Steve Embrey Site (18CV524)

The Steve Embrey site (18CV524) is a multi-component site located on the grounds of Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum (JPPM) in St. Leonard, Maryland. The site components consist of a late 19th- to early 20th-century house and a handmade brick clamp whose age is unknown. The site is located along the south side of the JPPM entrance road and is situated on a flat area at the top of a gentle slope, at the head of a ravine that runs south to Mackall Cove on St. Leonard Creek.

The property on which the site is located was purchased in 1834 by Captain John Peterson and inherited by his son, George W. Peterson (1815-1870) when his father died in 1849. The Peterson family continued to own the property at Peterson’s Point for four generations, until it was purchased by Jefferson Patterson in 1932 for the creation of his Point Farm estate.

The residents of the site are not known, although they were likely to have been African American tenant farmers, possibly once formerly enslaved on the Peterson plantation. The 1850 slave schedule lists George Peterson as owning sixteen enslaved persons, listed only by age and gender. Research has tentatively identified five of these individuals, including Sukeek, her daughter and granddaughter Rebecca and Jane, Jesse Coats and William B. Jones (Uunila 2002). It was common for emancipated individuals to remain as workers on the estates where they were formerly enslaved, often even residing in the same homes they lived in before the Civil War. Minnie Octavia Gross Brown, born in 1919, recounted how she and her siblings, as well as her mother all worked for the Petersons, and later the Pattersons. Jane Dawkins, Minnie Brown’s grandmother, was listed in the Federal Census as a farm laborer in 1880, working for the Peterson family upon whose property she resided.

By the end of the Civil War, African Americans made up 62 percent of Calvert County's population, working in tobacco, in oyster canneries, as watermen, and in the shipbuilding industry. Wallville, shown on late 19th- and early 20th-century topographic maps as the area extending on either side of Mackall Road from Lloyd Bowen Road towards Peterson’s Point, was one rural county community that was home to a number of African American families in this period.

The house that stood at the Steve Embrey site was the northernmost building in a line of seven structures running parallel with Mackall Road on the north side of St. Leonard Creek and shown on the 1901 USGS map. None of these seven structures appear on the 1892 topographic map, so it is likely that the seven homes were built between 1892 and 1901.

The site has two distinct components—a late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century house and a brick clamp of indeterminate age. Although directly adjacent to one another, these two components do not overlap in space, nor do the artifact assemblages share any resemblance to one another. The stone foundation of a small structure measuring around 20 feet square was visible above the ground surface. Brick rubble and brick wasters are abundant in the area of the clamp. Archaeologists at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory worked with students from the Huntingtown High School Archaeology Club in 2015 and in 2017 to record and test the site. In 2015, a limited, non-systematic surface collection of the site was done. The site was selectively cleared of ground cover, revealing the foundation remains more clearly, as well as yard midden. Each artifact was mapped in place, assigned north and east coordinates and collected. In 2017, eight shovel test pits were excavated at 8-meter intervals across the site. Testing revealed unplowed topsoil averaging 5 to 8 inches thick, overlying sandy clay subsoil.

Domestic artifacts, with bottle glass being the most common, concentrated in the area south and east of the foundation remains. The majority of the artifacts collected from the surface were glass and oyster shell. A total of 77 artifacts were surface collected and two surface finds were left in the field. Artifacts were recovered in all but one of the eight shovel test pits; these included ceramics, bottle glass, nails, oyster shell and bricks. A total of 101 artifacts were found in shovel tests.

The presence of brick fragments on the ground surface southwest of the stone foundation and in a slightly depressed rectangular area was noted in 2015. In 2017, several shovel test pits were placed in the depression and revealed layers of brick rubble/wasters, charcoal and burnt soil, confirming that this location had once served as a brick clamp. A total of 180 artifacts were recovered during the shovel testing and surface collection at the site (not counting the large quantities of highly fragmented brick from the clamp shovel tests). In general, the assemblage dated from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries and appeared to date to the occupation of the house, rather than the use of the brick clamp.

The age of the site’s clamp is uncertain, since no datable artifacts were discovered during shovel testing there (with the exception of one white clay tobacco pipe bowl fragment found in the area), nor is it known where the brick produced there was used. Presumably the clamp pre-dates the Embrey site house, as commercial, machine-made brick production was predominant in the years when that structure was occupied and its foundation was constructed with local stone. The clamp was located on the 19th/early 20th-century Peterson Farm. The Petersons built a house on the hill overlooking the mouth of St. Leonard Creek. Perhaps the clamp is associated with the 1830s Peterson House, although the clamp and the house were roughly 0.5 miles apart. After the original Peterson House burned in 1904, the family constructed a new house on the same site. It is not known how much brick was used in either of the Peterson houses, although it is likely that at least the foundation and chimneys would have been built of brick.

(From Samford and Chaney 2020)