Rich Neck Slave Quarter
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| Soil from one of the main root cellars at Rich Neck is collected for further processing by staff archaeologist Anna Agbe-Davies. |
Excavations in 1994 and 1995 on lands formerly part of the Rich Neck plantation, now part of the Holly Hills housing development, about one mile west of Williamsburg’s historic core, uncovered the remains of this eighteenth-century slave quarter, occupied by slaves owned by the Ludwell family.
The investigation of the slave quarter was carried out concurrently with extensive excavations of the nearby plantation manor house and outbuildings, resulting in a remarkable portrait of life on a major plantation very near the colony’s capital, owned by one of the wealthiest and most influential families in Virginia.
Subfloor rectangular features (commonly known as root cellars), a brick hearth, and postholes marked the site of the slave cabin. Artifacts found during excavation of the site include coins, buttons, ceramics of both imported and local varieties; fragments of glass including table, pharmaceutical, and window materials; dietary animal bones, and seeds indicating that enslaved people at Rich Neck used both wild and cultivated plants.
The quarter may have been constructed as early as the 1740s. The most recent material dates to the 1770s, indicating that the building was abandoned sometime around the Revolution. The papers of the Ludwell family point to twenty-one slaves living at Rich Neck during the 1760s.
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| The remains of pewter spoons, clay tobacco pipes, and a shell from the Rich Neck Slave Quarter site. These artifacts have been variously modified for specific, but as-yet unidentified, purposes. |
This site has facilitated the training of African-American interpreters at Colonial Williamsburg, other staff, students, and members of the public. It provides extensive data on a section of the Williamsburg slave community in the eighteenth century, and the research on this site is further linked to a broader biographical study of the eighteenth-century Williamsburg African-American community.
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