Archaeology at the Atkinson Site

The Polly Valentine House Site

In the late 1980s, a grant from AT&T allowed the careful study of the home owned in the early eighteenth century by gunsmith John Brush, and later owned by Thomas Everard, two-time mayor of the town, in the third quarter of the century. The grant was initially intended to provide the means to search for the homes and workspaces of some of Everard’s many slaves who worked and lived on his town property.

Although this goal was largely unfulfilled, due to the stratigraphic complexity of the lot (and the resulting mixing of the deposits generated by slave and non-slave activities, a common problem in urban archaeology), excavations on the Brush-Everard site revealed, unexpectedly, the home of a mid nineteenth-century slave family. While not a colonial-period structure, this is presently the only clearly-slave-related domestic space found in the Historic Area, and has become extremely important as archaeologists grapple with the problem of distinguishing slave and non-slave related deposits in urban areas.

Mid-nineteenth century slave house of Polly Valentine.

It appears that a pier-supported frame house stood on the property. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, owner of the nearby St. George Tucker House, southwest of the Brush-Everard House (and owner of part of what is now the Brush-Everard lot at that time), probably constructed the building during the 1840’s for his children “nanny”, a slave called Polly Valentine. Valentine and her family lived in this house until the outbreak of the Civil War.


	Artifacts from the Polly Valentine site.

Archaeological excavations on the Brush-Everard property in 1967 by Ivor Noël Hume were the first to find the 15 by 25 foot house, which had a substantial brick hearth and rested on brick and stone piers. Remnants of five piers helped the archaeologists to calculate the dimensions of the house. The site was re-excavated during the summers of 1987-89, and firmly associated with the Valentine family. The data from the excavations and the documentary evidence from the Tucker family papers provided important information on the material life and social relations of slaves in the nineteenth century.

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