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hen I arrived at the Universityof Virginia to begin graduate work inarchitectural history, my home inPasadena seemed a long way away.Thomas Jefferson’s university—withits World Heritage–designated central

campus,The Lawn—breathed a senseof history and a pattern of rural lifethat contrasted strongly with thesophisticated urban setting of theUniversity of Southern California,where I had completed my under-

graduate degree in planning and devel-opment two years earlier.

As a native Californian, I chose theprogram inVirginia because I wantedto learn how other regions of theUnited States approach the history and

SURVEYINGVirginia archaeological teamuncovers layers of meaning

in a Jeffersonian mapfrom The Huntington

by Laura Voisin George

W

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 17

preservation of their built and naturalenvironments—places whose historystretches back through the centuries.Little did I know when I arrived inCharlottesville that I would becomeinvolved with an archaeological inves-

tigation tracing thousands of years ofhistory. Critical to my collaborationwith archaeologists, anthropologists,historians, andThomas Jefferson expertswas a rare map from The Huntingtonwhose significance to theVirginia land-

scape had gone unnoticed since itsacquisition by Henry E. Huntingtonin the early 1920s.

My participation in a research proj-ect at a historic estate began innocentlyenough. Shortly after my arrival in

THE PAST

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Charlottesville, I met Stewart Gamage,who recently had become the direc-tor of the University of Virginia’sMorven Project.The Morven estate islocated in the Southwest Mountainsabove Charlottesville, about two and ahalf miles from Jefferson’s famousMonticello. In 2001, philanthropistJohn W. Kluge donated it to the uni-versity as part of a 7,379-acre gift ofAlbemarle County property.When theUniversity ofVirginia Foundation beganplanning for public outreach, civicengagement, and various academicefforts related to the property’s ecolo-gy, land use, and sustainability, Gamagerealized what was needed was a histo-ry of the property’s previous owners.She asked me to take on the job.

At that point, everything aboutMorven was terra incognita for me. Istarted by reading the history of boththe state and Albemarle County. Overthe next few months I unearthedinformation about the property andits former owners, moving from one

We excitedly comparedThe Huntington’s “IndianCamp” survey map withcurrent topographical maps.

Opposite: Fraser Neiman (center), the director of archaeologyat Monticello, points to a copy of the map from the Huntingtoncollection as the survey team compares it to current maps.From left to right: Stewart Gamage, director of the MorvenProject; Beth Bollwerk, a doctoral student; Neiman; JeffreyHantman, anthropology professor at the University of Virginia;and Alison Bell, a historical archaeologist from Washingtonand Lee University. Photo by Laura Voisin George. Below: TheHuntington’s “Indian Camp” map, ca. 1795, including notesin Thomas Jefferson’s hand. Right: Derek Wheeler, a researcharchaeologist at Monticello, used a GIS program to digitallyalign key points in the original “Indian Camp” map with currenttopographical data. Previous page: Morven ArchaeologicalSurvey team members at the site discussing their progress.Photo by Dan Addison/University of Virginia Public Affairs.

reference and file folder to the next atthe Albemarle Charlottesville HistoricalSociety, gathering sources and citations.When the 1,334-acre property was firstsubdivided from a larger land grant in1795, it was known as“Indian Camp”;it was later renamed“Morven”(Scottishfor“ridge of hills”) by its second owner,David Higginbotham.A few local his-tories suggested there had been a NativeAmerican settlement nearby, but nonegave specific information about its

location,nor did they provide landmarksor other features to identify it.

By early winter I had made someprogress with the project but headedhome to Southern California for theholidays. I was still intrigued by thename “Indian Camp” when Gamagetelephoned with an unexpectedassignment. With the help of a localresearcher, Christopher Owens, shehad come across a copy of a map of“Indian Camp” that was reproduced

in Frederick Doveton Nichols’s 1988book Thomas Jefferson’s ArchitecturalDrawings. It appeared to have beencreated as a survey when the propertywas sold in 1796 to diplomat WilliamShort, with his friend and mentorThomas Jefferson serving as the realestate broker. The original map waspart of The Huntington’s collections,and Gamage asked me to obtain anarchival-quality reproduction to addto our reference materials. I shook my

Henry Huntington and the Brock Collection

Three years after establishing The Huntington, Henry E. Huntington purchased what was said to be the largest pri-vate collection ofVirginia manuscripts and printed material ever assembled.Amassed by historian Robert AlonzoBrock, who served as the secretary of theVirginia Historical Society from 1875 to 1892, it contains an estimated50,000 manuscripts and 800 manuscript volumes as well as an astonishingly broad range of materials, includingletters, books, government publications, Civil War documents, newspapers, and graphic materials—and somedocuments by Thomas Jefferson.After Brock’s death in 1914, the collection was not auctioned as expected, andits price was too high for theVirginia State Library or other Virginia collectors to acquire it.With Huntington’s1922 purchase, the collection remained intact. In 2002 The Huntington Library and the Library of Virginiaundertook a project to digitize the contents of the Brock collection,making this vast resource available on micro-film to researchers.

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head in disbelief. As anyone who hasspent time in Charlottesville will attest,sometimes it seems like everything leadsback to Mr. Jefferson.

Returning to Virginia for thespring semester, I enrolled in a researchseminar to assess all available informa-tion about the Morven property and tohelp identify options for its use by theUniversity ofVirginia Foundation.AsI got deeper into the project, I beganconsidering the property’s potential toyield archaeological information, some-thing that historic preservationistsponder when evaluating a site.Whilecomparing the Huntington map to a

current map, I had a presentiment—orpremonition—that the stream formerlycalled “Indian Camp Branch” mightbe historically significant. It was nownamed Slate Quarry Creek, and on myhunch I recommended that no devel-opment be proposed in its vicinity untilthis possibility could be investigated.But I also realized that the quizzicallooks I got from the other class mem-bers were justified. I needed somethingto go on.

I had no archaeological training,but on a cold, late winter afternoon afew weeks later I hiked down to thecreek and followed it across the prop-

erty—in some cases climbing overfences and scrambling from bank tobank bypassing dense undergrowth.At the point where the creek takes analmost 90-degree turn to the east, I hada strong sensation of place as I lookedup to where the fields climb to a lowridge above the stream. On that day, Idid not know this was the point wherethe stream had met the old road that ledfrom an intersection near Monticelloto Carter’s Bridge.But I could tell thatsomething had been there.

Back at Morven’s “Claim House,”I gathered around a table with otherproject staff members and several fac-

As pairs of students dug the earth from theone-foot-diameter test pits, they rubbed thedirt and mud through framed screens tocapture possible artifacts.

Among the field school students who began Phase Iof the survey were Rebecca Schumann and AshleyIntemann (with shovel); and Chance Hamro andBeth Bollwerk (in hat). In July 2009, the universitygranted further funding for the completion of thepreliminary survey and the cataloging of artifacts.In the winter of 2010, Rivanna ArchaeologicalServices in Charlottesville continued the work underthe supervision of Steve Thompson and Ben Ford,both graduates of the archaeological doctoralprogram at the University of Virginia. Opposite: Astudent inspects sherds of Indian pottery found inone of the test pits. Inset: Another find was a two-inch-long arrowhead, which Indians used for cut-ting and scraping or as a spear point for huntingor defensive purposes. Photos by Dan Addison/University of Virginia Public Affairs.

ulty members who were more familiarwith the area and could interpret morefrom the map.Anthropology professorJeffrey Hantman had been working overthe course of eight years on archaeo-logical investigations in Charlottesvillenear the “Indian mounds” beside theRivanna River that are described inThomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State ofVirginia (1785). An expert in the his-tory of the Monacan Indian tribe, hehad been interested in following up onlocal lore that there had been an Indiansettlement in the vicinity of the estateformerly called “Indian Camp.”As thedirector of archaeology at Monticello,Fraser Neiman was also interested inthe possibilities of the Morven site.Overthe last decade,Monticello archaeolo-gists have teamed with specialists inpaleoethnobotany, geology, and forestecology to unravel the settlement andenvironmental history of Jefferson’sMonticello plantation tract from thetime of its initial settlement by Euro-peans and enslavedAfricans in the early18th century to the present.To Neiman,Morven seemed like an ideal compar-ative case study.

We excitedly compared The Hunt-ington’s“Indian Camp”survey map withcurrent topographical maps.Hantmannoted the size and placement of theagricultural fields shown near the water-ways, including Indian Camp Branch.They were consistent with the 18th-century pattern elsewhere of whitesettlers planting in the same fields thathad been cultivated earlier by NativeAmericans. Morven’s fields offered arare opportunity for Hantman,becausethey had been relatively undisturbedsince the colonial era.An archaeolog-ical dig on the site might yield richevidence that would show the varioususes of the land—first by Indians andthen by white settlers—in theVirginiaPiedmont, far from the usual Indiansites along larger rivers.

After a follow-up meeting, I escort-ed the group down to the Indian CampBranch stream, beginning at a springsome distance above the stream’s sharpturn. It had recently rained, and as wewere walking through the farm fields,Hantman picked up a piece of quartzalong the muddy path. It was an Indianscraper tool, characteristic of theMonacan settlement he had studiedalong the Rivanna River but not pre-viously documented in this part of theSouthwest Mountains. We knew wewere indeed onto something, and thegroup agreed to do a reconnaissancearchaeological survey to determine thesite’s significance.

With the archival scan of the mapfromThe Huntington,we were able toread for the first time Jefferson’s hand-written notes, indicating the names offarmers and sizes of their fields at the“Indian Camp” estate. I recently hadfound corresponding references to thetenants who rented these fields in ThePapers ofThomas Jefferson at Monticello’sJefferson Library, and together theyoffered a more accurate picture ofwhich areas of the property werebeing cultivated, and whether its agri-cultural products at the turn of the19th century reflected a Jeffersoniansystem of crop rotation.

Meanwhile in the Monticelloarchaeology lab, Derek Wheeler, aresearch archaeologist, used a GISprogram to digitally align key pointsshown in the 1795“Indian Camp”mapwith current topographical data.Thankswith the 200-year-old map from TheHuntington, researchers now had thelandmarks and points of reference thathad been lacking in local histories.Theso-called Indian Camp map was nowNeiman and Hantman’s digitized basemap for Phase I of the archaeological

survey; the new map of the 200-acresurvey area was overlaid with a grid oftargeted excavation locations usingequipment and field-recording proto-cols developed at Monticello.

Beginning in May, the digging wasundertaken by students participatingin summer field schools from theUniversity of Virginia and Washingtonand Lee University.They were guidedby Alison Bell, a colleague of Neiman’sat Washington and Lee University;Wheeler; and Elizabeth Bollwerk,a doc-toral student working with Hantman.Wheeler used portable GPS surveyingequipment to position marker flags thatcorresponded to the digital map’s grid.These markers served as a guide for the“shovel test pit” locations—regularlyspaced sample areas (in this case, every80 feet) in which field workers couldconduct a preliminary assessment of thesoil layers.

Whether in the humid heat of aSouthern summer or during soggy inter-vals of rain, two things were constant:insects and mud.As pairs of students dugthe earth from the one-foot-diametertest pits, they rubbed the dirt and mudthrough framed screens to capture pos-

sible artifacts. After reaching the levelof undisturbed soil, which varied be-tween one and three feet below thesurface, the students measured and re-corded the characteristics of each loca-tion before replacing the dirt and mov-ing on to the next marker. By the endof each day, everyone was smudged,anointed, and imbued with the orange-tinged mud.

As often is the case with research,what we found was different from our

expectations. Instead of a density ofdomestic artifacts that would confirmthe location of an Indian village, thelighter concentration suggested arepeated seasonal use of the site,perhapsas a hunting camp. And rather thanartifacts from the period shortly beforeEuropean contact, recovered itemsincluded a lanceolate quartz Guilfordprojectile point from the Late Archaicperiod—about 2,000 B.C. Hantmandescribed it as a multipurpose, bi-faced

A Society to Our Taste

In the late 1780s, after his wife’s death,Thomas Jefferson urged JamesMadison, James Monroe, andWilliam Short to buy land near his belovedMonticello and settle there to form“a society to our taste.” Jefferson hadmet Short, a distant relation, while he was studying law at the Collegeof William and Mary with Jefferson’s mentor, George Wythe, and heasked Short to serve as his secretary when he was appointed the nation’ssecond minister plenipotentiary to France. Jefferson referred to him ashis “adoptive son.” After Jefferson’s return to the United States, Shortremained in Europe, serving as the next American ambassador to Franceand subsequently as the ambassador to The Netherlands and to Spain. Itwas thus in 1795 that Jefferson wrote to Short about “a tract calledIndian camp” near Monticello that had recently been surveyed, andwhich Jefferson was purchasing on Short’s behalf.

Laura Voisin George, the author of the article, with Jeffrey Hantman.

tool that could be used for cutting andscraping tasks or as a spear point forhunting or defensive purposes.

In addition to these prehistoricNative American artifacts, the Phase Isurvey made some other importantdiscoveries related to later land use.These included the foundations of abuilding and fragments of householditems from Jefferson’s era as well asevidence of changing methods of agri-cultural production.While such findingsprovide a greater context for under-standing Jefferson’s agrarian experi-ments, they go a long way towardilluminating the little-documented lives

of the“middling folks”who rented thefields and their role in the rapidly evolv-ing western frontier.Alison Bell—oneof the organizers of the summer digin 2009—had written her dissertationon the subject under the guidance ofJames Deetz and Hantman and is nowparticipating in the analysis of theevidence found at Morven.

I was indeed a long way fromPasadena. While starting to build aframework of the history of this partof the Virginia Piedmont, I had beenchallenged to recognize scattered ref-erences in a variety of archival sourcesand to align them with present-day data.What moved this collection of data intothe archaeological survey was the Hunt-ington survey map of Indian Camp—itself separated from its original context.

Gamage nicknamed me the “birddog.” I’m not always sure what theseSoutherners mean, but I take it asan accolade for the presentiments ofthis Californian abroad in the OldDominion—Virginia Jones, if you will.

It is rather amazing that I ended upclose to home after all,with a centuries-old link to The Huntington, but as Isaid, sometimes it seems like every-thing in Charlottesville leads back toMr. Jefferson. �

Laura Voisin George completed her mas-ter’s degree in architectural history at theUniversity of Virginia in May 2010. Sheis now the director of research for Morven.

Sometimes it seemslike everything leadsback to Mr. Jefferson.

Layers of Meaning

In 1798,Thomas Jefferson receivedwhat Annette Gordon-Reed calls“one of the most extraordinaryletters in all of his correspon-dence—a bolt out of the blue thatappears to have stunned him.”Thecorrespondent was the very sameWilliam Short whose property wasoutlined in the“Indian Camp”map.

Gordon-Reed, the author ofThe Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, received the PulitzerPrize in History in 2009 for what the award committee described as “apainstaking exploration of a sprawling multi-generation slave familythat casts provocative new light on the relationship between SallyHemings and her master,Thomas Jefferson.”

In February 1798,Short wrote to his mentor and openly addressed thebeauty that comes from the mixing of the races. Jefferson ignored Short’smusings in a reply, and the young protégé persisted with the issue in twosubsequent letters. Jefferson, explains Gordon-Reed in her book,“hadbeen checkmated.” If he challenged Short, he would be drawn into adebate that would reveal him to be a hypocrite. If he conceded,he wouldbe contradicting the firm position on race that he had already outlinedin his Notes on the State of Virginia while, according to Gordon-Reed,“leaving for posterity a Rosetta stone that might help crack the code ofa part of his life that he wanted to remain totally private.”

Instead, Jefferson changed the subject, admitting he had mismanagedone of Short’s accounts and now owed his “adopted son” thousands ofdollars. Short never brought up the issue of race again.

-MS

Go to itunes.huntington.org to listen to Gordon-Reed’s recentHuntington lecture on “Writing the Life of an Enslaved Family.”

Thomas Jefferson, ca. 1791, oil on canvas, afterCharles Wilson Peale. The Huntington.

Annette Gordon-Reed on iTunes U