by plows drawn by draft animals. This bit of evidence furt...

As part of our larger effort of developing biographies for the myriad individuals who lived in and near Port Tobacco...not just the big shots, but the regular folks...I've been working with Carol and Elsie to wed land title and census data to newspapers items. (Okay, maybe 'wed' isn't quite the right word...I don't want to spawn another constitutional amendment movement.) John D. Covell came up in...

As I catalog all the many artifacts from our field session I always seem to come across something unique to myself or just unique in general. So that gave me an idea...why not blog on some of the more interesting artifacts we have found at Port Tobacco? I have covered all the basics in glass, ceramics, brick, etc. that has been found so now I am going to concentrate on the unique finds. At first I...

As I suspected, the School Commissioners' sale of surplus lands--mostly school lots--provided the location of that African American school that Washington Burch and others initially established. I was surprised: the school was southeast of town and not due east, and it was about 9 miles south of La Plata!The reader will recall from my last two postings that William and Ann Matthews had conveyed a s...

At this point we have no drawings or photographs of the school house built for African American children on the lot that the trustees acquired from William and Ann Matthews. In fact, we do not even know where the school was located. All we have to go on is the description in the original 1868 deed, to wit (I've modernized some spelling and punctuation):This Deed Made the Eleventh day of December in...