Make Way for Tomorrow
Black Homestead Artifacts Unearthed At Future Site of Intercounty Connector

By Mary Otto
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 24, 2008

In a few weeks, big machines will move into this patch of woods. The trees will be felled and the earth will be leveled for the intercounty connector, an 18.8-mile toll road that will link Interstate 270 in Montgomery County and the Interstate 95/Route 1 corridor in Prince George's County.

But for a few final hours yesterday, under the trees off U.S. Route 29 in Silver Spring, researchers with gentle, knowing hands swept and screened the fragile remnants of lives lived more than a century ago. They gleaned what was left to gather from a 19th-century African American homestead that has been called one of the most intact archaeological sites in Maryland.

Descendants of Melinda Jackson, a freed slave, pondered the stone foundation of the home the family matriarch made for herself and her five children in the years after the Civil War. Jackson apparently bought the property in 1869 from a woman who once counted her as a slave.

"This is truly a humbling experience," said the Rev. Spencer E. Jackson, 61, pastor of the nearby Abyssinia Baptist Church and a great-great-grandson of Jackson. "To be able to endure slavery and survive and bring her children here, it took deep-rooted spirituality to find land to call her own."

The site of the home, which burned about 1917, remained untouched for more than 90 years, until a team of archaeologists working for the Maryland State Highway Administration located it during a 2003 study for the proposed highway.

"It's a rare opportunity for an archaeologist to work on a site that has not been pilfered, plowed or developed," said Julie Schablitsky, chief of cultural resources for the highway administration.

The researchers, who have been digging and sifting for two months, said they have recovered more than 100,000 artifacts, including bits of tableware, scissors, a thimble, eyeglass frames, a hook for buttoning shoes, an 1860 political badge depicting Abraham Lincoln, a religious medal and children's toys such as a jack and fragile pieces of the china head of an African American baby doll.

The property has also yielded a cache of ritual objects associated with African spirituality, including a large crystal that appears to have been placed in the foundation of the structure in keeping with a tradition intended to protect the home.

By delving into land and census records and other documents, the team concluded that Jackson had been a slave owned by Ann M. Downs and that, after the Civil War, Jackson purchased the 8 3/4 -acre site, and possibly the small house, from Downs. Records also enabled researchers to trace living descendants of Jackson, members of a large and vital family that includes ministers, government workers and businesspeople who live in the area.

Schablitsky described the experience of touching the household items as "very, very magical."

"It's a way to time-travel," she said. But the most profound experience, she said, was meeting the descendants, "to be able to look into the eyes of the great-great-grandchildren of the people you are studying."

One of them, Francis Jackson Thornton Jr. , a minister and a corporal with the Montgomery County Department of Homeland Security, called the opportunity to stand at the old homestead "a blessing."

"I thank God for the archaeologists," he said, adding that if they had not taken the time to examine the site, it would have been paved over, gone without a trace.

He would have missed this chance to visualize his great-great-grandmother living here, praying for her family, "for descendants she had never seen." For him.

"This shows you aren't here by mistake," he said. "That you aren't just passing through, That you have a purpose on this planet."

The intercounty connector project is advancing, despite five decades of debate and delay, and ongoing appeals by opponents who are fighting the project on environmental grounds. Advocates say the road is vital to the state's economy.

Officials say it would not be feasible to save what is left of the Jackson homestead site after the researchers finish their work. The U.S. Route 29 interchange for the highway is due to be constructed on the property.

"This site will definitely be paved over," Schablitsky said. It is not the only archaeological site that lies in the path of the six-lane road. In November, she and other researchers conducted a tour of an area off Georgia Avenue where Native Americans gathered quartz and made tools 5,000 years ago. The researchers say what is important about such sites is the information they contain.

The artifacts from the Jackson homestead will be processed, analyzed and conserved. Highway administration archaeologists will be compiling the data from the site for a paper to be presented at a 2009 historical archaeology conference in Toronto. Displays at schools and local museums are also planned. Eventually, the artifact collection will be placed at the Jefferson Patterson Museum in Southern Maryland, the state repository for all artifacts.

Seated under the trees yesterday, Spencer Jackson declined to comment on the paving of the site, but said, wistfully, that it might be good to at least mark the spot. As he and other descendants prepared to leave, researchers offered them smooth river stones from the foundation of Jackson's house to take home with them.

Bonita Lee Bishop, 44, of Bowie, a great-great-great-granddaughter, chose a heavy stone that seemed to bear iridescent scars from the fire. Holding the stone, she said she was very grateful to have been to visit the homestead.

"It's wonderful," she said, looking around her in the woods, "to know you are from here."