CROWNSVILLE, MARLYAND—While looking for traces of French troops thought to have camped at Belvoir, an eighteenth-century plantation, during the Revolutionary War, archaeologists uncovered a 34-by-34-foot structure with a stone foundation and brick walls and floors that, according to the 1798 tax roll, housed slaves close to the brick plantation house. “There was a large front room with a kitchen hearth for cooking, meals, and socializing. In the rear were two rooms, perhaps with bunk beds in one and a family’s quarters in another,” Julie Schablitsky, chief archaeologist for the State Highway Administration, told The Capital Gazette. The large kitchen hearth, where meals may have been prepared for the plantation house, shared a chimney with two smaller hearths, one in each of the back rooms. Similar buildings have been found listed in historic documents, but this is the first time that a square, stone and brick structure has been unearthed in the Chesapeake. The tax roll also lists a log structure on the property that may have housed field laborers. To read more about the archaeology of slavery, go to "Free Before Emancipation."
