When a 545-acre parcel of land three miles east of Colonial Williamsburg was sold to York County nearly four decades ago, historians and archaeologists documented its rich history. Reports were written and pre-historic, historic and architectural features were registered with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Then, the site kept its secrets until the opening of the new millennium.
In May 2005, the land became a county park and was opened to the public on weekends in the winter and daily from May through September.
I was hired to develop and promote programs that would attract the county’s citizens outdoors to enjoy their new park and its many resources. We held bird walks and advertised the park's hiking trails. A mountain bike trail and a disc golf course were added. Monthly Walk and Talk programs became a regular experience. Area experts now also lead programs on the park’s flora and fauna, geology and history. The later was my favorite since, in my first career life, I had been a history museum curator.
From the early reports, I learned about the history of the site and conducted more research on my own. Dave Hazzard, an archaeologist with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and resident of the Queen’s Lake neighborhood next door to the park, had conducted the brief archaeology work in the 1970’s and I contacted him. Would he conduct a Walk and Talk for the park so that our visitors could learn more about what might be under their feet as they hiked, biked, and picnicked at the park?
In 2006, Dave was able to work us into his busy schedule. He poked around on a plot of the park’s land that was high on a bluff that fell off to a floodplain and marshes, providing a splendid view toward the York River. If you wanted to build a house on New Quarter Park’s property, this would be the site you would probably choose. Well drained and central, it made perfect sense.
In addition, we knew that there was a structure on that rise at the time of the American Revolution, because a structure was indicated as being there by the Frenchman who drew the famous map of the region during the years surrounding the Battle of Yorktown, the last major battle of the war.[i] At that time, the park land was one-fourth of a 2000-acre quarter, or outlying farm, called the new quarters by Robert “King” Carter, Virginia’s largest landholder, in his diary.[ii] The quarter was one of several attached to Carter’s Grove Plantation, which Carter had bequeathed to his grandson, Carter Burwell. When the Frenchman’s map was drawn, the new quarter farm and the slaves who worked it were the property of Carter’s great-grandson, Nathaniel Burwell.
Hazzard decided to do more than a Walk and Talk. He conducted New Quarter Park’s first public archaeology experience. He did all of the digging, but the public watched in awe as he uncovered wine bottle glass, pipe stems, pottery shards, nails, bricks, oyster shells and more. The most unusual item of this first dig was an eighteenth-century iron spur. Apparently, Hazzard had tapped a rubbish heap, the grand prize find of any archaeology endeavor. Visitors loved watching Hazzard dig and they came back for a second Walk and Talk program a few years later.
The idea of digging up a slave quarter structure took off in my mind and I begged Hazzard to come back again and do more. He told me that I should contact two young archaeologists in Gloucester, Thane Harpole and Dave Brown. Their Fairfield Foundation non-profit organization was centered on Fairfield Plantation, an archaeology project intended to bring the former Burwell family home, where the daughter of Robert “King” Carter lived and where his grandson Carter Burwell grew up, to light. They were involved in archaeology work all over Virginia’s Middle Peninsula and Northern Neck.
I contacted Harpole first. He was intrigued by our site, especially for its Burwell family ties to their Fairfield. But time and money, those scarce yet essential commodities, were not available to continue the work at New Quarter. In the meantime, I discovered Lorena Walsh’s book, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community,[iii] which provided documentation and conclusions drawn by the Colonial Williamsburg researcher.
Now the site came alive. Walsh had found the names of slaves and identified their cultural roots in Africa. We knew more about what they farmed and how they lived on the new quarter. Walsh also led two Walk and Talk programs at New Quarter Park.
In 2009, I traveled to St. Mary’s City, Maryland’s first capital, to see their ghost structures because I imagined such a construction built over the house indicated by the Frenchman’s map on our site. I visited Great Hopes, an exhibit at Colonial Williamsburg of an outlying farm, to look at the structures there and listen to the interpretation of eighteenth-century Virginia life beyond the Historic Triangle cities of Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown.
In 2010 and 2011, Robert Watson led Walk and Talks that we named “Remembering the Forgotten,” where the historian of African-American studies, dressed in African costume, led us in a quiet ceremony of music and remembrance. We acknowledged the people who toiled on the land during the time of their enslavement on our park land.
Then, it happened.
Momentum was growing around the public archaeology projects conducted by the Fairfield Foundation, where volunteers were instructed by professionals and certified amateurs to help dig and pan the dirt for its history lessons. People started to talk about a public archaeology project on the Virginia Peninsula beyond the Historic Triangle city restorations. Where might they dig? Harpole and Brown immediately thought of New Quarter Park.
The newly formed Tidewater Virginia Historical Society and the Fairfield Foundation, with support from the Archaeological Society of Virginia and York County, hosted two public archaeology dig days at New Quarter Park in October 2013. Forty volunteers got to get their hands dirty over the course of the two days. They continued to find eighteenth-century artifacts in a series of shovel tests conducted in a grid pattern across the site to determine the extent of use. In April of 2014, the group of organizations supported another 2 days of public digs with volunteers unearthing more artifacts, this time in tests pits that defined artifacts as they lay in layers across the site.
What we have found is something much more complex than I had originally envisioned. I was thinking about that structure on the Frenchman’s map all the while naively dismissing thoughts of the site’s use through the years. Many people over many years had chosen to live on this beautiful high bluff overlooking the Queen’s Creek marshes where inhabitants could see the York River and, beyond that, Gloucester County where Fairfield Plantation once stood.
On the second day of our April dig, we found artifacts from the seventeenth century, the century often forgotten by Virginians who have focused on the eighteenth-century period when Williamsburg was the capital of England’s Virginia colony. In fact, we know that before Robert “King” Carter acquired the new quarter around 1700, that some of the earliest Europeans to receive land patents had settled on the site. Records of early land grants on land that is now New Quarter Park include the names John Hartwell, Richard Jones, Robert Booth, John Bell, William Tayloe, and Samuel Watkeyes. Later, Richard Vaulx and his brothers James, Humphrey, and Thomas bought these patents. One of them may have smoked from the seventeenth century pipe that we unearthed in fragment. They may have enjoyed the wine that was once stored in the case bottle that came to us as another artifact.
During April 2015 public archaeology dig days, we uncovered a lot of brick rubble. In September, we revealed the cellar of a substantial brick dwelling with plaster walls.
How exciting is this site that is revealing itself to us now in layers of occupation that we will begin to understand as we wash, document, and analyze at two more public archaeology days this summer. “We could keep digging here for years,” said Fairfield’s Brown. We hope to continue using the New Quarter Park site for public archaeology digs twice a year and public archaeology documentation days once a year for the foreseeable future.
Keep the New Quarter Park site on your radar screen for layer after layer of discovery.
Sara E. Lewis is a guest writer for The Local Scoop and a New Quarter Park Interpreter.
[i] According to the Earl Gregg Swem Library Special Collections Database at the College of William and Mary, “The Plan de la ville et environs de Williamsburg en Virginie, America (a 11 mai 1782, levé au pas), also known as the Frenchman's Map is a map of Williamsburg dated May 11, 1782. It was drafted by an unknown Frenchman probably stationed with Rochambeau's army. Its detail suggests perhaps a billeting map for the French army following the battle of Yorktown. It has been called the "Bible of the Restoration of Williamsburg" because of the detail of the original buildings shown. It has also been used to illustrate town planning in eighteenth century America.” Plan de la ville et environs de Williamsburg en Virginie, America, Special Collections Research Center, Swem Library College of William and Mary.
[ii] Carter, R. (1723). November 27th, 1723. Diary. The Diary, Correspondence, and Papers of Robert “King” Carter of Virginia. 1701-1732. A collection transcribed and digitized by Edmund Berkeley, Jr. Electronic Text Center. University of Virginia. Retrieved on April 18, 2014 from http://carter.lib.virginia.edu/html/CD1723.mod.html
[iii] Walsh, L (1997). From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.