Carter's Grove Plantation Quarter (44JC110)
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Block 50
Site History
The enslaved quarters at Carter’s Grove Plantation (44JC110), occupied in the last quarter of the 18th century, was home to around 10 to 15 working adults and children working for Nathaniel Burwell II. The two-story brick mansion at Carter's Grove was built in the 1750s by Carter Burwell. The vast estate included numerous outbuildings, terraced gardens, and sweeping fields for the cultivation of tobacco, corn and wheat.
Archaeological Investigations
The quarter complex, which stood adjacent to a ravine northwest of the brick mansion, was excavated under the direction of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation archaeologist William Kelso in 1970. Excavation at the site revealed a series of features including fencelines, ditches, and a series of subfloor pits denoting the location of three separate quarter structures. No subsurface structural traces of these buildings, like postholes, sill trenches, or chimneys, remained at the site—likely lost to agricultural plowing after the quarters had disappeared.
Given the nature of the archaeological evidence, these buildings had likely been ground-sill log or frame construction with earthen floors, or the buildings had rested on shallow brick or log piers that had been removed or destroyed. The high numbers of nails recovered from the fill of the 16 subfloor pits at the site suggested that the buildings were of frame, rather than log, construction.
The arrangement of subfloor pits under the floor of the northern structure in the quarter indicated building dimensions of at least 42 × 20 ft. with a central chimney opening into each of two rooms. Two subfloor pits lined with wooden boxes suggested a second structure, a duplex built to house two families. A lone subfloor pit located east of the other two structures may have served a small, single-family structure. A fenced enclosure at the eastern end of the duplex structure helped form a courtyard between the larger quarter and the duplex.
References
2007 Subfloor Pits and the Archaeology of Slavery in Colonial Virginia. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL.