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MARYLAND: In the country's last surviving 18th-century greenhouse, on an Eastern Shore estate where statesman Frederick Douglass lived as a child ("A Community's Roots," November/December 2006), archaeologists have unearthed African spiritual caches. A pestle secreted between furnace bricks (based on a West African Yoruba practice) and charms such as coins and arrowheads buried near a door are tangible evidence of the role skilled African-American slaves took in the construction and operation of the greenhouse, where experiments were conducted in the cultivation of exotic plants.
