rulers. >> sunday at 4:00 p.m., on reel america, the 1956 film, "a city decides" about the historic supreme court decision, brown v. board of education. >> delegates from all the high schools in st. louis. >> well, all i know is at our school, there are some kids who just don't like colored people. >> some of the kids at our school don't like white people either. >> i think it's the individual that counts. how are you going to get to know a person unless you meet them. >> when the supreme court ruled that segregation was illegal, these children were ready. >> and at 6:00 p.m., on "american artifacts," we look at a selection of clifford barryman's popular political cartoons for the early 20th century. >> and clifford barryman continued to draw for the washington evening star for the next 42 years. his cartoons appeared almost daily, usually on the front page of the paper, very prominently placed, and he had quite an ill lustrous career. >> watch american history tv every weekend on c-span3. >> since 2011, architect and historic preservationist jobie hill has been visiting and compiling a database of former slave dwellings in the united states. her interdisciplinary work includes architectural documentation, photography, interpretation, and preservation of slave history. up next, on "american artifacts," we travel to southern virginia near the north carolina border to visit the former brandon plantation with jobie hill and learn about her saving slave houses project. she's joined by several archaeologists and preservationists and a team from trumpab tremble incorporated who came along to document the plantation with a series of 3d laser scans. >> we're here to do laser scanning and documentation of a slave house that is here. this is part of an independent project i am doing that's called saving slave houses, which is a database of all the known slave houses in the united states. it is a staffing central depository of information and documentation of slave houses in the united states, and i have partnered with turnbull, which is the company that makes the survey equipment that i use, to do kind of the highest level documentation that is available to us today, which is 3d laser scanning. it's important to do this because one documentation is a type of preservation. slave houses are buildings that are disappearing from the landscape, so by documenting them, that's one way of preserving them. documenting them and through my database is also a way to share information and get it out there and learn from them. so this is a way for people to learn about these buildings and study them. make them available to a wider audience without having to necessarily come out to the sites because a lot of these sites are hard to get to and a lot are privately owned, so, you know, property owners don't necessarily want people constantly coming out to their sites to look at these structures. but the property owners have been very helpful wanting to work with me. at the same time, it's easier to have something available online somewhere you can get to. in total i have done survey work at about 150 sites and 120 to 30 have been in virginia. i've been focusing on virginia the last couple of years. i found this place through a co-worker and mentor of mine, who has -- originally he worked in williamsburg and did documentation there and now he's an architectural historian and now works for a private architectural firm, practice, but he knew about the site and told me that it's one that he knew that i would want to check out. >> he's here today. could you tell us what the two of you are going to do? >> yes. his name is mark wenger. this site is special because it has a sub-floor pit. a sub-floor pit is a hole in the ground. you find them in enslaved places. they are in front of the fire place or hearth. they were used both as root cellars and also storage and personal items enslaved people may have had. they range in size and shape. there's a wide variety of them. some are wood lined and some are brick lined. some are holes, just dirt. this one is special because this building is stone lined and part of it is above the ground because the building is raised on piers. today, in addition to 3d laser scanning, we're also going to open the pit, to protect it, protect the pit, the floorboards were nailed closed to keep things out of it. we're going to open it to look at it and also to scan it. >> i think that's original. >> that framing is? >> huh. >> how can you tell? >> the fact that the saw marks on this framing go straight up and down. that's a reciprocal water-driven saw. that would sort of put it in the 19th century sometime. they start circular sawing lumber close to the middle of the 19th century and this was before that. >> it was build before that? >> yes. >> one thing i find interesting about these is that -- the opening is so large. like i mean, i don't know why you might necessarily need such a large opening. like this one looks like it was intentional and was constructed at the same time as the building was constructed, so when they built the floor, they framed out to have this hole. they knew that they wanted this hole, this opening in the floor, because they provided framing for it. and underneath of it, because the building's on piers and raised off the ground on the -- when you look to the edges, there's stone, so you can see that it's lined with step on the outside of it. so it's protected from the outside. i can't tell how deep it goes into the ground in relation to the grade outside. it looks like it goes into the ground a little bit. this is basically storage, i mean, a big hole used for storage of things. >> do you know where the kitchen would have been? >> no. unless they were using this space for the kitchen. >> so, mark, is this the original flooring? >> all that, all that nailing looks pretty convincing. this floor, it's pine. it has texture, it has wear. it's got wear, a lot of wear up by the hearth. >> that has a lot more wear. >> yeah. >> it's the same on the other side. >> uh-huh. this looks like it might be the original floor, yes. >> what would be in there? >> i'm guessing primarily like a root cellar. food items. it would be a cooler space, but also maybe personal items that they would have had. it's hard to say. hard to say without doing archeology. that's when it's important to do archeology in these spaces because then you have a much better understanding of what was in there. >> what kind of things had they found in these holes when they have done archeology? >> well, pass it to an archeologist. >> personal items, buttons, buckles, beads, fragments of ceramics. more refined. earthenwares. lots of evidence that they're keeping root vegetables in these root cellars. it really helps understand the daily lives of these people when you get chance to excavate these hidden spaces. >> my name is crystal paycheck. i run the field work at monticello, the archeological field work. >> why are you here today? >> jodi invited our department to come to the spaces she's surveying and we really wanted to come to experience this space, feel what these cabinets would have been like, to walk through, live in, walk up and down the steps. we often at monticello excavate a lot of these spaces once they're not on the landscape anymore, so to be able to be at one that's still standing, be at a slave cabin that's still standing, it's a different experience. we wanted to be here today for that. >> when you reflect on what you've seen, what are your thoughts? >> it's a good question. it's really humbling to be in these spaces of these people that were slaves. they were here living and working, didn't get a break. they weren't paid for their services but they still eked out and existence to navigate through those spaces in the 21st century, it's humbling. i think i get a better sense of what the room would have felt like. obviously, there's nothing in it today. to feel this space and walk through it gives me a better idea what it was we're looking for not on the landscape any more. i think it's important to come to these plantations and record what's here because one day this building may not be here. it's important to record our past and know what it is that makes us who we are today as a nation and as a people. it's important to remember these people that lived here, too, to be able to document their experience in the building in which they lived, to compare this building with what we had at montichello, get understanding across time and across space it really helps in -- inform archaeologists of o sites like brandon, can really help inform us at monticello and across the south and across the east coast. so i think it's important to document these spaces for sure. >> so this is the equipment i use from turnbull and this collects gps coordinates of a building, so i've already checked it for the building, and then i've created a digital survey form, like an architectural survey form, that has the information i'm interested in and i can fill it out and it links to that gps coordinate, so then when i map these points out where the buildings are, when you click on the point, all this information i've put in comes up for that point. this project started as part of master's thesis project. i'm a licensed architect, and i went back to school to get my master's degree in historic preservation after having been out in the real world practicing for a while, i realized that the type of architecture i wanted to do was historic preservation so i went back to school to get my master's degree and when i was in school for my master's thesis, i started doing research with the historic american building survey collection, which is a wpa program that started in 1936 to get architects back to work, and so 1,000 architects were hired to go out and document significant historic structures all across the united states. and part of that documentation was slave houses. not necessarily intentionally, but they did document slave houses, and sometimes -- a lot of times, it was just you got like one photograph or you would see that a slave house in the background of a picture behind the main house. and so, for that, for my master's thesis, i looked at that collection and identified all of the sites that had a slave house in them so the historic building survey has 48 -- 485 sites that have a documented slave house and i looked at the wpa slave narratives that were done at the same time in the 1930s, just kind of hoping that there would be some relationship between the two. although there was no coordination between the two projects, because the slave narratives were to get writers back to work and the architects were doing their own thing. but in my mind, it was like, well, there had to have been some overlap, just kind of by chance. so i also did research with the slave narratives, and so there are about 3,500 slave narratives, and i went through all of those and identified the ones that described their house during slavery, and so there are 1,010 slave narratives that describe their house during slavery. and i went through those, and of those and of the 485 documented slave houses, there are 5 that overlap. so you have five slave narratives that describe a specific house, documented slave house. so you have the actual words of the people living in these spaces, describing these spaces. which is just -- it's amazing. like that's the interpretation that we should be using when we interpret these spaces. and so, from that, that just, you know, i used the slave narratives to interpret and understand these spaces and to guide me to what should i be looking for in these spaces, and you know, what were they -- how were they using them and can i see any of that in these spaces now that i'm going back to look at. and my field work of going back and doing my own documentation of these buildings started when -- when i was working on my project in school, the -- i was a summer intern, a summer architect, because that helped with my research because i had access to their collection, but they asked me, how many of these have you seen? i was like, none. i was like, i'm in the archives doing research and they were like, well, you know, you should go out and see some of these. so when i was interning for the summer with them, we went out and saw some of them and so they helped me kind of get started and once i started going on visiting some of these, i just didn't stop. i just kept going. and knowing that, one, i really enjoyed it, because seeing these spaces in person is just -- it's not the same as seeing the pictures, although the documentation is amazing, and the photographs are amazing, but it's just completely different to actually visit these structures and stand inside the space. and so i just kept doing the field work, because it's exciting, i enjoy it, and it also answers a lot of questions for me and others, like how many of these buildings still exist. that's an open question. and in order to further the preservation of these buildings, we have to be able to answer those questions, to get support from others, you have to be able to answer how many are we looking at, how many are we dealing with. well, i'm trying to answer that question. how many are still out there or at least provide a case study of, so, in 1936, there were this many in the state, and now there's only this many left. so, that's what i'm working on, and yes, so, to fund this, it's -- it's funded by me, but i look for grants to do a lot of my survey work and things like that, grants that go to individuals and things like that. and usually, they're just smaller ones, but i can make a small grant go a long way. >> we'll put this back. one more. >> 3'7". >> oh, 3'? okay. >> well, so, this plant type is called a saddle bag plan or saddle bag partition wall so there's kind of two variations of a saddle bag, but primarily, it has a central chimney and then a room on either side and has a back-to-back chimney -- fireplace. and so that's the plan type. so this room that we're standing in right now, because of the size of the opening of the fireplace, and also the location to the main house and the fact that there's a sub-floor pit in the other side and may this side, we think this might have functioned as a kitchen, because the opening of the fireplace is larger on this side. but then that kind of made us question, why would a root cellul cellar be on the other side, but maybe because if this was primarily where there was a lot of cooking, then it would have been a lot hotter in this space, so if you're going to have a root cellar, the point is to keep things cool so they used the other space for the cooler side to have the root cellar and this is where a lot of the cooking may have taken place. >> how old do you think this pot is? >> that metal piece is a crane, but i'm guessing that's original. probably the pots are -- wouldn't surprise me if they're probably origin oal too. or at least fairly old. but yeah, the crane is, because that's just kind of part of the fireplace. >> and so, would people have lived in here? >> absolutely. >> and how would that work? where would they -- is the upstairs original and they would have slept up there? >> yeah. so, the upstairs is original. but there are not hearths in the upstairs. a lot of times, in the loft space, you do find hearths, fireplace openings, which is a definite indicator that people were living up there. but this one does not have that. but that does not mean they weren't living up there. they were living up there, which is why it's -- there's a partition wall up there and a door opening up there and a staircase, you know, an enclosed staircase leading up there. that was living space upstairs. you can never really tell for sure without documentation of exactly where people were sleeping or how many people were living in these spaces, but for kitchens, there's always -- those were always also living spaces, at least my understanding of them, because kitchens were always used and kind of just the -- what you kind of learn or hear from things is that once you lit the hearth in the kitchen, it never went out. like it just -- just because it took so long to light back then, the fireplace, and get it running and it took so long to do everything, that it was always running, you were always -- you always had to have hot water on whatever on hand that someone had to be there to watch that fire and also just from the slave narratives, they always talk about if they were the cook or their mother was the cook, they always say, we lived in the kitchen. like my mother lived in the kitchen and she was the cook, and so there's also evidence in the narratives that support that kitchens were also living spaces. >> and the other room over there? >> without knowing exactly how many people were being fed out of this kitchen, it's hard to -- i can't say what was being cooked or how often and exactly how much you needed to be cooking at one time, but i'm guessing that that was also probably just like a secondary kitchen or cooking space for them. without all the modern technology that we have today, there's no way i could do survey work on my own. so that's why i'm very thankful that we have all of this and that i have access to it, because otherwise, even just the digital measuring device that i use, i can't hold the end of one tape measure and walk the other, so i use a laser measurer to measure things. so now, i'm taking some measurements of the room and the doors and the windows. i just finished measuring the fireplace. and i'll do this for each of the different spaces in this building. and also, i took an overall dimension of the building too. and then this -- and that's part of my digital survey form that i have that's linked to the gis coordinates. so again, when i map it, all this comes up. >> i'm richard. i work at turnbull as a market manager, and i've been involved in the atlantic slave trade project, which is a philanthropic project that turnbull's become working on for three or four years now and as part of that project, jobie has asked us to help her document some of the slave houses in virginia area. so, with this particular house, we're trying to capture laser scans of the entire exterior and interior of the house and when we laser scan, we run our scanner on a tripod and then replace it with panoramic camera that can take panoramic slr images and the -- we can map the color from those images on to the laser scan. and that provides a point cloud of three dimensional point cloud from which we can pull models using our sketch-up software or we can use our other software packages to pull measurements and other kinds of useful information out of it. >> how did trimple get involved in doing this project? >> one of the vice presidents is very passionate about africa, and he's spent many years there. and as part of that, he has the ability to kind of help trimble choose which kind of philanthropic projects to do, and this was one that he was very passionate about. so we got together with an organization in the past who documents world heritage sites around the world, digitally, and started to work with them using our technology to document sites that were important to the atlantic slave trade. we've hit some sites in mississippi, south carolina, the virgin islands, we did a sugar factory down there. we will continue to do that. now, we're building a relationship with both educators and academics to continue the project and find some co-funding through different kinds of grants, working with the academic community. we have several historians who have been kind of tying in with us lately, including unesco. we've been talking to them about making sure we have ties with them to both help us get into different international locations but also to make sure that the projects we choose are of historical interest. now, in boulder valley school district in colorado, we've been working with the educators there to try to add some of this information into their curriculum, which they've successfully done last year. so, they have, as part of their curriculum now, some of the impact and education has managed to work with boulder valley to get this kind of material into their curriculum. >> take 29,000. >> back into the suv. spread out. >> hold on. >> what kind of crops? >> talking about the 19th century, probably tobacco at this point. that's certainly what it is now. and the tide water was big in the tobacco in the 18th century. i'm not so familiar with the agricultural history in this area in the antebellum period, but i would guess tobacco was the mainstay. but you'd also have grains, you know, wheat, and corn. those would probably be the three main crops. >> and how many -- is there any way to know how many slaves lived in here or how many they needed for that? >> i don't know. i'm not sure how many that would be. but you know, to have a house of that substance, you'd have to have quite a bit of acreage under cultivation to make that possible. so this was a substantial house for the period, even in the antebellum period, this was a pretty substantial place. >> so, i actually don't know as much about this plantation as i do other plantations, but i do know that -- so this is brandon plantation, which is the last name of the family that owned it. and even today, the current owner, she is part of the brandon family. her last name is also brandon. but there's other plantations with the same name. there's an upper brandon and a lower brandon plantation that are also nearby. and those plantations have been more heavily studied and documented than this one. this one has not been as heavily studied or documented. i don't necessarily know why that is the case. but that's also another reason why i think it's important to document this -- these structures is because it hasn't been as heavily studied so there isn't already existing documentation that's out there, so it's important that someone like myself come along and document it, because it doesn't exist yet. so that's why -- one of the reasons i'm excited about doing that today. i always have to kind of remind myself and others is that when you come back to sites, you always have to remember that you're missing a lot of the buildings. so, in order to paint a clear picture of what life was like, you have to be able to identify what buildings are missing. so, here, i mean, you usually always have like the main house, and here, we have the main house, this structure which was -- may have possibly been used as a kitchen, also living space for enslaved people, so like a kitchen quarter. we have a privy. we have a smoke house. we have a well. a smoke house and a well being next to a building, often next to a kitchen. there are certain buildings that are kind of clustered together because of their functions, so smoke houses, dairies, a source of water, you typically find next to a kitchen because kitchens rely on those things. kitchens are also usually close to the main house because they service the main house. at this site, also, now across the road, is our two tobacco barns that were also originally part of the original plantation, but look disconnected from it now. you know what i mean? so, you have to just kind of, in order to kind of get a good picture and understand how people would have been moving around the site, and where the farm, like where the -- the crops would have been, you have to know where all those kind of buildings would have been, and i just don't know where that would have been for this plantation. it's been divided, you know, this road's cutting through a lot of the spaces now, which we're definitely not there historically, so it's kind of hard to paint a good picture of what it would have been like, and i also don't know how many people were even here, either both at the main house or the enslaved community. so without knowing that, it's hard to be able to really say i can paint an accurate picture, because one of the questions that people always have is, when you're talking about slave houses, how many people lived here? that's what people always want to know, because a lot of times, you know, these spaces were more heavily populated than what we think of today for a traditional family of mother, father, and two to three children. that's not what it was like historically for either in slave families or slave-owning families. the families were just larger and they had more children. families were just bigger back then. so if it were a single family on multi-family housing, there were more people living in it. i just don't know exactly how many people were here. so it is hard to kind of paint that picture. >> the status of it now is? >> it's just stabilized but no one is living -- the main house is not used on a regular basis. it is used when the family comes out to do some hunt ng ting in area. no one is living in this structure. i don't know the last time people were living in the structure or using the structure. i am happy to say this structure is not being used for storage. a lot of places, the out buildings are used for storage, storage of furniture and big things that clutter the space. when that happens, that accelerates the detore yor racial of the space. when you have animals, that invites things in and luckily this is nice and cleaned out. you have cobwebs and other things like that. otherwise, it is in really good shape. that has really helped to preserve the building, the fact that there is no clutter in it. >> he so this is a long day's work. what would this look like as far as that goes? >> lots of photographs. in my book, i will have coordinates and there will be data that needs to be processed. then, it can then be kind of exported into different types of final products, the information i have and the information that tremble has compiled. that really just kind of buries in what we need and want. 3-d-models wi 3- 3-d models will be generated. these buildings and the people t that lived and worked in these buildings are a very important part of our history. it's important to tell their story truthfully. one way of doing that is the architecture. that's part of the material culture that still survives today that you can visit and you can experience. it is kind of a vehicle to tell their stories. so that's how i am using the architecture. it is also -- the work i'm doing is also important because when i started doing this research, i found that there is information both about the structures and these people but it is kind of everywhere. there are little bits everywhere. i have taken years to compile it and get it into one place and make it digital. it has taken me a long time to do this. i would like to share it with others. no everyone has to do the same thing i'm doing. it has taken me so long to do it, i want others to benefit from it and have access to it so they can move forward and do research with it. then they can produce meaningful research studies from it and not have to spend a lot of time compiling and doing the research that i am doing. although, i love it. i enjoy doing it. it does take a lot of time and energy to do. every site i go to, i learn something new. i have met a lot of great people doing it. visiting these structures and being inside of them is a lot different than seeing a picture for them. also, for the private properties that i'm going to, i've always discovered interesting things about the buildings but property owners are opening up to me and sharing things that they have with me. so, for example, i just went to a site and the man there has coverlets or blankets, two of them, from an enslaved woman. they are in really good condition. they are just amazing to see. so when i was there, he showed them to me. i never would have known about them unless i went out to the site and spent the time with the property owner. that's why he shared them with me. that's amazing. so to be able to see things like that that i never would have known about or seen, because if they are not in a museum, they are not anywhere that i would have known about publicly. they are just sitting in someone's private home. so that's truly amazing, that i'm getting to see things that private property owners have and are willing to share with me. >> you can learn more about jobi hill's project at her website, savi savingslavehouses.org. you can view this and all other programs at c-span.org/history. here is what's ahead. coming up next, a look at harriet tubman underground railroad visitors center and a program on the drafting of the u.s. constitution. later, the her bewe'll take you herbert hoover presidential library and museum. join us tonight for american history tv. we'll visit the herbert hoover presidential library and museum to review the american presidents like portraits exhibit and to see the presidential vehicles in michigan. american history tv begins at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span3. tonight, book tv is in prime time with a look at afterwards. the son of antonin scalia, christopher scalia, shares speeches by his father in his book "scalia speaks." and linda sarsor discusses her book, "together we rise." caylee mcinner ay is interviewe on her book "the new revolution" and the book "endurance" we review on cspan2. epa administrator scott pruitt and fox news host, janine pirro addresses the live political action conference. state governors from across the country are gathering here in washington, d.c. this weekend for their annual winter

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