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 dont like colored people. Some of the kids at our school dont like white people either. I think its 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 barrymans 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 cspan3. 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. Shes 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. Were here to do laser scanning and documentation of a slave house that is here. This is part of an independent project i am doing thats 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. Its 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, thats 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 dont 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, its 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. Ive been focusing on virginia the last couple of years. I found this place through a coworker and mentor of mine, who has originally he worked in williamsburg and did documentation there and now hes an architectural historian and now works for a private architectural firm, practice, but he knew about the site and told me that its one that he knew that i would want to check out. Hes 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 subfloor pit. A subfloor 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. Theres 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, were also going to open the pit, to protect it, protect the pit, the floorboards were nailed closed to keep things out of it. Were going to open it to look at it and also to scan it. I think thats original. That framing is . Huh. How can you tell . The fact that the saw marks on this framing go straight up and down. Thats a reciprocal waterdriven 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 dont 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 buildings on piers and raised off the ground on the when you look to the edges, theres stone, so you can see that its lined with step on the outside of it. So its protected from the outside. I cant 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, its pine. It has texture, it has wear. Its got wear, a lot of wear up by the hearth. That has a lot more wear. Yeah. Its the same on the other side. Uhhuh. This looks like it might be the original floor, yes. What would be in there . Im guessing primarily like a root cellar. Food items. It would be a cooler space, but also maybe personal items that they would have had. Its hard to say. Hard to say without doing archeology. Thats when its 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 theyre 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 shes 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 theyre not on the landscape anymore, so to be able to be at one thats still standing, be at a slave cabin thats still standing, its a different experience. We wanted to be here today for that. When you reflect on what youve seen, what are your thoughts . Its a good question. Its really humbling to be in these spaces of these people that were slaves. They were here living and working, didnt get a break. They werent paid for their services but they still eked out and existence to navigate through those spaces in the 21st century, its humbling. I think i get a better sense of what the room would have felt like. Obviously, theres nothing in it today. To feel this space and walk through it gives me a better idea what it was were looking for not on the landscape any more. I think its important to come to these plantations and record whats here because one day this building may not be here. Its important to record our past and know what it is that makes us who we are today as a nation and as a people. Its 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 its 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 ive already checked it for the building, and then ive created a Digital Survey form, like an Architectural Survey form, that has the information im 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 ive put in comes up for that point. This project started as part of masters thesis project. Im a licensed architect, and i went back to school to get my masters 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 masters degree and when i was in school for my masters 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 masters 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 its amazing. Like thats 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 im 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, im 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 didnt stop. I just kept going. And knowing that, one, i really enjoyed it, because seeing these spaces in person is just its not the same as seeing the pictures, although the documentation is amazing, and the photographs are amazing, but its just completely different to actually visit these structures and stand inside the space. And so i just kept doing the field work, because its exciting, i enjoy it, and it also answers a lot of questions for me and others, like how many of these buildings still exist. Thats 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, im 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 theres only this many left. So, thats what im working on, and yes, so, to fund this, its its 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, theyre just smaller ones, but i can make a small grant go a long way. Well put this back. One more. 37. Oh, 3 . Okay. Well, so, this plant type is called a saddle bag plan or saddle bag partition wall so theres 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 backtoback chimney fireplace. And so thats the plan type. So this room that were 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 theres a subfloor 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 youre 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 im guessing thats original. Probably the pots are wouldnt surprise me if theyre probably origin oal too. Or at least fairly old. But yeah, the crane is, because thats 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 werent living up there. They were living up there, which is why its theres 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, theres 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 theres 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, its hard to i cant say what was being cooked or how often and exactly how much you needed to be cooking at one time, but im 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, theres no way i could do survey work on my own. So thats why im 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 cant hold the end of one tape measure and walk the other, so i use a laser measurer to measure things. So now, im taking some measurements of the room and the doors and the windows. I just finished measuring the fireplace. And ill 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 thats part of my Digital Survey form that i have thats linked to the gis coordinates. So again, when i map it, all this comes up. Im richard. I work at turnbull as a market manager, and ive been involved in the atlantic slave trade project, which is a philanthropic project that turnbulls 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, were 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 Sketchup 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 President s is very passionate about africa, and hes