Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club 
18 Talbot Lane, Easton, Maryland 
18TA439 
2013 
 
 
By 
Tracy H. Jenkins 
Department of Anthropology 
University of Maryland 
1111 Woods Hall 
College Park, MD 20742 
 
 
 
Principal Investigator 
Mark P. Leone 
Department of Anthropology 
University of Maryland 
College Park, MD 20742 
 
Report Prepared for 
Talbot County Women’s Club 
Historic Easton, Inc. 
 
Archaeology in Annapolis, a Cooperative Project between 
Historic Annapolis Foundation, The Banneker Douglass Museum and 
The University of Maryland at College Park  
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Abstract 
 
 The University of Maryland, College Park, Archaeology in Annapolis Project, conducted 
Phase I and II archaeological excavations of the Talbot County Women’s Club (TCWC) in 
Easton, Maryland, from July 8th through July 26th, 2013.  This site is located at 18 Talbot Lane.  
The Women’s Club granted permission for this excavation as a part of The Hill Community 
Project to document and publicize the history of the Easton neighborhood known as The Hill and 
of the community of free African Americans that coalesced around this neighborhood in the 
nineteenth century.  Following on the heels of the 2012 successful public excavation of the 
Home of the Family of the Buffalo Soldier (HFBS), this second public excavation within The 
Hill Community Project sought more information on early members of the free black community 
and on the material conditions of tenants living on The Hill in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and 
twentieth centuries.  It also continued archaeologists’ efforts at the HFBS to test the capability of 
archaeological sites of bringing together people of different backgrounds to forge a more open, 
civil discourse about the past.  To these ends, archaeologists conducted a shovel test pit (STP) 
survey of yard spaces at the Women’s Club and opened seven test units to further investigate 
activity areas and construction phases, while maintaining a public dig site. 
 While the HFBS excavation focused on African-American landowners from 1879 to 
2002, the Women’s Club excavation focuses on the non-landowners who lived here from the late 
eighteenth to early twentieth centuries in order to highlight the diversity of experiences among 
neighborhood residents through the years.  These residents included enslaved and free African 
Americans in the nineteenth century and tenants of unknown ethnic background in the late 
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Today, upwards of two thirds of the residents of The 
Hill rent their homes.  The high rate of tenancy has been identified as a major contributor toward 
the gentrification processes that currently threaten the integrity of the African American 
community by pushing black families from dilapidating homes and demolishing historic 
community and racial landmarks in attempts to remove blight from the neighborhood.  
Excavations at the Women’s Club therefore sought more information on the material conditions 
of tenancy and the ways in which community can exist even without home-ownership.  The most 
promising archaeological materials for addressing these questions at the Women’s Club are a 
nineteenth-century kitchen used by both enslaved and free cooks and a sheet midden created by 
the several families renting the property from 1891-1946. 
 
  
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Acknowledgements 
 
 This excavation is an outgrowth of community efforts to highlight and preserve their 
history and historic places and it is Archaeology in Annapolis’ privilege to be able to do research 
on The Hill in aid of these efforts.  It is unusual in archaeology that a local community initiates a 
research project and sets the direction of inquiry but it is something that we hope happens more 
often and our first responsibility in excavating on The Hill is to the residents and community 
members who live, work, and worship here, and to whom the history we write about really 
belongs.  We continue to work on The Hill at the invitation and at the pleasure of the residents 
and the African-American community in particular and we hope that the contents of this research 
report respect the trust that the community has put in us to help illuminate their rich heritage. 
 For the excavation described in this report, special thanks must go to the Talbot County 
Women’s Club, which graciously hosted our excavation in the summer of 2013.  The Women’s 
Club members have been active stewards of the history of their property for many decades and 
their actions have preserved much of the archaeological integrity of the site that made it possible 
to analyze the material remains in detail.  They also preserve and keep up the main house, the 
earliest part of which dates to the eighteenth century.  It was in large part the age and intactness 
of the site that attracted us to it as a place to do research on African Americans and tenants.  In 
1998, Club member Arianna Porter-King researched at length and wrote a pamphlet on the 
property history that has been instrumental to us in interpreting archaeological finds within a 
historical context.  Porter-King’s pamphlet provides the basis for much of the property history in 
chapter 3 of this report.  Current members of the Women’s Club also showed us images from a 
local newspaper that helped us to learn more about the changes to the site in the twentieth 
century.  This Star Democrat article illustrated the extensive efforts to which the Club went to 
restore and renovate the main house and enabled us to date the large feature in Unit 5.  Most of 
all, the Women’s Club has been patient with us as we worked to put their yard back in order after 
our excavations and as this report took far longer to write than we had anticipated.  I hope it is 
worth the wait. 
 Our first invitation to work on The Hill came from Historic Easton, Inc., which initiated, 
and remains one of several partners in, The Hill community Project.  Conversations with then-
President Carlene Phoenix and Treasurer Priscilla Morris helped to select the Women’s Club as 
the second site for archaeological excavation in the neighborhood.  Historic Easton provided 
major funding for this excavation from donor support and we have worked jointly to secure 
grants to support ongoing efforts to share the findings of this research with the public.  Our other 
partners on this project have been equally supportive of our work at the Women’s Club and 
across The Hill, just as we hope our work has been supportive of theirs.  Professor Dale Green of 
Morgan State University has led regular tours of the neighborhood’s historic sites for the past 
few years and during the excavation at the Women’s Club, his tours brought a large number of 
visitors to the site to enhance the public component of our research and education efforts.  
Although most of the property history was drawn from Arianna Porter-King’s work, land records 
researcher Cynthia Schmidt provided clarification and new information on the James Price 
household.  Nancy Robbins provided housing to co-site director Tracy Jenkins.  The Talbot 
County Office of Tourism gave us access to bathrooms and directed visitors to the site.  Many 
thanks to Tim Poly for use of his photographs.  So many people are involved in researching and 
preserving the cultural heritage of The Hill that it is impossible to thank them all.  The 
excavation at the Women’s Club was part of a much larger project and this report aims to move 
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research forward as well as making the finding so far available to all the scholars and community 
members who are interested in learning more about the neighborhood’s history.  
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Table of Contents 
 
Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………………….. 1 
 
Acknowledgments ……………………………………………………………………………….. 3 
 
Table of Contents ………………………………………………………………………………... 5 
 
Organization of This Report …………………………………………………………………….. 5 
 
List of Tables ……………………………………………………………………………………..7 
 
List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………………….8 
 
Chapter 1: Introduction …………………………………………………………………..…….....9 
 
Chapter 2: Research Design and Methodology …………………………………………………15 
 
Chapter 3: Cultural Context and Historical Background ………………………………………..21 
 
Chapter 4: Previous Archaeological Investigations and Significant Architectural Structures ….25 
 
Chapter 5: Archaeology and Interpretations …………………………………………………….29 
 
Chapter 6: Conclusions and Recommendations ………………………………………………...85 
 
References Cited ………………………………………………………………………………...89 
 
Appendixes ……………………………………………………………………………………...93 
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Organization of This Report 
 
This report contains the results of the Phase I and II Archaeological Investigation of the Talbot 
County Women’s Club. It is divided into the following sections: 
 
Chapter 1 of this report is an introduction to the archaeology conducted at the Women’s Club. 
Included within this chapter is a brief contextualization of the project, including dates of 
fieldwork, laboratory processing and analyses, as well as the identification of key project staff. 
Also included within this chapter is a detail of the project’s location and physiological 
description; as well as the organizational layout of this report. 
 
Chapter 2 of this report details the project’s research design and methods.  Included within this 
chapter are key research questions that guided fieldwork and laboratory analysis. In addition this 
chapter details methods employed during fieldwork, laboratory processing, and artifact analyses. 
 
Chapter 3 of this report details the cultural significance and connections of the Women’s Club 
and the property history, with a focus on contextualizing the site within the history of the 
neighborhood now known as The Hill and the African-American community centered on and 
around this neighborhood.  This chapter treats the significance of the site, and of the excavations 
there. 
 
Chapter 4 of this report details previous research conducted at the Women’s Club and its 
surrounding environs.  These include two previous excavations near the Women’s Club.  This 
chapter also describes the significant architectural resources at the site. 
 
Chapter 5 of this report details the archaeology conducted at the HFBS and the interpretations of 
these results.  This chapter is organized into two sections.  The first of these describes the units 
excavated, the data recovered, and the extent of archaeological resources at this site.  This 
section includes statistical summaries of artifacts found at different locations on-site.  The second 
section uses the chronology of site strata to tell the archaeological story of the Women’s Club 
property as it is currently understood. 
 
Chapter 6 of this report details management recommendations concerning the future of the site 
and the future of archaeology on The Hill. 
 
Appendixes: 
A Shovel Test Pit and Unit Summaries 
B Sample shovel test pit, level, and feature forms used during field and laboratory analysis. 
C Complete artifact Catalogue for the Talbot County Women’s Club. 
D Qualifications of the investigators involved in this excavation and analysis. 
E The text of four interpretive signs hung at the site. 
F A representative sample of press reports on this excavation.  
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List of Tables 
 
1. Levels and Features Dating to the Federal-Period Price-Household Occupation of 18 
Talbot Lane (ca. 1795-1815) ………………………………………………………………..41 
2. Artifacts from the Federal-Period Price-Household Occupation (ca. 1795-1815) ………….42 
3. Levels and Features Dating to the Early Antebellum-Period Price-Household Occupation  
of 18 Talbot Lane (ca. 1815-1840) ………………………………………………………….46 
4. Artifacts from the Early Antebellum-Period Price-Household Occupation (ca. 1815- 
1840)………………………………………………………………………………………....49 
5. Levels and Features Dating to the Mid Nineteenth-Century Price-Household Occupation  
of 18 Talbot Lane (ca. 1840-1869) ………………………………………………………….52 
6. Artifacts from the Mid Nineteenth-Century Price-Household Occupation (ca. 1840-1869) ..53 
7. Levels and Features Dating to the Late Nineteenth-Century Dawson-Household  
Occupation of 18 Talbot Lane (ca. 1869-1891) ……………………………………………..59 
8. Artifacts from the Late Nineteenth-Century Dawson-Household Occupation (ca. 1869- 
1891) ………………………………………………………………………………………...60 
9. Levels and Features Dating to the Wright Tenant Occupation of 18 Talbot Lane (ca.  
1891-1946) …………………………………………………………………………………..69 
10. Artifacts from the Wright Tenant Occupation (ca. 1891-1946) …………………………….74 
11. Levels and Features Dating to the Talbot County Women’s Club Occupation of 18 Talbot 
Lane (ca. 1946-2013) ………………………………………………………………………..78 
12. Artifacts from the Talbot County Women’s Club Occupation (ca. 1946-2013) ……………81 
 
List of Figures 
 
1. Location of the site within Maryland …………………………………………………………9 
2. The Easton neighborhood known as The Hill ……………………………………………….10 
3. Maryland Archaeological Research Units …………………………………………………..11 
4. Detail from USGS Easton 7.5’ Quadrangle …………………………………………………12 
5. Clip from an article about the restoration …………………………………………………...23 
6. Billy O’Donnell’s painting of the HFBS excavation ………………………………………..25 
7. Henry Chandlee Forman’s rendering of the Federal Period appearance of the  
Courthouse square …………………………………………………………………………...26 
8. Price double house …………………………………………………………………………..27 
9. Sitemap showing location on the block ……………………………………………………..30 
10. Sitemap showing unit labels ………………………………………………………………...31 
11. Distributions of several artifact types ……………………………………………………….32 
12. Detail of 1891 Sanborn ……………………………………………………………………...33 
13. Plan view of Unit 1, top of Level L1 ………………………………………………………..33 
14. Distributions of foodways-related artifact types ……………………………………………34 
15. Detail of 1901 Sanborn ……………………………………………………………………...34 
16. Map of the site showing the extent of the sheet midden and work area ……………………35 
17. Nail stock and slage from Unit 6, Level G ………………………………………………….40 
18. Gun flint from Unit 2, Level I ………………………………………………………………46 
19. 1794 U.S. Penny from Unit 1, Level H ……………………………………………………..57 
20. Intact booklet cover from Chichester’s English Pennyroyal Pills from the  
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Museum of Contraception and Abortion ……………………………………………………64 
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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 
 
 Staff of Archaeology in Annapolis conducted Phase I and II archaeological investigations 
of the Talbot County Women’s Club in order to get a broader look at life in an Easton, Maryland, 
neighborhood known as The Hill.  The Hill has been the geographic focus of a large African 
American community since the late eighteenth century and the investigations at the HFBS are 
part of a larger project to document and publicize this community’s heritage.  The first 
excavations on The Hill, at the Home of the Family of the Buffalo Soldier in 2012, indicated 
remarkable preservation of archaeological materials in the area and gave some insight into the 
lives of African-American landowners from the 1880s onward.  However, documentary records 
indicated a complex co-habitation of the neighborhood by both African and European Americans 
from at least the turn of the nineteenth century.  The excavations at the Women’s Club, located at 
18 Talbot Lane, grant a wider view of both black and white, tenant, slave, employee, and 
landowner.  The built environment, including a Federal period double house, also promised a 
material record stretching back beyond that of the HFBS to include the early growth of both the 
town of Easton and the African-American community centered around The Hill.  Archaeological 
assemblages at the site delivered on this promise. 
Archaeological excavations took place between July 8, 2013 and July 26, 2013. This 
report contains the results of the fieldwork that was completed during these dates, and the 
laboratory work that continued through January 2015. 
Field and laboratory work was carried out by staff from the Department of Anthropology, 
University of Maryland, College Park, Archaeology in Annapolis Project. Dr. Mark P. Leone is 
the Director and the Principal Investigator of this project. Stefan Woehlke and Tracy Jenkins 
directed field excavation and Kate Deeley directed laboratory investigation both in the field and 
in the laboratory at College Park. 

	


 
Archaeological laboratory processing of the materials from the Women’s Club was 
conducted at the Archaeology in Annapolis laboratory at the University of Maryland, College 
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Park, and overseen by Kate Deeley. During the fall 2013 and spring 2014 semesters, volunteer 
students aided in laboratory work supervised by Archaeology in Annapolis staff. 
This investigation forms part of a larger project researching and documenting the 
historical heritage of the neighborhood in Easton, Maryland, known as The Hill.  Ongoing since 
2009, The Hill Community Project is a collaboration between Historic Easton, Inc., Morgan 
State University, the University of Maryland, and other local individuals and institutions.  It 
combines historic preservation, documentary and architectural history, historical archaeology, 
oral history, genealogy, and other avenues of inquiry to increase and promote knowledge of The 
Hill’s historic heritage, with a focus on the community of free African Americans who have 
lived in Talbot County, centered around The Hill, since the late eighteenth century.  The project 
orients research to serve the interests of community revitalization in ways that support the 
integrity of the social, cultural, architectural, and archaeological fabric of this community.  Much 
of this work involves a combination of research and public engagement to enlarge the content, 
voice, and audience of historic memory, working toward fuller and more inclusive narratives of 
local history on The Hill and in Easton.  Much has been written on the lives of Frederick 
Douglass and Harriet Tubman, who both lived and worked nearby in Talbot and Dorchester 









	










	





 

	






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Counties.  However, both scholars and members of the general public know considerably less 
about the lives of other free African Americans during the time of slavery whose community, 
centered on The Hill, contributed to the character of social and cultural life in Easton and in 
Talbot County and very likely influenced the life experiences and development of the better-
known Douglass and Tubman.  The black community on The Hill is representative of the many 
throughout Maryland and the United States before Emancipation but The Hill is one of the few 
that survives into the present, with more disappearing as the years wind on.  Exploring the 
history of this free African-American community and the neighborhood that became its 
geographic anchor offer important opportunities to better understand what makes and maintains a 
community so that The Hill and other communities like it can be revitalized in the twenty-first 
century. 
While other avenues of inquiry can identify persons, institutions, and events in the history 
of The Hill, archaeological research further characterizes the lives of individuals and families 
that appear in documentary and oral record.  Especially where documentary evidence is 
concerned, information on African Americans and tenants, and their lives, can prove elusive.  At 
the Women’s Club, archaeology offers insights into the daily lives of residents from the late 
eighteenth century into the twenty-first.  It is in the more mundane everyday practices that 
community is created between people and the material record of these everyday practices 
provides data not present in historical records.  The interpretation of a sampling of 
archaeological remains at this site thus forms a piece of the larger story of the growth and 
development of The Hill for over two hundred years. 
 
Physiography and Topography 
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The Chesapeake Bay watershed is the largest estuary system in the United States 
(Maryland Department of Natural Resources 2007). The Bay lies on the coastal plains of the 
Atlantic Ocean and was formed by the ancestral Susquehanna River, which was drowned by sea 
level rises over several millennia. Fifty major tributaries contribute to the Bay. Ninety percent of 
the freshwater in the system comes from tributaries to the north and west of the Bay. The other 
10 percent of the fresh water comes from tributaries on the Eastern Shore like the Tred Avon 
River.  Nearly an equal part of saltwater enters the Bay from the Atlantic Ocean, therefore all the 
waterways of the Chesapeake Bay are comprised of a combination of fresh, salt, and brackish 
water (Chesapeake Bay Foundation 2007).
 
The town of Easton, Maryland lies in the Atlantic Coastal Plain Province within the Tred 
Avon River watershed. The Council for Maryland Archaeology refers to this area as Maryland 
Archaeological Research Unit 4—Choptank Drainage (Figure 1). The Choptank River drainage 
system lies to the east of the Chesapeake Bay, on the northwestern part of the Delmarva 
Peninsula, known as Maryland’s Eastern Shore (Netstate.com 2001). The peninsula is 115 miles 
in length, north to south, encompassing the whole state of Delaware and portions of Virginia and 
Maryland. Its maximum width in Virginia is only about 14.5 miles, while in the Maryland-
Delaware portion it is, at maximum, 45 miles wide (Rountree and Davidson 1997:3). 
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Easton, Maryland (38º46’18”N, 76º4’14”W) (Figure 2) is centrally located in Talbot 
County, Maryland, and serves as the county seat.  The courthouse and the area the the immediate 
east of it, which has served as the center of town since the eighteenth century, stands near the 
corner of Washington and Dover Streets.  The Hill, though more fluidly defined by social than 
by cartographic boundaries, lies roughly between Goldsborough St., Brookletts Ave., 
Washington St., and Kemp Ln., with a core in the area between Dover St., Brookletts Ave., 
Harrison St., and the former Maryland and Delaware railroad line.  The neighborhood’s name


erives from its slight elevation above the lands to the east, south, and west, but particularly from 
the west, where Port St. comes up from Easton Port through an area known as The Bottom.  At 
30-35 feet above sea level, The Hill stands slightly above surrounding areas.  The neighborhood 
slopes up toward the north and toward Aurora St., but the rise is barely noticeable within The 
Hill. 
The Talbot County Women’s Club, at 18 Talbot Lane, sits at the western edge of The 
Hill, closer to the center of town and to early development in the Federal period.  It is four blocks 
from the courthouse and fronts on Talbot Lane, facing west toward the center of town.  The 
house on the lot is oriented with the town grid close to true north.  The lot was originally much 
larger and stretched up to South Lane and back to Hanson Street, from the intersection of which 
one can see both Asbury United Methodist Church and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal 
Church, institutions that have anchored the African American community in The Hill since at 
least the 1810s. 
 
Soils 
The substrata soils in the Chesapeake region are formed from unconsolidated 
sedimentary deposits of sand, silt, clay, and gravels, which overlie crystalline bedrock. Although 
the topographic relief in the area is not diverse, the sediment deposits vary greatly in depth, 
texture and degree of permeability (Brush 1986: 7). Much of the soil on the Eastern Shore is not 
naturally fertile; however, the loamy soils that are available in some places are the best soil in 
Maryland for cultivation and farming (Rountree and Davidson 1997:8-9).  The majority of soils 
in Easton are silty, with higher, yellowish, clay content below approximately one-and-a-half feet 
in undisturbed soils. 
 
Vegetation and Fauna 
Between 25,000 BC and 15,000 BC the forests of the Chesapeake region included spruce, 
pine, varieties of fir, and birch trees. By 10,000 BC the forests became a mixture of hardwood 
and pinewood, having become dominated by oak and hickory, representing a more varied and 
exploitable environment for human groups (Haynes 2002:43).  Deer, rabbit, fox, wild turkey, and 
other animal species were likely once common, as they still are elsewhere in the Chesapeake 
region (Shelford 1963), but became less so as Easton developed from the late eighteenth century. 
 
Current vegetation and fauna within the project area are indicative of modern urban 
settings, and typical throughout the town of Easton.  Between paved streets and sidewalks are 
small plots of mostly grass and some shade trees.  Fauna include varieties of domesticated cats 
and dogs, mice, rats, and the Eastern grey squirrel, as well as varieties of songbirds and 
waterfowl.  Aquatic species found in the Tred Avon River and the Chesapeake Bay near the 
study area include soft shell clams and oysters, blue crabs, white and yellow perch, striped bass 
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(also known as ‘rockfish’), herring, shad, alewife, American and hickory shad, and short nose 
and Atlantic sturgeon. During the warmer months, numerous marine species, including bluefish, 
weakfish, croaker, menhaden, flounder, and spot also live in waters near Easton.  Many of these 
species are fished. 
 
Climate 
Talbot County presently has a temperate mid-continental climate. This type of climate is 
marked by well-defined seasons. The average temperature range in July is between 66.3 and 87.5 
degrees Fahrenheit. The average temperature range in January is between 26.9 and 44.0 degrees 
Fahrenheit. These averages are slightly higher than the statewide average temperature: Easton’s 
July average is 76.9 degrees Fahrenheit as compared to a statewide average of 75.02 degrees, and 
the January average in Easton is 35.45 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to a statewide average of 
32.55 degrees (National Climatic Data Center 2007). There is an average of 190 frost-free days a 
year (Rountree and Davidson 1997:3) Rainfall, as recorded in Easton, MD, is moderate; an 
average of 44 inches per year since 1971; and snowfall accumulates on average of 12 inches per 
year, recorded since 1947 (Southeast Regional Climate Center 2007). 
 
 
  
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CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY 
 
As a part of the larger Hill Project, Archaeology in Annapolis staff developed a research 
strategy for the Talbot County Women’s Club site in consultation with Historic Easton, Inc. and 
Professor Dale Green of Morgan State University in order to orient research to the interests and 
needs of community members and residents.  The Hill Community Project aims to use research 
to facilitate and enhance community revitalization efforts on The Hill.  Archaeological 
excavation offers an opportunity for community members to learn more about their past and 
publicization of findings helps to promote and maintain interest in preserving African American 
heritage on The Hill among other residents of Easton who can become allies of the African-
American community. 
 
1. Is The Hill one of the oldest free African-American neighborhoods in the United States? 
2. When was the lot first occupied? 
3. When was the lot occupied by African Americans? 
 
The possibility that The Hill is home to the oldest free African American neighborhood in 
the United States has attracted a good deal of interest from both the descendant and local 
communities, as well as members of the general public (Polk 2012a; Polk 2012b).  For the 
general public, this potential holds intrigue.  But for community members, it holds a source of 
pride.  Though community members have come and gone, many families who today have ties to 
The Hill bear the same names as free African Americans listed in the 1790 US census district 
that includes this neighborhood.  Even if the community is not the oldest, a title currently held by 
Tremé in New Orleans (Logsdon and Elie 2008), its age and social and cultural integrity through 
the years stand as a testament to the efforts of black and white community members across the 
generations and years.  Pride and interest (which can lead to investment of many sorts) are 
significant goals for this project, centered as it is on community revitalization efforts.  Thus, a 
wide sampling of contexts from across the HFBS aimed to ascertain the earliest occupation of 
this site and the earliest black occupation.  Pursuing these questions for this particular property 
helps to address, in part, the larger question of community origins. 
 
4. What was the relationship between the Federal-period African-American residents of the 
site and James Price, the white landowner? 
5. What was life like for tenants on The Hill, particularly those who were African 
American, through time? 
 
Renting living space is a common practice on The Hill, today as in the past.  In recent 
years, rates of rentership that exceed 60 and sometimes 80% among the neighborhood’s resident 
population have likely contributed to the deterioration of the built landscape and the perception 
of The Hill as blighted and in need of redevelopment (Morris, Personal Interview 2012).  Thus, 
relationships between landlords and tenants and the conditions of renters are tied to the forces 
that threaten the current and future integrity of The Hill Community’s social and physical 
landscape.  Historical archaeology can inform plans for community revitalization that works for 
tenants and other Hill residents by illuminating the social impacts of tenancy, the changing 
relations between landlords and tenants, and the contributions of tenants to social and community 
life on The Hill. 
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By 1790, already more than one thirteenth of the Talbot County population were free 
African Americans (United States Census Bureau N.d. [1790]), but very few of them owned the 
land on which they lived (see, for example, Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax 1812).  
Most, therefore, rented space.  Typical of these manumitted men and women were three free 
African Americans living here with James Price in 1800 (Genweb 2005 [1800]).  We can assume 
with relative safety that, though listed as members of his household, they were not his blood 
relatives.  What contributions did these tenants make to the birth and early growth of the 
African-American community that became centered on The Hill?  One may also compare their 
experiences with those of later tenants at the site. 
 
6. How can archaeology on The Hill engage and benefit the local and descendant 
communities? 
 
The Hill project aims to conduct research that is relevant and interesting for the local and 
descendant communities (The Hill Community Project 2013).  This means working with 
community members to select sites, research questions, and to interpret findings in ways that 
engage Hill residents and others involved in the community.  At all stages of excavation, we seek 
to promote conversations among members of various publics about the past and its meaning for 
the community in the present.  As such, the excavation and interpretation of archaeological 
remains at this site incorporates a degree of public input, often in the form of comments and 
questions from site visitors.  At the Women’s Club, many of these were neighborhood residents, 
though many were also visitors. 
 
Methodology 
 
 Site Selection 
 
Because of the hypothesis that The Hill is the oldest continually-occupied African-
American neighborhood still in existence anywhere in the United States, Archaeology in 
Annapolis staff chose to excavate at the Women’s Club in order to learn more about the very 
earliest black residents of The Hill.  Deed and census records indicate that in 1800, the household 
of James Price, who acquired the property in 1795, included three free African Americans.  
Though Price may have also owned additional properties elsewhere, the eighteenth-century 
house on this location and a second 1803 brick house, both of which survive to the present, 
indicated that the Price household lived here at what eventually became the Women’s Club 
property.  Nothing more is known historically about these three free persons of color, so 
archaeology provided the best means of further research. 
 
Field Excavation 
 
Field excavations at the HFBS followed the Maryland Historical Trust’s Standards and 
Guidelines for Archaeological Excavations in Maryland (Shaffer and Cole 1994), and also 
followed standardized excavation methodology developed over the last three decades by 
Archaeology in Annapolis, which has been implemented in a number of recent excavations in the 
City of Annapolis and in Talbot County—although applied here with some adjustments. 
 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 17 


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During Phase I testing, researchers excavated 13 shovel test pits (STPs) at intervals of 20 
feet in both side yards and the back yard of the Women’s Club property except where plant 
growth or utility lines prevented excavation.  Following this testing, archaeologists excavated six 
five-foot-by-five-foot and one 2.5-foot-square test units in areas of interest in all three yards.  
Both STPs and units were tied to the house and the town grid and were placed by measuring with 
tapes from a corner of the Women’s Club building.  Excavators recorded horizontal positions for 
all points and, because the ground is very flat onsite, measured elevations from ground level. 
 
All excavations were completed by hand, using appropriate hand tools, and mostly with 
trowel and shovel.  Excavation ceased either at sterile soil or due to time constraints.  In unit 
three, dense root growth prohibited excavation after a certain depth and excavators opened one 
quarter of the unit only at lower strata.  Excavators removed each context in natural levels.  
Within thicker strata, particularly those composed of long-term natural accumulation, excavators 
excavated in arbitrary sub-levels of two tenths of a foot.  Elevations for the top and bottom of 
each level were measured from unit-specific datums and therefore represent the depth below the 
unit-local ground surface; however, the property is very flat, so depths are comparable between 
units.  The depths for each stratum in the unit summary section are the center points of each 
stratum. 
 
Each STP, test unit, and feature received a unique number designation, each STP level 
received a unique number designation, and each unit or feature level received a unique letter 
designation.  Feature levels have both a feature number and a unit stratum letter, so that features 
are included in the total count of stratigraphic levels in a unit.  Excavators recorded detailed field 
notes for each STP and test unit.  These notes included descriptions of soil layers, features and 
artifacts encountered in addition to standardized forms for levels and features.  On forms, 
excavators recorded soil color, texture, and inclusions, along with depths, stratigraphic 
relationships, artifacts recovered, and interpretations.  Excavators drew top view plans for the top 
of each level and profile views for each sidewall, and took digital photographs of the bottom of 
each level and for each profile.  Plans and profiles use the engineer’s scale (tenths of a foot).  All 
cultural artifacts were collected by STP or by unit stratum, and all excavated soils were dry-
screened through 1/4” mesh wire. 
 
Curation and Laboratory Analysis 
 
All archaeological materials recovered in the course of testing were transported to the 
Archaeology in Annapolis lab, located in the Department of Anthropology, University of 
Maryland, College Park.  Artifacts recovered from archaeological excavations were washed, 
identified and inventoried, and processed according to the standards and guidelines established 
for the state of Maryland (Seifert 1999). Ceramics, glass, bone, plastics and other durable, stable 
artifacts were washed in water and allowed to dry on drying racks.  Metals and other more fragile 
artifacts were dry brushed. Once cleaned, all artifacts were sorted by material type and placed in 
re-sealable archival quality plastic bags.  Each bag was labeled with provenience information and 
bag number.  Provenience information included site name, unit number, and level or feature 
number, date excavated, and initials of excavators. 
 
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All artifacts were cataloged according to a modified version of the Archaeology in 
Annapolis catalog system (see Appendix C for catalog codes and sample catalog sheet).  Artifact 
identifications were based on material, function, form, and date.  Brick, concrete, mortar, oyster 
shell and coal slag were counted, weighed and discarded according to the standards defined for 
the state of Maryland (Shafer and Cole 1994, Seifert 1999).  For some contexts, samples of 
bricks, right side complete oyster shells, and mortar were retained.  All artifact coding sheets 
were then entered into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (see Appendix D for database).  The 
catalogue follows established Archaeology in Annapolis format, with some modification to add 
additional detail to data entries. 
 
Identifications and interpretations of each context were initially made in the field but 
further developed in the lab.  Any contexts that did not have interpretations were given them, 
based on field notes and photographs.  Estimated dates for each context are based on a 
combination of the terminus post quem (TPQ) of the context, the context type, the assemblage, 
and its stratigraphic relation to other contexts.  The TPQ was established using all datable 
artifacts in each context, but particularly ceramics, nails, and plastics.  In some cases, a single 
artifact appears that has a date much later than the rest of the artifacts in the context and 
drastically affects the TPQ.  These outliers may have been introduced due to excavation error or 
bioturbation.  They were not removed, so the terminus post quem is not directly representative of 
the date of the context.  Dates are also respective of the type of context.  Fill events may be of a 
later date than their contents when they involve secondary and tertiary as well as primary 
deposition.  In addition, some levels were created gradually over a period of many years as trash 
was deposited in the yard and topsoil grew; these contexts were sometimes dated not by the latest 
artifacts in them but by the preponderance of the dates of their assemblages.  To sort out these 
complexities, the dates of each level within a unit were compared when grouping contexts into 
periods of occupation.  For the resulting phasing of the site’s archaeology, see chapter five of this 
report.  These periods are not meant to be sharply divided, since occupation of the site has been 
fairly continuous over the past 200 and more years.  It was possible to link periods in artifact 
phasing to changes in property ownership and these analyses are incorporated into the 
“Archaeological Chronology” section of chapter five.  Both the TPQs and the site phasing are 
estimates of the dates of contexts.  These dates are neither absolute, nor exclusive of alternative 
dates using other methods such as those utilizing historical documentation or mean ceramic date, 
or including additional dates for artifacts that could not here be dated. 
 
 Chapter five of this report contains an analysis of artifact distributions using the results of 
the shovel test pit survey.  Based on the number of artifacts in each of our excavated STPs, we 
estimate the areas where there were concentrations of various types of artifacts.  Because our 
excavations only sampled the yard, rather than excavating the whole of it, we used a computer 
algorithm to estimate how many artifacts of each type we would have recovered in the spaces 
where we did not dig, if we had dug them.  This analysis was performed using ESRI’s ArcGIS® 
ArcMap™ version 10.2.  While in the field, we used measuring tapes to construct a map of the 
site and the locations of each of our STPs and units.  This hand-drawn site map was fitted to 
actual global coordinates by georectifying it to an NAD 1983 CORS96 UTM Zone 18N map 
projection.  We then used the digitized field map to create a points shapefile marking the 
locations of shovel test pits and unit corners.  Polygon shapefiles of the main house and property 
boundaries were also created using georectified scans of Sanborn fire insurance maps, aerial 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 19 


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imagery, and field measurements.  To analyze artifact distributions, the points for STPs were 
joined with tabular data extracted from the artifact catalogue for the site.  Artifact concentrations 
were interpolated using ArcMap’s Kriging tool in the Spatial Analyst toolbox.  The program was 
set to run an ordinary krig using a spherical semivariogram model with a cell output size of 
.349012400000356 and with a variable search radius.  This process was repeated on various 
artifact types.  The result was a map that showed how many nails, brick fragments, pottery 
sherds, etc. were estimated to be in each part of the yard.  The first section of chapter 5 interprets 
the meaning of these concentrations. 
 
Because artifacts from the site may be involved in further study in the near future, the 
collection is currently being housed by the Archaeology in Annapolis Project at the Department 
of Anthropology, University of Maryland, College Park.  The Talbot County Women’s Club is 
the current owner of all archaeological materials recovered at the site. The University of 
Maryland, College Park will cooperate with the Women’s Club to determine the final disposition 
of the collection following the completion of the project. 
 
Public Archaeology 
 
Because of its origins and focus as a community project, the excavation sought to engage 
members of various publics in several ways.  Primarily, the site was open to the general public 
daily from 10am-3pm during the workweek, the time when Archaeology in Annapolis staff and 
students were conducting archaeological fieldwork.  Visitors walked freely about the site and 
were able to observe all parts of excavation and to handle artifacts under the supervision of 
Archaeology in Annapolis staff, who answered questions.  Visitors included neighborhood 
residents, Easton residents, and those who had traveled from further away.  Members of the 
Women’s Club came regularly and shared information about the site’s history and historical 
photographs.  Several representatives from the press also visited the site.  Their stories are 
reproduced in Appendix E. 
 
Archaeology in Annapolis staff gave many informal, walk-on site tours during the course 
of the excavation.  During and since the excavation, Professor Dale Green of Morgan State 
University has also included the Women’s Club on his recurring tours of The Hill’s historic sites, 
which took place weekly during the summer and monthly during the rest of the year. 
 
During the excavation at the Women’s Club, Kate Deeley erected and oversaw a field 
laboratory to the right of the house at 18 Talbot Lane.  This laboratory followed the same 
methodology described above for the laboratory in College Park, though field lab activities 
included only washing, sorting, and re-bagging.  She processed artifacts from Wye House 
Plantation, another Archaeology in Annapolis excavation, with the help of students.  Visitors 
were invited to view and handle artifacts and to ask questions about the research process.  In 
front of the field lab, AiA staff wrote and posted four interpretive signs that provided overviews 
of The Hill, its history, and efforts to remember it; the goals of archaeology on the site; the 
historical significance of the Women’s Club property; and the research process and sponsors.  
For the text of these signs, see Appendix D. 
 
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 On Sunday, July 21, 2013, archaeologists hosted a special half-day open house aimed at 
attracting visitors who were not able to come during the regular work week hours, especially 
African Americans.  Other colleagues in the project personally visited both Asbury United 
Methodist and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Churches, The Hill’s two historic black 
congregations, to issue invitations and lead groups to the site after worship.  These visitors were 
joined by many others.  
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CHAPTER 3: CULTURAL CONTEXT AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
 
Project Background 
 
 As a portion of The Hill Community Project, this excavation involved the use of research 
to promote community development and preservation.  The Hill is a multiracial neighborhood in 
Easton, Maryland that has been the focal point of a free African American community that dates 
to at least 1790, when already more than 400 free African Americans lived in the census district 
that includes The Hill (Priscilla Morris 2012, elec. comm.).  In the nineteenth century, this 
community became centered on The Hill.  Yet this historic neighborhood faces conditions of 
blight due to its neglect by the town of Easton in historic preservation and other public 
community development projects.  The Hill received no mention in the 1980 nominations of 
Easton’s historic district to the National Register of Historic Places (Maryland Historic Trust 
N.d.), so although it is protected within that historic district, its inclusion is not secure.  The 
mainstream historical narratives about Easton and Talbot County history have ignored the lives 
of free blacks, including those who lived on The Hill, until very recently and continue to 
unsatisfactorily include local free black histories (Jenkins 2013).  This has also been true of the 
Eastern Shore at large (Dorsey 2011:x-xii).  The Project works to correct this imbalance in 
historical narratives and to use heritage as a platform for community development.  Historical 
narratives and historic sites make up this platform, built by scholars and community members, 
which advances a future for The Hill that is aware of and builds on its past to provide an 
alternative to models of development that ignore the needs of residents and community members.  
Research into the past provides the table around which community members and others can 
gather to address the community’s present needs. 
 
Historical Background 
 
What became the Talbot County Women’s Club property was surveyed by Henry 
Needles in 1791 when establishing the grid for the blossoming Town of Easton, Maryland.  
Following the Revolutionary War, the possibility of moving a general court for the whole 
Eastern Shore to Easton led to a rush of speculation and investment (Tilghman 1915:230-3).  
Easton expanded from a small number of taverns serving a part-time courthouse into a fully-
fledged town during the late eighteenth century.  To facilitate this expansion, town leaders 
commissioned Jeremiah Banning to plat the town in 1786 and Henry Needles to survey it in 1791 
(Morris 2008:14).  Deeds from the 1790s for what became the Women’s Club property indicate 
that this portion of the town was part of a tract formerly known as Long Acre (Land Records of 
Talbot County, Maryland Book 26:445).  Banning and Needles divided the block bounded by 
South Lane, South Street, Talbot Lane, and Hanson Street into three lots, numbers 27, 28, and 
29.  Lots were sold at auction (Land Records of Talbot County, Maryland Book 25:175). 
During the first few years of the town’s growth, land speculation rippled across Easton.  
Most residences and businesses clustered along Washington and Dover Streets, while other lots 
further away from the centers of commerce and government were left relatively undeveloped 
(Cynthia Schmidt 2013, personal interview).  Like this latter group, the block on which the 
Women’s Club now stands, bounded by South Lane, Talbot Lane, South Street, and Hanson 
Street, was divided and subdivided and changed hands many times in the 1780s and ‘90s until 
James Price, the Talbot County Register of Wills and a “gentleman,” purchased the northern half 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 22 


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of the block in 1795.  His holdings here included lot 27 and the northern half of lot 28 (Land 
Records of Talbot County, Maryland 1795 Book 26:425, 444).  At some time in the last decade 
of the eighteenth century, either Price or his predecessors built a frame house here. 
The Price household was multiracial.  The year before he moved to the site, James Price 
became the guardian of the orphaned two-year-old daughter of Jeremiah Garland.  So when he 
moved to what is now the Talbot County Women’s Club, his household included Garland, her 
nurse “negro Grace,” and Grace’s daughter Dye.  The three continued to live with him until 
August 1796, when Price sent Garland to board with a Mrs. Cockayne.1  At this point Grace and 
Dye also left the Price household.  In 1800, the second US federal census lists James Price, 
between the ages of 26 and 45, as living with three free people (US Census Bureau 1800:521), 
among whom may have been one free African American.  One or two of these three were Price’s 
white apprentices (Schmidt 2014, elec. comm.).  By 1810, James Price had gotten married and 
the household had grown to a total of six white people, six free persons besides the Price family, 
and nine slaves (US Census Bureau 1810:328).  It is likely that this larger number of free persons 
includes free African Americans but whether this is the case cannot be determined at present.  
Between 1800 and 1810, Price had a large brick house built adjacent to the frame house and 
probably moved into the new building (Porter-King 1998:2), leaving the latter to the free people 
living with him.  By the 1820 census, his household no longer included free African Americans 
(US Census Bureau 1820:342).  Thus, roughly twenty years beginning just before the turn of the 
nineteenth century comprises a period in which a few free blacks lived in close proximity to 
James Price and his white family.  No more is known about these free African Americans or their 
relationship with Price from the historical record, but they probably rented space here and may 
have worked for Price. 
James Price died in the 1860s and left the property to his brother Joseph’s children.  They 
seem to have had no use for it, for they sold it in 1868 to Mordecai and Deborah Dawson, a 
white family with four children (Porter-King 1998:2).  They lived here in 1870 with a black 
servant, Scipio Thomas and a black cook, Harriet Anderson, as well as Anderson’s husband John 
(US Census Bureau 1870:51).  By 1880, a black waitress named Jane had replaced Scipio 
Thomas (US Census Bureau 1880:58).  The Dawsons joined the frame and brick houses of the 
Price period by having doors cut between them (Porter-King 1998:2), perhaps to facilitate the 
work of their servants.  They also made an addition to the back of the brick house that appears in 
the first (1891) Sanborn Insurance Map to depict the property. 
In 1891, the Dawsons sold the property to William T. Wright, who rented it out.  He 
separated the frame and brick houses again, renting them individually (Porter-King 1998:2).  
During Wright’s ownership, an additional house was constructed to the north of Price’s double 
house (Sanborn-Perris 1891; 1896), presumably to enhance the renting income of the property. 
The 1940s ended the property’s primary use as a residence.  When Wright died, he left it 
to his daughter, who sold it to Anna Brinkloe, president of the Talbot County Women’s Club in 
1946.  By this point, the yard contained an old stable and a shed, but much of the backyard had 
become a dumping ground for bottles and the grounds were overgrown.  Soon after the Women’s 
Club acquired the property, vandals broke into the cellar and dug up the floor looking for 
rumored buried treasure.  The Women’s Club embarked on an extensive restoration and 
renovation of the property.  They re-laid the brick floor in the cellar, removed the Victorian front 
porch and used the wood to re-floor the room above the kitchen, filled in the alley between the 








































 



















1
 Mrs. Cockayne is probably Mary Cockayne, Price’s neighbor, and not James Cockayne’s wife on Hanson St. 
(Schmidt 2015, elec. comm.). 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 23 


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two Price-era houses and re-connected them, and replanted the gardens (Porter-King 1998:3-4).  
Although the club kept the nineteenth- and twentieth-century additions on the back of the house, 
they tore down all outbuildings and restored the front façade to a moderately Federal appearance 
(Star-Democrat 1958:Ed.8).  This program of historic preservation formed a component of other 
work going on throughout Easton in the mid-twentieth century, led in part by architect Henry 
Chandlee Forman.  Characteristic of preservation of this period, the Women’s Club placed 
emphasis on the earliest and most elite architecture of the site, the Price double house, meaning 
that later landscape features and work buildings and spaces were sacrificed to achieve a colonial 
revival aesthetic.  Though probably without malicious intent, these efforts wiped tenants and 
African Americans from the existing built landscape.  Much of their world survives only below 
ground. 
At some point in the past, the property lines have shifted.  The Talbot County Women’s 
Club now owns only a small portion of what James Price bought in 1795 and some small section 
of the lot to the south that Price did not own in his time.  It is unclear at present when the 
portions of the property were segmented, but there are now four houses on what Price had 
originally owned, each held separately. 
 
Cultural Significance 
 
 The Women’s Club site bears strong connections with the experiences of tenants and 
servants in houses and on land that they did not own in Easton, Maryland in three centuries.  
Their contributions and their experiences significantly shaped Easton society and life at this site 
	

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Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 24 


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was in many ways characteristic of experiences elsewhere in town.  The activities of the African 
Americans living with James Price, free during the time when plantation slavery surrounded 
them, most certainly impacted the birth and early development of the local social network of free 
African Americans that our project has come to know as The Hill Community.  It was during 
their time here that the African Methodist Episcopal Conference in Baltimore sent Revered 
Shadrack Bassett to preach to free African Americans in Easton, at the intersection of South 
Lane and Hanson Street, which Price’s property adjoined, in 1818 (Wayman 1881:1; Dale Green 
2012, personal interview).  This meeting and sermon formally organized the Bethel Church in 
Easton, which still serves as a core institution in the African American community 196 years 
later this year. 
 The story of the Women’s Club property is also one of the erasure of landless tenants and 
servants from historical memory, and of how this project works to change that.  Historic 
preservation at the Women’s Club in the twentieth century marked the domination of elite 
historical narratives and created a white space through selective preservation of certain material 
narratives over others.  These material narratives are embedded and conveyed through material 
culture, most visibly in architecture.  But this report documents the use of archaeology to 
emphasize additional material narratives, of those who did not own the land.  Many on The Hill 
today find themselves in the same situation.   
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 25 


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CHAPTER 4: PREVIOUS ARCHAEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS AND 
SIGNIFICANT ARCHITECTURAL STRUCTURES 
 
Previous research 
 
In (1998), Adrianna Porter-King, a member of the Talbot County Women’s Club, 
researched the property history and produced a pamphlet about the history of the property and its 
owners from James Price to the Women’s Club.  Mrs. Black, the club’s current director, 
provided copies of this pamphlet to us.  Porter-King’s work is based mostly on newspaper 
articles from the Star-Democrat and focuses on property ownership and structural changes to the 
property’s architecture.  It also contains a brief history of the Women’s Club and of women’s 
clubs in America. 
 
No archaeological research had been performed at the Talbot county Women’s Club 
property prior to this investigation.  The first excavation on The Hill may have occurred in recent 
years across Talbot Lane from the Women’s Club, in the backyard of the Bartlett Pear Inn, 
formerly the Hambleton residence.  The Town of Easton, Department of Public Works, 
conducted this excavation in the course of utility work and uncovered the former icehouse for the 
Hambleton residence.  No archaeological report exists for this work, which was not performed 
with archaeology in mind. 
Archaeology in Annapolis conducted the first archaeological research on The Hill at the 
Home of the Family of the Buffalo Soldier, four blocks east of the Women’s Club, in 2012.  
Located more within the core of The Hill neighborhood, the HFBS was built by African-
American Civil War veteran John Green 
and his wife and got its name from later 
residents who were kin to Sergeant 
William Gardner, who served in the US 
Army in the late nineteenth and early 
twentieth centuries.  Excavations here 
recovered some items possibly 
associated with Gardner and 
demonstrated that site’s archaeological 
integrity, greatly adding to efforts by 
African-American and historically-
minded residents to preserve the 
structure and its story.  The 2012 field 
excavation also demonstrated the power 
of public archaeology to bring together 
people of diverse backgrounds to share 
in learning about and preserving the 
heritage of The Hill Community.  This work laid the foundation for the 2013 excavation at the 
Women’s Club by demonstrating the potential of public archaeology on The Hill.  For more on 
this research, see Jenkins and Skolnik (2013). 
 
 The Talbot County Women’s Club property may have been the site of previous research 
in historical architecture, but no analyses have yet been found.  Henry Chandlee Forman 
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Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 26 


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conducted extensive documentation of historic architecture on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the 
mid twentieth century, including in Easton.  Some mention of his work in the town appears in 
Early buildings and Historic Artifacts in Tidewater Maryland (Forman 1989).  His rendering of 
“The Old Court House Square, Easton, Maryland: A Tentative Reconstruction Based on the 
Available Evidence” appears inside the cover of Tidewater Maryland Architecture and Gardens 
(Forman 1956).  However, no account of any buildings on The Hill appears in either volume.  
His rendering of the courthouse square in Easton appears to have influenced reconstruction and 
restoration efforts in the downtown part of Easton, which today features many of the colonial 
revival shop-fronts he drew. 
 When they purchased the 
property in 1946, the Women’s 
Club embarked on a project to 
restore the double house to its 
Price-period appearance, at least on 
the front facing the street.  
Members of the club today still 
feel a duty to preserve this historic 
structure for future generations and 
have expressed this sentiment to us 
during our archaeological 
fieldwork.  Forman appears to have 
been actively researching historic 
properties in the region at the time 
of this restoration, but it is 
unknown whether he engaged 
directly with the Women’s Club’s 
efforts in any way. 
 
Significant structures 
 
 The only significant structure still standing at the Talbot County Women’s Club property 
is the main house, which was built in several phases from the 1790s to 1919.  The first part of the 
house was constructed in the 1790s.  It is a frame structure on a brick foundation with a brick 
chimney at the southern end and a cellar.  In 1803, James Price had a brick house built 
immediately next to the frame house, though not adjoining it.  This also has a cellar, with a large 
kitchen fireplace in it.  Together, these structures, which have since been joined, make up what I 
refer to as the double house, following Porter-King (1998:2).  By 1891, when the first Sanborn 
Fire Insurance map depicts the property, an additional room connecting the two parts of the 
double house had been constructed, as well as a third wing extending off this room to the east.  
Between 1891 and 1919, the house reached roughly its current floor plan with a final additional 
addition. 
 
 The current yard and garden areas on the property date to the twentieth century.  
Whatever formal garden(s) may have existed previously are gone, as are work areas and 
outbuildings.  They have been replaced by the Women’s Club with a grassy lawn and some 
bushes around the edge, which is framed to the east and southeast in English ivy that proved 

3)
	
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Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 27 


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impenetrable to excavation.  There is one large tree in along the current east fence line that likely 
dates to the early- or mid-nineteenth century. 
  
5

	

:


 

 
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CHAPTER 5: ARCHAEOLOGY AND INTERPRETATIONS 
 
 Even at this preliminary stage of archaeological research at the Talbot County Women’s 
Club, a good deal can be said of the archaeological record here and what it can tell us about the 
lives of African Americans and tenants on the site.  Archaeologists think largely in terms of 
space and time.  Though of course the two cannot be separated from one another, this chapter is 
divided into two sections focusing on each, respectively.  The first section describes some of the 
archaeological resources that this excavation documented and where these resources are located.  
Although not every deposit is described in detail, I focus on those that pertain directly to the 
experiences of African Americans and tenants.  This section may be useful in making decisions 
about future research and how to avoid disturbing particularly sensitive resources during future 
construction and gardening.  The second section tells the archaeological story of the property’s 
history, with a particular focus on African Americans and tenants.  It is the sum of what we know 
at this point about these people’s lives. 
 
Location and Description of Archaeological Resources 
 
The archaeological resources at this site are extensive and well-preserved, making the 
Talbot County Women’s Club property a rich site for research.  All parts of the yard space 
around the current house bear archaeological materials that are intact.  Not one shovel test pit, 
nor one test unit, was sterile of artifacts.  In this urban lot, it would appear that inhabitation was 
very intense.  In the rear and both side yards, cultural deposits appear at the ground level and 
there are often artifacts of both recent and not-so-recent date in the sod.  Cultural deposits range 
in maximum depth from about one and a half feet to about three feet.  Discounting the tree 
removal in Unit 4, cultural deposits lie from ground surface down an average of 1.89 feet.  The 
identity and contents of those cultural deposits, as indicated by the STP and unit excavation 
results, demonstrate that the immediate landscape of the yard has been substantially altered at 
various times by the presence and use of buildings and by other activities that give a window into 
the lives of residents of differing backgrounds over the course of the site’s inhabitation. 
 Because of our interest in learning more about the African American and working-class 
occupants of the site, much of the archaeological investigation of the Talbot County Women’s 
club focused on locating and identifying domestic and work spaces associated with these 
occupants.  We chose not to excavate immediately adjacent to the main house, which for much 
of its lifetime was the residence primarily of wealthy white people.  We hoped that in the yard 
behind the property we might find evidence of worker housing and other spaces.  Unfortunately, 
we did not locate any dwellings, neither quarters for enslaved individuals, nor for tenants.  These 
may have been located further to the east of the current property boundaries.  What we did find 
were two buildings and a range of outdoor work and play areas.  The first of these buildings was 
a kitchen in use throughout most of the nineteenth century where at least one African American 
cook, Harriet Anderson, worked.  The function of the second remains inconclusive.  Very little 
of either building has been excavated, as this initial foray into the archaeology of the Women’s 
Club site focused on a strategy of identifying as many different features as possible to gain a 
sense of the possibilities for future research. 
 The first step in identifying buildings in the archaeological record is a shovel test pit 
survey.  Although it is rare that a hole only a foot in diameter will come down on a foundation or 
a posthole and none of our STPs here did so, testing on a grid enabled us to get a sense of the  
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Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 32 


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distributions of several artifact classes across the site.  Identifying concentrations of certain 
artifacts is key to locating likely buildings.  To do so, I plotted the STP locations in ArcGIS and 
linked these coordinates with the numbers of brick, mortar, and nail fragments found in each pit.  
Interpolating how many of each of these probably lie between the pits that we dug gives an 
estimate for where on the property there are concentrations of these architectural materials and, 
therefore, likely building sites.  Comparing the density maps for different artifact types and 
comparing these results with those of the test unit excavations and historical records helped to 
identify the two buildings that we have located in this excavation. 
Not every concentration of architectural material was associated with a building.  For 
example, shovel test pit results showed a concentration of brick south of the main house but unit 
5 indicated that these brick fragments were fill deposited after a tree was removed in the 1940s 
by the Women’s Club.  However, the other clusters of architectural artifacts were more 
productive in locating buildings.  The second concentration of brick matched up with 
concentrations of mortar in the northeast corner of the lot, indicating a probable building there.  
It is curious that there is a concentration of mortar directly east of the house but not a 
concentration of brick.  Perhaps there was a structure here with only a masonry chimney and the 
bricks were removed for use elsewhere before the building fell down.  This could have left the 
mortar at this location even though the bricks are gone.  In this location east of the house there 
was also a concentration of nails, at least when measured in weight.  When measured in number 
of fragments, the distribution of nails is more spread out to the north across the east-northeastern 
edge of the property.  This indicates a difference in concentrations of large, relatively complete 
nails east of the house—probably a building that was taken down—versus a concentration of 
smaller nail fragments spread out as part of a sheet midden across most of the northern half of 
$

	
 	


	


 

  
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 33 


Do not cite without permission of author. 
the backyard.  Together, these clusters of bricks, mortar, and nails indicate the presence of two 
buildings.  A closer look at each gives clues to when and how they were used. 
  
Building 1: Kitchen 
 So far, we know the most about the building 
east of the main house.  Here, we happened to place 
Unit 1 directly on a corner of the building, following 
the discovery of nail stock in STP D2.  In the three-
unit block we opened in this area, we found only one 
other piece of nail stock and some slag—evidence of 
blacksmithing but not the forge we had hoped for.  
What we found instead was a kitchen and the yard 
around it.  This kitchen turned out to be our most solid 
link to free African Americans employed and living on 
the property, specifically the family of Harriet 
Anderson, who cooked for the Dawsons after the Civil 
War.
 
 In addition to concentrations of mortar and 
nails here that appeared in the STP survey, Unit 1, 
which was placed atop STP D2, came down on a 
posthole (Feature 5) and a second was discovered in 
the sidewall as we concluded the excavation.  Both 
postholes cut through eighteenth-century levels, 
indicating very early nineteenth-century construction 
for the building.  This is supported by concentrations of cut nails at this location.  Post-in-ground 
construction is in keeping with the low concentration of brick here and was common for 
outbuildings during the Federal period.  The posts are on-grid with the house, suggesting that this 
building was part of the formal landscape of the site during the Price years.  Although we did not 
uncover the full dimensions of the building, the two postholes are four feet apart, indicating that 
the north-south axis of the building was of a 
length some multiple of four.  Outbuildings 
with walls of eight, twelve, and sixteen feet 
were common.  The posthole in Feature 5 
appears to be the northeast corner of the 
building because the line between levels J and 
L and K and M, which the posthole cuts, may 
mark the interior and exterior of the building, 
respectively.  Higher strata show that the 
building was demolished around the end of the 
nineteenth century, since the sheet midden 
extends across Unit 1.  Indeed, there is a small 
building in this location that appears on the 
first Sanborn fire insurance map of the 
property in 1891 but that is gone by Sanborn’s 
1901 map.  This building was therefore a small 
post-in-ground frame building, possibly with a 
$	,.-,%	




 
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, 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 34 


Do not cite without permission of author. 
brick chimney, that was in use throughout most of the nineteenth century. 
  
Although we had hoped it might be a forge, this building is clearly lacking in the 
metalworking debris requisite to identify it as such.  While in the field, we had thought it might 
be a chicken coop.  The soil of Unit 1 Level J was a grayish color consistent with chicken 
manure and Unit 2 uncovered an oyster shell deposit (Level N) that could have been used as feed 
to give chickens more calcium in their diets.  However, further consideration of the materials 
from STPs and from Units 1, 2, and 6 indicate that this building was almost definitely a kitchen.  
The STP results indicate the strongest concentrations of ceramics, bottle glass, and bone in and 
around STP D2, and abundant faunal remains were recovered from Units 1, 2, and 6, much of it 
butchered.  Although some of these foodways-related artifacts may be associated with the 
midden, much of it came from levels beneath the midden, either inside or in the yard outside the 
kitchen.  It was in this kitchen that Harriet Anderson worked in the 1870s and ‘80s, and before 
her there were probably other African American cooks who also used this building.  After all, 
James Price owned several slaves in the Antebellum period.  This kitchen and the yard around it 
are therefore perhaps the best places on this property to study the labor and lives of enslaved and 
free African Americans. 
 
Building 2: unidentified building 
 In addition to the kitchen, excavation 
identified a building in the northeast corner of the lot.  
STP A1 appea
rs to have snagged a corner of the 
building, which is marked by concentrations of brick, 
mortar, and, somewhat less so, of nails.  No evidence 
of the building appeared in Unit 3, which is part of 
what suggests that it is in fact a building.  Were it just 
a scattering of artifacts on the ground, there would be 
less of a strong divergence between the dense 
concentration of artifacts in STP A1 and the low 
artifact density in Unit 3.  Only cut nails appeared in 
STP A1 in high numbers, suggesting a nineteenth-
century construction date. 
 There are two candidates for this building’s 
identity from the historical records.  The first is a large 
wagon shed that appears in the first Sanborn map of 
1891.  The second is a small building that appears first 
on the 1901 Sanborn map.  Given the lack of accuracy $	,-7,%	





 
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Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 35 


Do not cite without permission of author. 
in building locations on these maps, the archaeological materials could point to either.  The 
abundance of nineteenth-century nails is not much of a factor in deciding between the two, since 
a small building built at the turn of the twentieth century could easily have been made using 
older nails that were on hand rather than the newer wire nails.  Since no evidence of the building 
appeared in Unit 3, most of it lies on the adjoining properties.  This suggests the wagon shed as 
the most likely candidate, but further excavation on the properties to the north and northeast of 
the Women’s Club would be productive in determining this more concretely.  STP A1 turned up 
no horse- or wagon-related artifacts. 
 
The James Price double house 
 It is worth mentioning as well that the only concentration of handmade, wrought nails 
from STP results is located adjacent to the earliest part of the main house.  Archaeology 
sometimes contradicts architectural and documentary dates for buildings, but in this case results 
of excavation confirm that this frame house was built in the eighteenth century. 
 
Sheet midden 
 The largest and one of the most significant yard features on the site to understanding the 
experiences of tenants is a sheet midden that encompasses most of the backyard.  This layer of 
household refuse was deposited between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by 
residents who rented the property from William Wright.  Theirs seems to have been the most 
materially intensive occupation of the yard, and the artifacts in this midden constitute the debris 
of household activities of several families.  This midden was first identified during the STP 
survey as a thin band of coal ash 
that appeared in STPs A3, B1, 
B2, and B3, and later also in Unit 
7 Level E.  This band of coal 
ash, with fragments of coal and 
clinker mixed in, is therefore 
most concentrated in an area that 
takes us about a quarter of the 
current property, northeast of 
center.  There was a lighter 
concentration of coal ash in Unit 
1 Level D, and the postmold that 
this level caps, Unit 1 Level E, is 
filled almost solely with coal 
ash, coal, and clinker.  In 
addition, several 
contemporaneous strata adjacent 
to this band of coal ash, either 
above it or beside it, displayed 
spikes in the number of artifacts, 
especially coal but also all other 
artifact classes.  Where these 
levels were composed of a single 
soil type, and not fill, they are 
	




4	


 
%

+!


0
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+2


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Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 36 


Do not cite without permission of author. 
also part of the sheet midden.  These appear in Unit 2 (Levels D and F), Unit 6 (Levels D1, D2, 
and E), and Unit 7 (Level D).  The sheet midden therefore stretches out across most of the 
backyard.  The midden includes not only coal, which was burned for heat and cooking, but 
also an array of artifacts from organic food remains to bottles and ceramics and also combs, 
toothbrushes, marbles, and buttons.  This feature may form the bulk of the archaeological record 
of tenants’ lives here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though these residents 
also created other deposits. 
 
Work area 
 Among these other deposits was an early-to-mid twentieth-century workspace in the 
north side yard.  Here, in Unit 5, Level C, artifacts we recovered included a wrench, a horseshoe, 
screws and nails, a large bolt, and a pair of scissors.  These tools could have been used during the 
renovation and restoration during the early Women’s Club ownership, but the tools seem more 
closely related to machinery repair.  It would appear that this part of the yard was used by one or 
more of Wright’s tenants as a work space.  Though some work-related artifacts occurred at 
various spots across the site, here is the greatest concentration of them.  Whatever larger 
artifacts—machinery parts, a bench or shed—might have also been a part of the repairman’s 
work have been swept away during renovation, but some of the tools remain beneath the current 
garden beds. 
 
Yard scatter from several periods 
 In addition to these specific buildings and features, there is yard scatter across the entire 
site from all periods of occupation, from the late eighteenth century strata just above and 
transitioning into subsoil to the plastic embedded in the topsoil and grass roots of the last thirty 
years.  On an urban site, this is unsurprising.  What is intriguing is that the eighteenth- and very 
early nineteenth-century levels, which appear to be well-preserved, bear a substantial amount of 
coal.  This is a bit early for large-scale coal burning for household heating, and therefore 
suggests blacksmithing activity.  However, we did not locate a forge on the portion of the lot that 
we tested.  It probably lies to the east, further away from James Price’s house where the noise, 
smell, and smoke would bother his family less.  This puts it under or adjacent to the three houses 
that stand along Hanson Street at the back of Price’s original lot. 
 One particularly interesting stratum of yard scatter appeared in Unit 2, Level D.  Located 
on the edge of the sheet midden, this level included several toys, from the ever-ubiquitous 
marbles to the tires and ladder of a fire truck to a gun.  It is possible that these toys were simply 
tossed out onto the sheet midden.  After all, the truck is incomplete and broken.  However, 
because all these toys were closely spaced together in this location, on the edge of the midden 
rather than in its center, it is likely that the early twentieth-century tenants of the site carved out a 
play area for their child/children between the house and the midden.  This might be located in the 
spot where the toys were found or slightly to the west, closer to the house.  This area could yield 
a good deal of information on raising working-class children in the early twentieth century. 
 
Fill events 
 There are many fill layers in various places across the site.  Some of the more important 
ones include those in Units 1, 2, and 6 that contain bones and slag.  This is the deposited debris 
of kitchen and industrial activities on the site that were performed by members of the working 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 37 


Do not cite without permission of author. 
class, quite likely African Americans and/or tenants.  These strata date from the nineteenth 
century and bear the artifacts associated with enslaved and free labor. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Archaeological Chronology of the Site 
 
Colonial period 
 
During the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the area in which the site is located was 
part of a plantation called Long Acre.  During this period, tobacco was the principle crop 
produced on plantations in the region for export to Britain and bound for European markets.  
European and African inhabitation of Maryland’s Eastern Shore became more intense over this 
period and these colonists displaced many but not all of the Native Americans living here.  This 
excavation identified no strata on the Talbot County Women’s Club site that definitively date to 
the Colonial Period, though some of the contexts that have been attributed to the Federal Period 
may actually belong to the Colonial.  As a part of a plantation, we might have expected to see a 
level of plow zone arranging from a foot to a foot and a half thick where the passing of the plow 
had churned up subsoil and topsoil, leaving plow scars in the subsoil where the plow had 
occasionally dug in deeper than usual.  However, there was no evidence of this.  The absence of 
a plow zone may indicate that this portion of Long Acre was not actively farmed, but was instead 
part of a woodlot.  No evidence from previous Native American occupation was found either, 
although excavation stopped at the top of subsoil that might contain a record of those 
inhabitations prior to Contact.  This lack of evidence suggests that James Price’s household from 
1795 was the first to actively occupy the site. 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 38 


Do not cite without permission of author. 
The Early Price-Household Occupation (ca. 1795-1815) 
 
 When James Price and his household arrived in 1795, they were the first to intensively 
occupy this site.  The earliest archaeological contexts identified in this excavation date to the late 
eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries and rest immediately above subsoil, the natural 
soil from before human activity.  The period during which James Price owned the property 
stretched for the majority of his lifetime, from 1795 to 1869.  In order to look at the Price 
household’s changing use of the land over this period, the archaeological remains are broken into 
three phases according to the dates of the contexts.  These phases roughly follow major historical 
periods and the first period of occupation by the Prices and their household, including enslaved 
and free African Americans, corresponds approximately with the Federal Period in American 
history. 
James price bought the northern half of the block in September 1795 (Talbot County 
Land Records 26:425, 444) and soon after moved his household into residence there.  This 
period marked a major construction phase on the property, and architectural materials comprise 
24% of the assemblage from the Federal Period by number, or 17% by weight.  This is relatively 
high in comparison to other periods, especially the period immediately following, in which 
architectural materials make up only 1% of artifact counts and 2% of weights.  In contrast, the 
artifacts associated with daily living on the site make up a low percentage of the assemblage 
from this period.  Ceramics account for only 9% of counts and 1% of weights, while glassware 
sherds account for only 3% of counts and less than 1% of weights.  Faunal remains, which 
include the bones and shells left over after meals, appear in fair abundance during this period but 
almost all of this comes from a single oyster shell deposit.  Discounting this pile of shells, the 
low percentages of artifacts related to foodways corresponds to a small household that was just 
establishing itself.  Over time, the household grew in size as Price children were born and as 
James Price acquired several enslaved African Americans.  As such, in later periods, foodways 
artifacts grew to become a more dominant proportion of total artifacts.  In this early period, 
however, the archaeological record testifies to substantial construction efforts that were needed 
to turn a vacant plot of land into a home.  James Price had the frame house built around 1795 and 
the larger, adjacent brick house built in 1803.  Together, these are called the “double house” and 
form the core of what is today a single main house on the property.  Both the frame and masonry 
structures were probably built by contracting with local laborers since he did not yet own any 
slaves.  Around the end of the Federal Period, workers also erected a kitchen (building 1) behind 
the double house that was identified archaeologically and that by 1810, when Price appears in the 
census as a slaveholder, was probably the domain of an enslaved black cook. 
Part of the footprint of this building was located in Unit 1, where we documented two 
postholes and a line in the soil between the interior and exterior of the building.  One posthole, 
Feature 5, was excavated, while the second was only discovered in the sidewall at the close of 
excavation.  Running across the posthole of feature 5 was a line marking the boundary between 
levels L1 and L2 and Level M.  Although the line is not straight and curves slightly off-grid with 
the postholes, it appears to be the northern edge of the kitchen.  The soil differences between 
Level L1 and Level M are faint and consist mostly of a red flecking in Level L1 that continues in 
Level L2.  Apart from this flecking, all three levels look almost identical to subsoil.  It is 
therefore likely that these levels are yard scatter from shortly before the kitchen was erected, and 
that the differences in soil are the results of leeching from above, where the boundary between 
Levels J and K is more discrete.  Levels L1, L2, and M all contained creamware but no later 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 39 


Do not cite without permission of author. 
ceramics, dating these levels to the eighteenth century.  The posthole in the sidewall cuts through 
these eighteenth-century levels, and also into subsoil beneath L2, and is capped by Level J, which 
dates to the early Antebellum Period.  This suggests that the posthole was dug during the Federal 
Period, possibly towards its end.  The posthole in Feature 5 cuts through nineteenth-century 
levels, and would appear to be much later, but there were two postmolds in this feature, Levels E 
and I, suggesting that the post was replaced at some point in the building’s life and that the fill of 
the posthole in Feature 5 is not indicative of the construction date of the building.  Together, this 
evidence supports a late Federal Period construction of the kitchen.  The kitchen was therefore 
built around the same time that Price acquired slaves, which indicates that one of these was 
probably a cook.  It is also possible that these enslaved African Americans built the kitchen 
itself. 
It is conceivable that much of the work of cooking for the household was performed not 
only in the kitchen, but also in the yard around it.  A few feet to the west of building 1, in Unit 2, 
the topmost level—and the most recent one from this period, with a TPQ of 1805—was a deposit 
of oyster shells (Level N).  This was a sizeable pile of shells, accounting by weight for 64.9% of 
the assemblage from this period.  This large deposit seems unrelated to diet, given the low 
presence of ceramics, glass, and bone across the site at the time.  Because of its late date in the 
period and because it rests atop two other layers of fill (Levels O and P) before the transition to 
subsoil (Levels Q and R), the shell deposit here may have been used to level the grade in 
preparation for the kitchen construction.  This may have been necessary after a large hole was 
dug in the area to extract clay for making bricks during the construction of the brick house in 
1803. 
There is not much to suggest how the Price household used this part of the yard in the late 
eighteenth century, before the kitchen was constructed.  In Unit 2, underneath these three layers 
of fill and set into subsoil is a small posthole of unknown purpose (Level S).  Across most of the 
site, the very early Price years seem to have had a rather light and uncomplicated impact on the 
archaeological record.  In Unit 3 (Level I), Unit 5 (Levels H, I, and J), and Unit 7 (Levels J and 
K), the only levels dating to the Federal Period are yard scatter right above subsoil.  This yard 
scatter reveals no specific clues to the various activities that must have occurred here, including 
the work of enslaved African Americans, the leisure time of both the Price family and the slaves, 
and the early years of Price’s children.  It is also likely that his ward and her caretaker, a free 
black woman named Grace, spent time in the yard.  However, of the artifacts scattered around it 
during this period, nothing links specifically to any of these individuals. 
Besides the house and kitchen construction, the largest archaeological event from this 
period that we recorded was the planting of a tree to the south of the frame house.  Unit 4 
contained several levels of fill (Levels M, O, P, and Q), as well as a possible planting feature 
(Level N) dating to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  The hole being filled in at 
this time is large enough to suggest that a previous tree was removed and that this tree, which 
was later removed in the twentieth century, was a replacement.  Alternatively, the hole may have 
been a clay borrow pit from the making of bricks onsite for the frame house foundation.  The fill 
contains handmade brick, creamware, and pearlware, suggesting that the tree was planted in the 
very late eighteenth or very early nineteenth century, after the frame house was erected on its 
brick foundation.  Being south of the frame house, it would have kept the structure in shade and 
therefore cooler during the summer. 
The Price household thus spent much of this early period settling into the site.  They built 
two homes and a kitchen and planned well enough to take advantage of natural air conditioning 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 40 


Do not cite without permission of author. 
as best they could.  Undoubtedly, much of the manual labor that wrought all these changes in the 
landscape came from free and enslaved African Americans, who lived and worked in the area in 
great numbers.  However, it is impossible to say this with certainty without the written contracts 
James Price procured or some other similar textual source. 
 
 
Artifact Highlights: Nail Stock 
 
While the Prices and their household were settling in, someone appears to have 
been doing some blacksmithing on the site.  However, the evidence for this so far is a bit 
circumstantial, leaving it an open question as to whether this occurred on the property and 
who was doing it.  During excavation, we recovered pieces of nail stock, the raw iron bars 
from which smiths forged nails prior to the Industrial Revolution.  This came from STP 
D2, in the area where the kitchen was located and where later a lot of fill was laid down.  
In addition, fill layers in Unit 6 (particularly Level G) contained a large amount of slag.  
This context dates to the next period of the Price occupation, suggesting that the contents 
of the fill could have come from the Federal Period.  Lastly, during excavation we 
observed coal in many of the yard scatter levels that date to the late eighteenth and early 
nineteenth centuries.  Coal was in use only in metalworking operations until the Industrial 
Revolution took hold and introduced it into widespread use later in the nineteenth century 
for household heating.  Therefore, it is unusual to see coal in such early levels.  However, 
many of these were apparently very small pieces because their presence was not recorded 
in significant quantities in artifact counts or weights for this period.  Only 10 fragments 
weighing 65.3g were recovered through 1/4” mesh screen, sampling pieces that were 
larger than a U.S. quarter.  Like the slag in later fill events, the pieces of coal that were 
observed in these Federal Period levels appear to be scattered across the yard from some 
nearby activity.  We did not locate a forge within the limits of the Talbot County 
Women’s Club property, though it is entirely possible and perhaps even likely that a forge 
was in use further back on Price’s lot, away from his house and along Hanson Street.  We 
will have to test those adjoining properties to be certain.  If blacksmithing was occurring 
during this period on James Price’s lot, it is certain that he was not doing it.  He was a 
member of the gentry.  Perhaps his slaves engaged in some small-scale production, but it 
seems more likely that he rented out the space to neighboring craftsmen.  A number of 
free African Americans lived in this part of Easton at the time (Cynthia Schmidt 2014, 
elec. comm.) and any of them could have been trained in blacksmithing while enslaved on 
a plantation or could have learned the craft to support himself or herself while free.  
 
 
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Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 41 


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Levels and Features Dating to the Federal-Period Price-Household 
Occupation of 18 Talbot Lane (ca. 1795-1815) 
Unit 
Number 
Level/ 
Feature Interpretation TPQ Artifacts Depth 
1 L1 Kitchen interior 1762 
Coal, handmade brick, oyster 
shell, a nail, beef rib fragments, 
creamware, window glass, and an 
eye for a hook-and-eye clothing 
fastener.  Level L1 is cut in the 
southern sidewall by a posthole 1.06 
1 L2 Kitchen interior 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts 
Oyster shell, handmade brick, 
lime-based mortar, wine bottle 
glass, imported eighteenth-century 
tobacco pipe, creamware, and 
pork ribs 1.26 
1 M Kitchen exterior 1762 
Handmade brick, oyster shell, a 
nail, a cow or pig tooth, coarse 
earthenware, and creamware 1.09 
2 N 
Oyster shell 
deposit 1805 
Oyster shell, limestone, handmade 
brick, handmade nails, stoneware, 
creamware, pearlware, and bird 
bone 1.38 
2 O Fill 1720 
Oyster shell, handmade brick, 
slag, German stoneware, and 
mammal bone including some 
partially burned fragments and 
some fragments of joints 1.42 
2 P Fill 1820 
Oyster shell, limestone matching 
that in Level N, gneiss, handmade 
brick, cut nails, German 
stoneware matching that in Level 
O, creamware, pearlware, sherds 
from a coarse earthenware milk 
pan, a glass bottle stopper, and 
mammal bone 1.38 
2 Q 
Transitional 
subsoil 1805 
Oyster shell, brick, lime-based 
mortar, nails, bottle glass, 
creamware, coarse earthenware, 
and mammal rib bone fragments 1.57 
2 R 
Transitional 
subsoil 1840 
Handmade brick, lime-based 
mortar, oyster shell, coal, nails, 
creamware, white salt glazed 
stoneware, and mammal bone 1.69 
2 S (F9) Posthole 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts None 2.08 
3 I 
Occupation/ 
transitional subsoil 1820 
Oyster shell, slag, a nail, a sherd 
of burned ceramic, and a 
creamware sherd 1.68 
4 M Fill 1775 
Handmade brick, oyster shell, 
mammal bone, cut nails, a 
fragment of slate possibly part of 
a writing tablet, devitrified dark 1.31 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 42 


Do not cite without permission of author. 
green wine bottle glass and non- 
devitrified clear bottle glass, 
creamware, and pearlware 
4 N (F8) Planting feature 1899 
Handmade brick, coal, lime-based 
mortar, a cut nail, transfer-printed 
pearlware, and transfer-printed 
whiteware 1.50 
4 O Fill 1805 
Handmade brick, mortar, cut 
nails, an iron fork, mammal bone, 
devitrified dark green wine bottle 
glass, lead-glazed coarse 
earthenware, creamware, 
pearlware, canary ware, and 
widow glass 1.38 
4 P Fill 1795 
Handmade brick, oyster shell, 
mammal bone, table glass, and 
creamware 2.00 
4 Q Lens of fill 1805 
Oyster shell, clinker, devitrified 
dark green wine bottle glass, a 
wire nail, mammal bone, lead-
glazed coarse earthenware, and 
pearlware 2.15 
4 S 
Transitional 
subsoil 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts Handmade brick 2.25 
5 H 
Transitional 
subsoil 1820 
Handmade brick and shell-edged 
and engine-turned pearlware 1.15 
5 I 
Transitional 
subsoil 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts Handmade brick 1.33 
5 J 
Transitional 
subsoil 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts 
A nail and fragments of handmade 
brick and coal 1.52 
6 J 
Occupation/ 
transitional 
subsoil 1790 
Oyster shell, handmade brick, 
lime-based mortar, one nail, one 
glass fragment, a sherd from a 
coarse earthenware bowl, 
creamware, and mammal joint 
bone 1.60 
7 J Yard scatter 1762 
Coal, a burned feather edged 
creamware plate rim sherd, and a 
medicine bottle rim 1.33 
7 K 
Transitional 
subsoil 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts Imported tobacco pipe 1.65 
 
 
Artifacts from the Federal-Period Price-Household 
Occupation (ca. 1795-1815)   
Item Count Percent Weight Percent 
Coarse Earthenware 8 0.8 79.7 0.2 
Ironstone/White Granite 3 0.3 2.0 0.0 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 43 


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Stoneware 9 0.9 45.1 0.1 
Porcelain 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Whiteware 5 0.5 4.1 0.0 
Pearlware 16 1.6 13.6 0.0 
Creamware 30 3.0 59.2 0.1 
Yellowware 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Refined Earthenware 
(unidentified) 10 1.0 8.5 0.0 
Other Ware Types 4 0.4 170.7 0.3 
Total Ceramics 85 8.5 382.9 0.7 
Table Glass 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Bottle Glass 14 1.4 105.8 0.2 
Lighting Glass 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Window Glass/ Flatglass 10 1.0 9.3 0.0 
Other Glass 6 0.6 7.7 0.0 
Total Glass 30 3.0 122.8 0.2 
Handmade Wrought Nails 1 0.1 8.1 0.0 
Cut Nails 9 0.9 94.5 0.2 
Wire Nails 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Unidentified Nails 24 2.4 143.6 0.3 
Brick 189 18.9 8460.5 16.2 
Mortar 14 1.4 321.6 0.6 
Plaster 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Asbestos 1 0.1 2.9 0.0 
Other Architectural Materials 3 0.3 6.1 0.0 
Total Architectural Materials 241 24.1 9037.3 17.3 
Iron 10 1.0 100.0 0.2 
Copper Alloy 1 0.1 0.2 0.0 
Other Metals 1 0.1 8.7 0.0 
Total Metals 12 1.2 108.9 0.2 
Faunal Bone 64 6.4 144.4 0.3 
Shell (Oyster) 507 50.8 36408.1 69.7 
Other Organic Material 43 4.3 5886.7 11.3 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 44 


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Total Organic Materials 614 61.5 42439.0 81.3 
Buttons and Fasteners 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Toys 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Marbles 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Coins 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Tobacco Pipes 2 0.2 2.6 0.0 
Other Small Finds 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Total Personal Items 2 0.2 2.6 0.0 
Coal 10 1.0 65.3 0.1 
Clinker 2 0.2 19.0 0.0 
Slag 2 0.2 47.0 0.1 
Total Coal/Clinker/Slag 14 1.4 131.3 0.3 
Total 998 100.0 52225.0 100.0 
 
 
  
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 45 


Do not cite without permission of author. 
The Middle Price-Household Period (ca. 1815-1840) 
 
 Once the Price household had established itself, its members set about the daily affairs of 
living for the next few decades.  Architectural materials from this period drop to 1% of artifact 
counts and 2% of artifact weights out of the assemblage from the early Antebellum Period.  
Ceramics rise to become 42% of artifact counts and 11% of weights.  Animal bone also 
increases, as does the oyster shell that was related to meals.  Curiously, there was no real 
increase in the percentage of the assemblage made up by glass to match that in ceramics and 
organic food remains.  As the Price household’s archaeological presence became more focused 
in domestic trash, the household also shifted toward a simpler social structure in which the labor 
of enslaved African Americans supported a comfortable lifestyle of the Price family.  Additional 
free people no longer appeared in the censuses.  So too did any previous blacksmithing activity 
disappear, for no trace of it was found except in fill layers depositing material discarded in years 
prior.  What labor free people previously provided was taken on by the Price’s increased number 
of enslaved African Americans. 
 Among the enslaved laborers whose work kept up the Price family’s social standing was 
at least one cook.  During this period, a layer of soil and debris built up inside (Unit 1 Level J) 
and outside (Unit 1 Level K) around the kitchen that contained animal bones, pottery and 
glassware sherds, and other artifacts.  The debris inside the kitchen covered over the posthole 
that appeared in the Unit 1 sidewall and probably also the posthole in Feature 5, though that has 
since been re-dug and the post replaced.  Among the ceramic vessels that the cook used, course 
earthenware bowls and jars made up a large proportion, as did the older, less stylish creamware 
and pearlware vessels made in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  But the kitchen was 
no stranger to porcelain or the newer whitewares.  Characteristic of its function, neither the 
interior nor the exterior of the kitchen bear any table glass from this period.  Instead, the glass 
shards from Units 1, 2, and 6 included mostly bottle and window glass.  For the enslaved cook(s) 
who labored away in and around the kitchen, this was a place of work.  The few personal items 
appeared in early Antebellum levels from Unit 1 (Levels J and K), Unit 2 (Levels I, J, K, L, and 
M), and 6 (Levels F, G, H, and I) include only a handful of buttons and two fragments of tobacco 
pipe. 
 During this period, the waste from the kitchen was deposited along with soil and other 
debris from elsewhere into the borrow pit nearby, which was still in need of filling.  These fill 
events (Unit 2 Levels I, J, L, and M; Unit 6 Levels F, G, and H) make up most of the 
archaeological contexts from the middle Price period.  Somewhere in the midst of in-fill 
someone saw fit to plant some small plant (Unit 2 Level K), but this cannot have lasted too long 
before more fill was laid on top of it.  Out in the middle of the yard, more artifacts were scattered 
by everyday activities (Unit 3, Level H; Unit 7 Level I).  Apart from the kitchen, no intense 
activity appears to have occurred in the Price backyard that left a recognizable archaeological 
presence.  Unit 5 bore no levels dating to this period, and the traces of whatever may have 
transpired under the tree in Unit 4 were obliterated by twentieth-century disturbance when the 
tree was removed. 
 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 46 


Do not cite without permission of author. 
 
 
 
Levels and Features Dating to the Early-Antebellum-Period 
Price-Household Occupation of 18 Talbot Lane (ca. 1815-1840) 
Unit 
Number 
Level/ 
Feature Interpretation TPQ Artifacts Depth 
1 J Kitchen interior 1820 
Coal, mortar, slag, 
handmade brick, oyster 
shell, cut nails, iron strap, 
joint and long bones, wine 
and other bottle glass, 
creamware, pearlware, 
whiteware and stone 1.03 
1 K 
Kitchen 
exterior 1790 
Oyster shell, handmade 
brick, cut nails, stone, 
buttons, flint, coarse 
earthenware, creamware, 
porcelain, and rib and other 
bone fragments 1.06 
2 I Fill 1820 
Oyster shell, clinker, brick, 
cut nails, a gun flint, black-
glazed coarse earthenware 
matching that in Level H, 
creamware, pearlware, 
transfer-printed and flow .81 
Artifact Highlights: Gun Flint 
Amid all the fill during this period trying to level the ground where the borrow pit 
had been dug, we recovered a small gun flint from Unit 2, Level I.  It probably belonged 
to a rifle or fowling piece, since it is too small to be effective on a musket.  Enslaved 
members of the Price household may have used this gun to help procure food for the 
cook, either to prepare for the Prices or for the enslaved men and women’s own 
consumption.  It is, of course, also possible that James Price or one of his family 
members took part in hunting for sport, which was a common practice among gentry of 
the period. 
 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 47 


Do not cite without permission of author. 
blue whiteware, bottle glass, 
and mammal bone 
2 J Fill 1820 
Oyster shell, handmade 
brick, cut nails, window 
glass, the base of a burned 
redware vessel, black-glazed 
coarse earthenware matching 
sherds in Levels H and I, 
creamware, pearlware, 
whiteware with red transfer 
print, annular cabled 
pearlware, a bone tool 
handle, large and small 
mammal bone fragments, 
and drinking glass fragments .85 
2 K (F7) Planting feature 1820 
Oyster shell, mortar, nails, 
three links of a brass chain, 
window and bottle glass, 
black-glazed coarse 
earthenware, stoneware, 
creamware, pearlware, 
whiteware, annular cabled 
pearlware, annular 
creamware, porcelain, and 
mammal and bird bone 1.12 
2 L 
Fill (gravel 
concentration) 18992 
Handmade and machine-
made brick, clinker, oyster 
shell, nails, drinking glass, 
burned earthenware, black-
glazed coarse earthenware 
matching sherds in Level K, 
lyme-based plaster, 
creamware, pearlware 
including at least two green 
feather-edged plates and cup 
and mug handles, a copper 
disc with three nail holes in 
it, and mammal bone 
including a pig mandible .95 
2 M Fill 1840 
Oyster shell, handmade 
brick, cut nails, clear and 
dark green bottle glass, 
burned stoneware, lead-
glazed coarse earthenware, 1.24 








































 



















2
 The TPQ would be 1840 except for one piece of modern mortar that honestly looks like it could be a rock.  I didn’t 
re-catalogue it just yet, but I could if it makes sense to. 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 48 


Do not cite without permission of author. 
creamware, pearlware—
much of it from a green 
shell-edged plate—
porcelain, and mammal bone 
including ribs and a cow 
horn 
3 H Occupation 1820 
Oyster shell, coal, clinker, 
mortar, handmade brick, 
nails, creamware, 
handpainted pearlware, 
devitrified wine bottle glass, 
and devitrified window glass 1.44 
6 F Fill 1840 
Oyster shell, handmade 
brick, lime-based mortar, 
slag, clinker, cut nails, dark 
green and clear bottle glass, 
a whetstone, milk pan and 
garden pot sherds, 
creamware, mocha motif 
creamware, green feather- 
edged plate and other 
pearlware sherds, sherds of a 
porcelain bowl, of redware, 
and of stoneware, two brass 
buttons, and mammal rib and 
long and other bone 1.09 
6 G 
Fill 
(brick rubble) 1775 
Slag and handmade brick, 
mortar, coal, oyster shell, 
one nail, lead-glazed coarse 
earthenware, pearlware, 
porcelain, leg and other 
mammal bone, and a 
fragment of a writing slate 1.13 
6 H 
Fill 
(brick rubble) 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts 
Oyster shell, mortar, brick, 
clinker, and mammal bone 1.33 
6 I 
Occupation/ 
transitional 
subsoil 1840 
Handmade brick, lime-based 
mortar, slag, oyster shell, 
nails, wire bottle glass, 
coarse earthenware bowl 
sherds, creamware, a pewter 
button, mammal leg and rib 
bone, and imported tobacco 
pipe bowl and stem 
fragments 1.40 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 49 


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7 I Yard scatter 1840 
Coal, oyster shell, handmade 
brick, cut nails, wine and 
other bottle, window, and 
wine glass, a sherd of terra 
cotta pot rim, a coarse 
earthenware handle, 
porcelain, creamware, 
pearlware, whiteware, and 
machine-sawed mammal 
bone 1.22 
 
 
Artifacts from the Early Antebellum-Period Price-
Household Occupation (ca. 1815-1840)   
Item Count Percent Weight Percent 
Coarse Earthenware 105 6.0 675.9 4.7 
Ironstone/White Granite 16 0.9 37.9 0.3 
Stoneware 6 0.3 115.5 0.8 
Porcelain 41 2.3 56.8 0.4 
Whiteware 67 3.8 77.2 0.5 
Pearlware 226 12.9 271.8 1.9 
Creamware 235 13.4 227.9 1.6 
Yellowware 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Refined Earthenware 
(unidentified) 11 0.6 27.9 0.2 
Other Ware Types 38 2.2 126.5 0.9 
Total Ceramics 745 42.4 1617.4 11.1 
Table Glass 1 0.1 18.7 0.1 
Bottle Glass 38 2.2 177.2 1.2 
Lighting Glass 11 0.6 4.1 0.0 
Window Glass/ Flatglass 25 1.4 14.4 0.1 
Other Glass 12 0.7 7.6 0.1 
Total Glass 87 5.0 222.0 1.5 
Handmade Wrought Nails 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Cut Nails 19 1.1 157.4 1.1 
Wire Nails 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Unidentified Nails 90 5.1 482.0 3.3 
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Brick 452 25.7 14712.1 101.2 
Mortar 13 0.7 100.5 0.7 
Plaster 3 0.2 6.8 0.0 
Asbestos 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Other Architectural Materials 3 0.2 211.5 1.5 
Total Architectural Materials 19 1.1 318.8 2.2 
Iron 25 1.4 280.7 1.9 
Copper Alloy 3 0.2 13.0 0.1 
Other Metals 2 0.1 203.7 1.4 
Total Metals 30 1.7 497.4 3.4 
Faunal Bone 394 22.4 958.6 6.6 
Shell (Oyster) 237 13.5 4744.8 32.6 
Other Organic Material 5 0.3 27.8 0.2 
Total Organic Materials 636 36.2 5731.2 39.4 
Buttons and Fasteners 5 0.3 6.3 0.0 
Toys 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Marbles 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Coins 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Tobacco Pipes 2 0.1 1.4 0.0 
Other Small Finds 2 0.1 11.6 0.1 
Total Personal Items 9 0.5 19.3 0.1 
Coal 19 1.1 223.9 1.5 
Clinker 31 1.8 498.7 3.4 
Slag 181 10.3 5404.1 37.2 
Total Coal/Clinker/Slag 231 13.1 6126.7 42.2 
Total 1757 100.0 14532.8 100.0 
 
 
  
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 51 


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The Late Price-Household Occupation (ca. 1840-1869) 
 
 During the middle of the nineteenth century, toward the end of the Price family tenure on 
the property, the household continued its daily activities with some alterations.  Bottle glass rose 
to 5.9% of artifact counts and 4.2% of weights, and glasswares would continue to make up 
approximately the same percentages through later periods until the present.  This period saw a 
decrease in faunal materials as percentages of the assemblage, perhaps due to an aging household 
with fewer members, though confirming this will rely on census records.  During this period, 
with the gathering speed of the Industrial Revolution, coal and clinker came to occupy a higher 
percentage of the assemblage.  Coal makes up 10% of artifacts counts and 14% of weights, while 
clinker accounts for 4% of counts and 5% of weights.  The Prices probably purchased a coal-
burning stove to heat their home, as did many other Americans at this time as coal became 
readily available for that purpose.  The high percentages that architectural materials, especially 
cut nails and brick, make out of the assemblage indicate construction activity on the site during 
this period, though the distributions of these materials are even enough in space and in 
stratigraphy to defy the identification of a specific building site or sites.  Excavation in Unit 1 
does, however, suggest repair work on the kitchen. 
 As the kitchen reached several decades in age, its post-in-ground architecture came to the 
end of its life span.  Sometimes buildings are at this point dismantled but in this case the kitchen 
was repaired and continued to service the cook and the Price household.  Sometime in the middle 
of the nineteenth century, after coal had come into use, the post at the northeast corner of the 
kitchen was removed and coal ash and clinker fell into its place, secured in Feature 5 as Unit 1 
Level I.  A new post was put in its place and the hold filled in with dirt and debris from the 
kitchen yard.  As a result, the contents of Unit 1 Level F, the posthole that was excavated in three 
sections, bear the signature of the middle of the nineteenth century: coal, clinker, and ironstone 
pottery, among other artifacts.  It appears that at this point a raised wooden floor was also added 
to the kitchen.  Previously, the dirt floor had been a work space into which bones, glass shards, 
and ceramic sherds were pressed to form identifiable archaeological levels.  But we documented 
no strata from the latter half of the nineteenth century other than fill pushed under the building.  
There is therefore a gap in occupation surface between use of the early Antebellum dirt floor and 
the laying down of the sheet midden in the last decade of the nineteenth and into the twentieth 
centuries.  A wooden floor helped the cook to maintain a clean environment for food preparation.  
To the west, the entrance to the kitchen may also have been upgraded.  Unit 2, Level H included 
a concentration of gravel that may be the remnants of a path leading from the main house to the 
kitchen.  Elsewhere in the yard, the space remained open and various artifacts were scattered by 
its use (Unit 3 Level G; Unit 5 Levels G1 and G2; Unit 7 Levels G and H). 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 52 


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Levels and Features Dating to the Mid 19thth-Century 
Price-Household Occupation of 18 Talbot Lane (ca. 1840-1869) 
Unit 
Number 
Level/ 
Feature Interpretation TPQ Artifacts Depth 
1 F1 (F5) Posthole 1830 
Brick, slag, oyster shell, cut 
nails, bottle and window 
glass, drinking glass, coarse 
earthenware, creamware, 
pearlware, transfer-printed 
whiteware, and yellow ware .71 
1 F2 (F5) Posthole 1840 
Handmade brick, a large 
piece of slag, mold-blown 
empontiled wine or brandy 
bottle, creamware, 
pearlware, whiteware, 
ironstone, coarse 
earthenware, window glass, 
and cut nails .96 
1 F3 (F5) Posthole 1820 
Slag, nails, a clay marble, 
wine bottle glass, coarse 
earthenware, creamware, a 
tobacco pipe bowl 
fragment, pearlware, 
whiteware, and a small 
amount of ironstone 1.18 
1 I (F5) Postmold 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts Clinker 1.17 
2 H 
Remnants of a 
path? 1830 
Oyster shell, black-glazed 
coarse earthenware, 
machine-made brick, bottle 
glass, creamware, 
pearlware, yellowware, and 
mamal bone .70 
3 G Occupation 1885 
Handmade brick, mortar, 
cut nails, a ceramic marble, 
bottle and window glass, 
and coarse earthenware, 
creamware, and shell edged 
pearlware sherds 1.30 
5 G1 Occupation 1840 
Pearlware, creamware, 
ironstone, possible canning 
jar shards, window glass, 
and sherds of transfer-
printed whiteware .70 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 53 


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5 G2 Occupation 1846 
Whiteware, pearlware, 
creamware—some of it 
transfer-printed—a small 
quantity of ironstone, cut 
nails, and window glass .90 
7 F 
Occupation/yard 
scatter 1840 
Coal, clinker, handmade 
brick, cut nails, ironstone, 
and butchered mammal 
bone .70 
7 G Yard scatter 1840 
Coal, clinker, oyster shell, 
handmade brick, cut and 
wire nails, wine and 
medicine bottle and window 
glass, creamware, coarse 
earthenware, ironstone, one 
glass button, and mammal 
and bird bone .82 
7 H Yard scatter 1907 
Coal, clinker, oyster shell, 
handmade brick, cut nails, a 
medicine bottle base 
marked “WT&Co,” amber 
and other bottle glass, 
window glass, creamware, 
whiteware, ironstone, and 
butchered mammal bone, a 
wire nail, a brass pin with 
rhinestones set in it, and a 
celluloid comb 1.00 
 
 
Artifacts from the Mid Nineteenth-Century Price-
Household Occupation (ca. 1840-1869)   
Item Count Percent Weight Percent 
Coarse Earthenware 20 2.5 58.0 1.4 
Ironstone/White Granite 35 4.5 64.8 1.6 
Stoneware 8 1.0 91.6 2.2 
Porcelain 3 0.4 1.9 0.0 
Whiteware 56 7.1 50.0 1.2 
Pearlware 27 3.4 24.4 0.6 
Creamware 44 5.6 59.9 1.5 
Yellowware 3 0.4 15.9 0.4 
Refined Earthenware 4 0.5 2.6 0.1 
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(unidentified) 
Other Ware Types 2 0.3 5.4 0.1 
Total Ceramics 202 25.7 374.5 9.1 
Table Glass 4 0.5 5.1 0.1 
Bottle Glass 46 5.9 173.2 4.2 
Lighting Glass 3 0.4 0.6 0.0 
Window Glass/ Flatglass 93 11.8 54.1 1.3 
Other Glass 19 2.4 13.9 0.3 
Total Glass 165 21.0 246.9 6.0 
Handmade Wrought Nails 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Cut Nails 36 4.6 209.9 5.1 
Wire Nails 2 0.3 8.4 0.2 
Unidentified Nails 105 13.4 496.6 12.1 
Brick 55 7.0 994.1 24.2 
Mortar 2 0.3 11.3 0.3 
Plaster 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Asbestos 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Other Architectural Materials 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Total Architectural Materials 200 25.4 1720.3 41.9 
Iron 4 0.5 7.9 0.2 
Copper Alloy 2 0.3 1.8 0.0 
Other Metals 8 1.0 20.4 0.5 
Total Metals 14 1.8 30.1 0.7 
Faunal Bone 60 7.6 71.9 1.7 
Shell (Oyster) 19 2.4 133.6 3.3 
Other Organic Material 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Total Organic Materials 79 10.1 205.5 5.0 
Buttons and Fasteners 2 0.3 1.2 0.0 
Toys 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Marbles 2 0.3 8.7 0.2 
Coins 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Tobacco Pipes 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 55 


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Other Small Finds 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Total Personal Items 4 0.5 9.9 0.2 
Coal 82 10.4 580.1 14.1 
Clinker 29 3.7 218.8 5.3 
Slag 9 1.1 721.0 17.5 
Total Coal/Clinker/Slag 120 15.3 1519.9 37.0 
Total 786 100.0 4110.2 100.0 
  
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 56 


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The Dawson Household Occupation (ca. 1869-1891) 
 
 When James Price died, his family sold the property to Mordecai and Deborah Dawson.  
The Dawsons moved in and occupied the property for the next 32 years, during which time they 
continued to leave an archaeological signature much like that of the Price years: one of genteel 
white family whose lifestyle was facilitated by African-American labor, this time free.  
Compared to the other periods of occupation at this site, ceramics, glass, and architectural 
materials make up a medium percentage of the assemblage from these years.  Likewise, the 
faunal material makes up a medium 25% of artifact counts and 27% of weights.  With 
architectural materials making up 20.9% of artifact counts and 34.2% of weights, there appears 
to have been some construction during this time, and either during the late Price years or while 
the Dawsons owned the property the main house was extended toward the east with an addition 
reaching almost to the kitchen.  This addition appears on the first Sanborn fire insurance map of 
the property in 1891, the year the Dawsons sold the property.  The addition still stands and is 
timber frame on a brick foundation.  This is consistent with the large number of nails from the 
Dawson period, which account for 14.6% of artifact counts, and the amount of brick, which by 
weight makes up 19.7% of the assemblage.  However, the Dawsons mostly produced domestic 
waste from daily living.  They continued the household consumption of coal, which with clinker 
makes up 9% of artifact counts and 13% of weights.  They also continued to use the kitchen, 
where their live-in cook Harriet Anderson prepared meals for the household. 
 Anderson would have arrived at the property to find a relatively decent space in which to 
practice the trade by which she supported her family, along with help from her laborer husband.  
The kitchen had just been repaired by the Prices and sported a brand new wood floor.  The 
Dawsons and Anderson were able to keep the yard around the kitchen reasonably clean by 
pushing debris under the building.  This was recorded as Unit 1 Level H.  Again contributing to 
the interpretation that a wood floor was added, the layer is too densely artifact-rich to be a 
useable work surface and it respects no division between the interior and the exterior of the 
building.  Usually, this would indicate that the building had been demolished and this layer of fill 
was laid over it.  However, we know from the levels above H and from the Sanborn fire 
insurance maps that the building did not come down until around 1900.  Therefore the fill that 
makes up Level H must have been pushed under the raised wooden floor that was added late in 
the Price tenure. 
 However, this did not entirely dispose of the artifacts scattered in the yard around the 
kitchen.  379 artifacts were recovered in Unit 6 Level E, the yard surface to the north of the 
kitchen during this period.  Among these artifacts, ceramics, glass, and faunal material were rich, 
suggesting that in the three decades that Anderson served here as cook for the Dawsons, the 
household kept her quite busy.  The material record of her work lies richly here in the yard 
around the kitchen, and much of the fill under her feet as she worked was probably also the 
material record of her cooking, although among the fill of Unit 1 Level H were also fine pieces 
like an opaline glass pitcher that were probably kept and used in the main house by the Dawsons 
and not in the kitchen by Anderson. 
 Other contexts from this period are less specifically identifiable.  In Unit 3, two levels of 
yard scatter (Levels F1 and F2), were recorded.  In Unit 5, two levels of fill were laid (Levels E 
and F).  These levels contain artifacts from the household’s daily affairs, from pots for flowers to 
pottery for eating and from architectural materials to canning jar fragments. 
 
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Artifact Highlights: 1794 U.S. Penny 
 
Archaeologists usually use coins mostly for dating purposes.  Especially in the 
modern era, they bear stamps of the year in which they were produced and motifs that can 
be readily identified to help determine terminus post quem in the absence of more closely 
datable artifacts.  However, the penny we recovered from the fill under the kitchen, Unit 
1 Level H, showed us a different side of coins.  Unlike most pennies and nickels, dimes 
and quarters, which are lost or otherwise taken out of circulation within a few decades, 
the coin deposited in the late nineteenth century bears the stamp of 1794 and one of the 
first images ever pressed onto a U.S. penny, that of Lady Liberty holding a cap on a pole. 
 
 
 
The image on the coin is a slightly revised version of the first U.S. penny, minted the year 
before, which had met with concern over Liberty’s wilder hair and the use of a chain with 
thirteen links on the reverse, which a Philadelphia journalist proclaimed to be “‘a bad 
omen for Liberty.’”  Both the 1793 and 1794 versions are modeled on the medal that 
American diplomat Benjamin Franklin and French artist Augustin Dupré created in 1782 
to celebrate American independence (Fischer 2005:137-9). 
The iconography of Liberty with the cap and pole originated in Ancient Rome, 
where “slaves were released from bondage by a ritual in which a praetor touched them 
with his wand and gave them a stocking cap as a token of their liberty” (Fischer 2005:41).  
This history and symbolism were familiar to Early Modern Europeans and Americans in 
an age in which leaders read widely from classical texts.  The imagery was reinvigorated 
by German archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s recovery in 1766 of a bas-
relief of a Roman goddess of liberty during excavations in Rome.  Throughout Britain 
and British colonies in the Americas, cartoons, sketches, and other images of the goddess 
libertas, later known simply as Lady Liberty, holding a long wand with a stocking cap on 
the end of it, became widespread in the eighteenth century (Fischer 2005:41). 
 The image on the coin symbolizes the struggles and inconsistencies within the 
Revolutionary era in which it emerged and, subsequently, highlights the nature of 
American freedom and equality as works in progress.  The patriots of the American 
Revolution claimed in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal 
and that liberty was an inalienable right.  In New York City in 1766, the Sons of Neptune 
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adopted the liberty pole with the cap on top as an icon of the rights to autonomy in a 
pluralistic society (Fischer 2005:37-43).  And yet, the Roman tradition they cited was one 
in which “liberty implied inequality.”  Most people in Ancient Rome were born into some 
form of bondage and attained various liberties and degrees of liberty according to their 
rank in society.  And moreover, liberty in the Roman sense was a manmade creation, 
bestowed upon one person by another and identified with the artifacts of the cap and 
wand (Fischer 2005:6-7).  Within the discourse of the American Revolution and the 
republicanism of the early years of the United States, there was therefore a disconnect 
between visions of liberty as natural or divine rights and as social constructions that could 
be given or taken away.  This inconsistency ran parallel to the holding of slaves by many 
of the Founding Fathers.  The finely tuned subtleties of the interplay between freedom 
and liberty, equality and hierarchy continue to structure much public discourse, debate, 
and policy in the United States in terms of class, racial, and other social relations.  The 
1794 penny symbolizes these inconsistencies and the dynamism they have produced in 
American life. 
 The penny was recovered from fill underneath the kitchen floor where Harriet 
Anderson labored to prepare meals for the Dawson household, which included her own 
family as well.  She may have laid down the fill herself and the coin could have been lost 
at this time, or at some previous date.  Much of the material in the fill level came from the 
middle of the nineteenth century, so the coin could have belonged either to Anderson or 
to one of the Price’s slaves.  Pennies being worth a good deal more in the nineteenth 
century than they are today, this coin was probably dropped accidentally.  But whether it 
belonged to Anderson or to one of the Price slaves, it remained in human hands for 
between four and nine decades—well after many of the other coins minted in 1794 had 
fallen from circulation.  Why it lasted so long is unclear. 
Certainly, the penny possessed economic value.  But the African Americans on 
this site may have been keenly aware also of its symbolic import.  What, specifically, 
they thought of it one can only speculate.  Unlike the image’s designer, the Price slaves 
and Harriet Anderson are unlikely to have read any of the classics, and certainly unlikely 
to have been well versed in Roman history.  Yet, they probably knew enough about the 
Roman use of caps and wands in granting freedom to slaves for this coin to mean 
something different, and more significant to them than it would to a free, white person at 
the time.  Perhaps one of the Price slaves identified in this coin the promise of freedom.  
We do not yet know whether Anderson was ever enslaved, but perhaps it meant the same 
thing to her.  Or perhaps yet still she saw in its iconography the imperfections and 
inconsistencies of freedom in a Postemancipation America still, like Ancient Rome, 
rigidly hierarchical and in which white Southerners wasted little time in rolling back 
African-American liberties and installing the legal and social institutions of Jim Crow.  
Perhaps whoever dropped the coin was conscious of its symbolism and perhaps 
unconscious of it.  But at least for the archaeologist, lady liberty with her pole and cap 
help to illuminate the ongoing struggles for freedom in Easton and in America in the 
nineteenth century and throughout our history. 
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Levels and Features Dating to the Late-Nineteenth-Century 
Dawson-Household Occupation of 18 Talbot Lane (ca. 1869-1891) 
Unit 
Number 
Level/ 
Feature Interpretation TPQ Artifacts Depth 
1 H Fill 1868 
Coal, oyster shell, mortar, 
slag, clinker, cut nails, wine 
bottle, other bottle, and 
window glass, drinking 
glass, most of an opaline 
glass pitcher, handmade 
brick, part of a celluloid 
comb, a 1794 penny, a 
straight pin and tobacco pipe 
stem, stoneware, milk pan 
sherds, creamware, 
pearlware, whiteware, some 
ironstone, porcelain, 
butchered long bone, and rib 
and joint bone fragments .71 
Artifact Highlights: Canning Jar Fragments 
 
 During this period, fragments of glass canning jars begin to appear in small but 
noticeable quantities.  They appear particularly in Unit 5, Levels E and F.  Although 
never making up more than a fraction of a percent of the total assemblage, canning jars 
significantly altered the way that cooks like Harriet Anderson were able to perform their 
duties in large households such as that of the Dawsons. 
 The first commercial production of food in metal cans began in 1837 and in 1858, 
Mason invented the screw-top glass canning jar (Miller et al. 2000:8, 14).  Canned food 
enabled cooks to work outside of what was available during a season and to introduce 
more variety into the diets they prepared in the winter months.  Prior to food canning, 
they were restricted by what was fresh and what would keep well in a root cellar, or an 
icehouse if they worked for a particularly wealthy family.  The introduction of the 
canning jar by Mason enabled cooks to can food in their own kitchens, exerting a greater 
degree of control over the ingredients at their disposal.  However, canning is an intensive 
process that takes time away from the constant preparation of meals that Harriet 
Anderson would have had to do.  Canning requires not only preparing food but also 
keeping a hot water bath running until all the jars have been successfully sealed.  This 
occupies the stove and makes preparing anything else difficult for the duration of a 
canning session.  Still, the ability to control the ingredients and the seasonal availability 
of dishes meant that Anderson was able to offer the Dawsons a greater diversity of foods.  
Surely, this helped her to maintain her position in the household through the years. 
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3 F1 Occupation 1885 
Coal, handmade brick, 
stoneware, cut nails, 
ironstone, creamware, lead-
glazed coarse earthenware, 
and bottle and window glass 1.08 
3 F2 Occupation 1885 
Coal, cut nails, one wire 
nail, an iron button, bottle 
and window glass, a graphite 
pencil fragment, stoneware, 
terra cotta flower pot, 
ironstone, and pearlware 
sherds 1.19 
5 E Fill 1820 
One nail, one sherd of 
ironstone, and fragments of a 
canning jar .43 
5 F Fill 1840 
Canning jar fragments, 
ironstone, pearlware, some 
creamware, handmade brick, 
cut nails, coal, and a 
fragment of an early wine 
bottle .53 
6 E 
Natural 
accumulation/ 
occupation 1885 
Oyster shell, coal, clinker, 
handmade brick, cut nails, 
wine bottle and table glass, 
creamware, pearlware, 
yellowware, transfer-printed 
whiteware, ironstone, terra 
cotta pipe stem, a straight 
pin, a glass button, mammal 
limb, rib, and jaw bones, and 
bird bone .81 
 
 
Artifacts from the Late Nineteenth-Century 
Dawson-Household Occupation (ca. 1869-1891)   
Item Count Percent Weight Percent 
Coarse Earthenware 40 3.0 217.5 3.1 
Ironstone/White Granite 43 3.3 134.9 1.9 
Stoneware 2 0.2 97.6 1.4 
Porcelain 18 1.4 60.8 0.9 
Whiteware 79 6.0 99.3 1.4 
Pearlware 90 6.8 75.2 1.1 
Creamware 52 3.9 37.6 0.5 
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Yellowware 9 0.7 23.1 0.3 
Refined Earthenware 
(unidentified) 3 0.2 4.2 0.1 
Other Ware Types 7 0.5 17.9 0.3 
Total Ceramics 343 25.9 768.1 11.0 
Table Glass 36 2.7 533.4 7.6 
Bottle Glass 95 7.2 254.3 3.6 
Lighting Glass 8 0.6 4.5 0.1 
Window Glass/ Flatglass 71 5.4 50.2 0.7 
Other Glass 7 0.5 14.1 0.2 
Total Glass 217 16.4 856.5 12.2 
Handmade Wrought Nails 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Cut Nails 58 4.4 310.7 4.4 
Wire Nails 3 0.2 7.6 0.1 
Unidentified Nails 132 10.0 570.3 8.1 
Brick 69 5.2 1383.0 19.7 
Mortar 10 0.8 117.9 1.7 
Plaster 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Asbestos 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Other Architectural Materials 4 0.3 9.9 0.1 
Total Architectural Materials 276 20.9 2399.4 34.2 
Iron 20 1.5 85.1 1.2 
Copper Alloy 2 0.2 13.9 0.2 
Other Metals 15 1.1 33.2 0.5 
Total Metals 37 2.8 132.2 1.9 
Faunal Bone 205 15.5 367.1 5.2 
Shell (Oyster) 119 9.0 1496.6 21.4 
Other Organic Material 3 0.2 17.7 0.3 
Total Organic Materials 327 24.7 1881.4 26.9 
Buttons and Fasteners 2 0.2 0.5 0.0 
Toys 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Marbles 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Coins 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
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Tobacco Pipes 2 0.2 4.2 0.1 
Other Small Finds 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Total Personal Items 4 0.3 4.7 0.1 
Coal 88 6.7 760.2 10.8 
Clinker 20 1.5 138.7 2.0 
Slag 7 0.5 63.7 0.9 
Total Coal/Clinker/Slag 115 8.7 962.6 13.7 
Total 1322 100.0 7007.0 100.0 
 
 
  
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The Wright Tenant Occupation (ca. 1891-1946) 
 
 The period during which William Wright owned and rented the property to tenants is the 
real gem of this archaeological site for a project interested in learning about the lives of African 
Americans and tenants on The Hill.  As deeply connected as the Price-Dawson kitchen is to the 
labor of enslaved and free African-American cooks, on a site where so many of the 
archaeological contexts are yard scatter and fill, much of the earlier materials cannot be linked 
specifically to the enslaved or working-class members of complex households.  In the late 
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when tenants alone occupied the site, the possibilities 
for analysis are much greater.  This phase of occupation also created the greatest number of 
archaeological strata and added the largest number of artifacts by far to the assemblage.  This is 
only logical, since the period is almost as long as the combined Price tenure and Wright also 
rented to not one but several families. 
 As Wright shifted the landscape of the property from single-family occupancy to 
maximizing the rents he could get by letting out different parts of the lot to different families, 
buildings like the Price/Dawson kitchen became irrelevant.  Architectural materials account for 
fully 32.7% of artifact counts and 53.3% of artifact weights from this period and many of these 
artifacts are concentrated in Units 1, 2, and 6, which had 575, 881, and 744 architectural artifacts, 
respectively.  The kitchen destruction thus featured prominently in the statistical record of 
archaeological events in this period.  The post in Feature 5, which had already been replaced 
once, was removed for good in the twentieth century and the hole filled with refuse from the 
accumulating sheet midden that filled the backyard.  Besides being less useful to an owner intent 
on subdividing even the main house room by room to rent to tenants, the kitchen had once again 
run up against the limited lifespan of a post-in-ground building.  Moreover, as the twentieth 
century progressed, detached kitchens became a thing of the past all across the South. 
 In order to further expand his ability to collect rents, Wright built a new house on the 
corner of Talbot Lane and South Lane by 1896, when it first appears on the Sanborn maps.  This 
gave him more floor space to rent and maximized the productivity of the property.  We did not 
excavate around this house, but its construction was apiece with landscape changes that shifted 
the nature of the property toward tenancy.  Wright also enlarged the main house with its final 
addition between 1896, when it does not appear on the Sanborn map, and 1901, when it does.  
Unit 2, Level G contains fill from this construction episode.  The addition must have encountered 
or even caused drainage problems, for a drainage pipe was installed, its ditch recorded in our 
excavations as Unit 5, Level D.  The ditch was dug sometime early in the twentieth century.  Its 
fill contains a mixture of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century artifacts, from 
creamware to wire nails.  After the kitchen destruction and house and addition constructions, 
however, the property was relatively free of abrupt alterations to the built environment for many 
years.  As anyone who has rented property knows, there is little incentive by either the landlord 
or the tenant to build much of anything.  Instead, the buildings were allowed to decay around the 
tenants to the point where the Women’s Club felt obliged to embark on drastic renovations at the 
conclusion of this period. 
 Most of the contexts from this period reflect the materially rich lives of several families 
able to acquire new products with the new age of consumerism that the late nineteenth century 
ushered in.  Mail order catalogues and department stores, chain shops and national brands made 
goods available at astonishing levels even to those who could not afford to own their homes.  
Over a 55-year period, Wright’s tenants participated actively in American consumer society.  
Phase I and II Archaeological Testing at the Talbot County Women’s Club, 2013 64 


Do not cite without permission of author. 
Yet, they had to throw out much of what they bought as it broke.  The debris of their lives, from 
consumer goods to the coal with which they heated their homes and from ceramics to glasswares 
to food scraps, make up a large assemblage perhaps overshadowed by the architectural debitage 
if one were to look only at the percentages that ceramics, glass, faunal materials, personal items, 
and coal and clinker make up of the total assemblage from the period.  However, coal and clinker 
do make a low spike in percentage of the assemblage (23% by number, 27.2% by weight), as the 
number of families and the number of hearths multiplied on the property.  Much of the refuse of 
daily life for these several families was tossed out into the backyard, where it formed a large and 
thick sheet midden (Unit 1 Levels C1,C2, and D; Unit 2 Levels C, D, and F; Unit 6 Levels D1 and 
D2; Unit 7 Levels C, D, and E).  Some of the artifacts in this sheet midden grant insight into the 
struggles of these tenants to control their lives and their identities. 
 
 
Artifact Highlights: Chichester’s English Pennyroyal Pills 
 
One of the most curious and complex artifacts from this excavation came from 
Unit 1, Level C2 in the shape of a torn piece of celluloid.  It was the cover of a booklet on 
women’s health sold with a package of Chichester’s English Pennyroyal Pills and 
matches one from 1903 (MUVS 2015).  Another similar, but slightly different booklet 
was made in 1901 or 1902 (McKune 2015).  Though the pages of our example are 
missing, the matching booklet contains etiquette tips, calendars for 1902-1905, and wax 
paper for storing stamps.  The story of this booklet and the pills with which it was sold, 
which were presumably consumed by one of the tenants here in 1903, interweaves the 
histories of gender, class, race, women’s health, contraception, abortion and debates  
 
! 	
	

	!+67,(0

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about it, the commercialization of medicine, the rise of advertising, and the beginning of 
federal drug regulation.  This story is too big to fully discuss here, but even a preliminary 
investigation of the historical context in which this booklet and the pills that accompanied 
it appeared and were consumed helps to point the way to a deeper understanding of life 
for tenants at this site in the early twentieth century. 
Chichester’s was only one of many brands of abortifacient pills that appeared for 
sale in Europe and the United States by the 1840s (Riddle 1997:232).  Although 
unobtrusively advertised as “Female Pills,” “Female Monthly Pills,” “French Lunar 
Pills,” or “Renovating Pills” (Riddle 1997:235), the public understood well that these 
products were meant to induce menstruation, maintaining a regular cycle and causing the 
body to expel any fetus that might be gestating.  Riddle conceives of such marketing 
terminology as cleverly covert and thinly disguised attempts to get around social taboos 
on abortion, but it is also possible that there was even in the nineteenth century no clear 
division between health and reproduction.  One such brand of pills was advertised to 
“‘females laboring under weakness, debility, fluoral bas, often so destructive and 
undermining to health’” (Riddle 1997:235) and so the language of control over 
reproduction and control over one’s health were entwined in the discourses surrounding  
abortifacients.  The advertisement’s focus on health is also quite accurate, since the same 
products that induced abortions also solved uncontroversial non-pregnancy-related health 
issues like amenorrhea (Riddle 1997:237).  Thus, in medical practice and in both medical 
and popular discourse, it was impossible to separate reproduction from health.  From the 
1840s to the 1870s and on up, such pills became increasingly popular and increasingly 
commercialized.  Although re-conceptualized through the Industrial Revolution, the use 
of abortifacients built on centuries of folk knowledge of the medicinal properties of 
various plants.  As Riddle writes, “women who did not know which plants to gather knew 
which products to buy” (1997:234).  They chose from a wide variety of over-the-counter 
and prescription products with varying ingredients. 
Like many other similar products, Chichester’s main active ingredient was 
pennyroyal, an herb used as an abortifacient since ancient times in Greece, where 
Hippocrates listed it as a method of birth control and where it was well-enough known to 
appear without introduction in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (Riddle 1997:47).  These were 
dangerous ingredients, and cases abound where pills taken to induce abortions caused 
illness and even death when women took too much of them.  Pennyroyal in particular 
must be taken in precise amounts or it becomes toxic to the liver (Riddle 1997:47).  In 
1897, a 23-year-old British woman died of congestion of the stomach, intestine, and brain 
eight days after consuming a tablespoon of pennyroyal to “bring on menstruation” and in 
August 1912, a 16-year-old girl died at the Maryland General Hospital in Baltimore four 
days after swallowing 36 pennyroyal pills “of a well-known brand” in order to “seek 
relief” from a 2-month-long pregnancy (Macht 1913:105-6).   Other active herbal 
ingredients in similar pills included ergot, cotton root, aloe, black hellebore, savin, tansy, 
and rue.  These plants, often reduced to their essential oils for consumption have similar 
properties either as toxins or as irritants (Riddle 1997:237). 
With a great many similar products on the market to treat menstrual problems and 
to induce abortions, companies like Chichester’s turned to advertising during an era that 
also saw the birth of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue, further elaboration of store-front  
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window displays that originated in the eighteenth century, and the creation of shopping as 
an experience like none other (Cook et al. 1996:54).  Chichester’s English Pennyroyal 
Pills, later renamed Diamond Brand, were sold in what W.A. Puckner and L.E. Warren 
described in 1911 as “a small tin box, ‘elegantly and artistically decorated in red, black, 
and gold’” (Puckner and Warren 1911:1591).  Examples of these attractive pill boxes 
may still be found for sale by antique collectors online.  Puckner and Warren’s package 
also came with a booklet, which they quote, explaining reasoning behind the recent 
change in name from Chichester’s Pennyroyal to Chichester’s Diamond Brand Pills as an 
effort to fight competition: 
 
“Our Remedy was formerly called ‘Chichester’s English Pennyroyal 
Pills,’ but on account of unscrupulous imitations offered under the name of 
‘pennyroyal’ our remedy will hereafter be known only as ‘Chichester’s 
Diamond Brand Pills.’ 
 
“Treatment may be begun at any time, although in some instances the pills 
are more effective if taken about the regular time for the menstrual flow.   
As a rule, however, it is found that more satisfactory results are secured be 
beginning treatment at once and continuing it until the pills give relief.” 
 
Puckner and Warren also noted that “Only one small page each is devoted to 
‘Amenorrhea,’ ‘Dysmenorrhea,’ and ‘Directions,’ the remainder is taken up with 
testimonials, cautions to ‘Take no other,’ ‘Refuse all others,’ ‘Beware of imitations,’ etc.” 
(Puckner and Warren 1911:1591).  It would seem that Chichester’s was overwhelmingly 
concerned with outcompeting its commercial rivals.  Even the directions on how to 
achieve the best results from the pills may be seen in part as an effort to ensure consumer 
satisfaction and guarantee future repeat customers. 
The celluloid booklet whose cover we recovered in Unit 1, Level C2, was a part of 
these same advertising efforts.  Made only a few years before Pucknew and Warren’s 
package and before the name switch, the rear page of our booklet also bears the warnings 
against knockoffs, proclaiming that here is “THE ORIGINAL” “THE ONLY GENUINE” 
“THE BEST.”  And it prints a picture of the pill box so that consumers will recognize it 
when they are shopping.  The contents of the booklet, titled “‘Chic’ Helps and Hints,” 
included materials unrelated to the usage of pills but instead relating to the consumption 
of femininity.  The respectable woman of the turn of the twentieth century was expected 
to be able to manage a household, and so this booklet included calendars to keep track of 
schedules and wax paper to hold stamps and facilitate literacy and letter-writing.  The 
front cover bears the image of a well-to-do white woman with unblemished skin, her hair 
done up without a strand amiss, and her face adorned with makeup.  Here, Chichester’s 
would have it, was the pinnacle of femininity.  By following the “helps and hints” and by 
consuming the pills—to maintain menstrual health or even to avoid unwanted 
pregnancies—a woman could achieve this ideal, even if she herself were poorer, lacked 
the time to devote to her appearance, or were non-white.  Women who bought and took 
these pills consumed this particular brand of femininity and Chichester’s used the appeal 
of this constructed gender ideal to help sell its pills.  And because the company had to  
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constantly battle competitors in an ever-shifting marketplace, its packaging continuously 
changed.  This is how we could so precisely date the booklet we recovered.  The one 
produced in 1903 is slightly different from the one made the year before, and different 
still further from the packaging Puckner and Warren encountered in 1911.  Our example 
is closest to that in 1903.  And so the world of advertising becomes not only an 
interpretive tool but a dating tool for the archaeologist. 
But the world of advertising had limits.  In 1906, the US Food and Drug 
Administration was formed to regulate the economy for consumables in the United States.  
As an over-the-counter medical product, Chichester’s English Pennyroyal Pills fell under 
its mandate.  In fact, Puckner and Warren suggest that this, not competition, is the true 
reason behind the change that took the word “pennyroyal” out of the product’s name, for 
they charge the company with false advertising.  Upon examining the chemical makeup 
of a package of pills they purchased on the open market, Puckner and Warren found no 
presence of pennyroyal or any other abortifacients, including black hellebore, tansy, 
savin, and ergot.  Even the claim that the pills were sugar- coated “is scarcely warranted 
by the facts.”  They therefore suggest that “the change of name from ‘Chichester’s 
English Pennyroyal Pills’ to one in which the word ‘Pennyroyal’ does not occur is 
significant…Under the Food and Drug Act it would be illegal to sell as ‘Pennyroyal 
Pills,’ pills that did not contain that constituent.”  As such, their editor concluded that “the 
use of this nostrum is pernicious and in the interest of public health and public morals its 
sale, and the sale of similar nostrums, should be prohibited” (Puckner and Warren 
1911:1591-2). 
It may appear odd that contributors to, and the editor of, the Journal of the 
American Medical Society would comment on the propriety and legality of false 
advertising.  It is not an entirely medical issue.  Yet, it was common since the nineteenth 
century for medical experts to decry the sale and consumption of abortifacients on the 
grounds that they did not work.  What is perhaps more intriguing is that while doctors 
labeled abortifacient pills as nostrums, they themselves prescribed the same recipes for 
menstrual issues unrelated to birth control (Riddle 1997:237).  What emerges from the 
pages of the AMA and other medical publications is a fight between medical practitioners 
and drug companies for authority and influence over American women, their health, and 
their bodies.  Yet, despite abundant claims of the ineffectiveness of over-the-counter 
abortifacients, modern research shows that pennyroyal, the ingredient in question in the 
Chichester’s case, actually does work.  The plant’s oils contain pulegone, which is fatal to 
fetal tissue (Riddle 1997:47, 124).  Puckner and Warren’s AMA editor readily conceded 
that “white it is true that many of these nostrums are merely fraudulent, rather than 
dangerous, yet not a few contain potent and—for the purpose for which sold [abortion]—
villainous drugs” (1911:1592).  And so when the arguments against effectiveness fell 
short of stopping efforts by their patients to achieve abortions, medical experts turned to 
bourgeois morality. 
Although pills such as Chichester’s English Pennyroyals could be taken to address 
uncontroversial, widely-recognized gynecological problems, every brand received harsh 
condemnation on moral grounds that focused on the products’ abortifacient properties.  
The makers of A.M. Mauriceau’s Portuguese Female Pills felt obliged in their 1847 book 
The Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion to defend against accusations that “if  
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woman had certain knowledge on how to prevent pregnancy, their sexual morals would 
be destroyed” by pointing out “the social benefits of limiting family size” (Riddle 
1997:232-3).  Recall that Puckner and Warren’s editor called effective abortifacients 
“villainous” (1911:1592)!  There has therefore been a strong opposition to contraception 
and abortion in the United States since at least the nineteenth century on the grounds that 
women freed of the risk of pregnancy will engage in licentious behavior well outside of 
Victorian moral standards.  As shown above, this view was often espoused by doctors.  It 
was also the view of many legislators, who passed aggressive anti-abortion laws in every 
state in the 1850s (Riddle 1997:244).  Benevolent societies like the New York Society for 
the Suppression of Vice, whose leader Anthony Comstock lobbied successfully for the 
1873 Comstock Act that outlawed pornography and abortifacients from being carried 
through the U.S. mail, led this crusade against sexual impropriety (Riddle 1997:245-6).  
And so the fight between the producers and consumers of such pills and those who 
opposed them took on the semblance of a class and gender conflict.  It pitted male 
legislators against female consumers and both male and female producers like Ann 
Lohman, arrested in 1878 under the Comstock Act (Riddle 1997:246).  It pitted the 
educated against the “‘ignorant women’” who believed the false advertisements (Riddle 
1997:242).  And it opposed the formalized, male-dominated institutions of medicine 
against the midwives who often supplied the pills as part of their trade (Riddle 1997:246).  
In a Jim Crow era where the legislators and doctors where overwhelmingly white, but 
where people of color could certainly be midwives and consumers, the controversy also 
took on racial tones.  The woman who bought and consumed Chichester’s English 
Pennyroyal Pills therefore stood as a threat to the idealized (white) femininity of the 
bourgeoisie. 
 And yet, Chichester’s packaging and advertisement does not stand merely in 
opposition to this ideal.  It engages with it.  The woman depicted on the front cover of the 
little celluloid booklet found at the Women’s Club site appears the very image of 
bourgeoisie femininity.  She is white, elegant, clean.  And so in terms of imagery and 
medical practice, those who produced, sold, and took the pills both challenged and 
consumed an ideal tinged with class, gender, and racial significance.  They did so in a 
complex way that acknowledged certain conceptions of class, gender, and race, but also 
worked to construct tangential and alternative ideals.  Moreover, women who used 
abortifacients came from all backgrounds.  Although the moral rhetoric would make it 
seem that mostly indigent women used these pills, in mid-nineteenth-century New York 
not a few wealthy women were among the patrons of Madame Restell (Ann Lohman)’s 
famous abortion clinic (Riddle 1997:246).  Puckner and Warren note that in 1911, 
Chichester’s retailed for $2 a box, or 10¢ a pill (1911:1591).  Adjusting for inflation, this 
amounts to around $2.40 per pill in today’s money (Bureau of Labor Statistics).1  The 
price seems meager, but pills were sold by the box, which would today have cost almost 
$50.  They were therefore not inexpensive.  Puckner and Warren comment that “the 
profits in retailing at $10 per hundred ought to be satisfying even to the most avaricious” 
(1911:1591).  Prices such as these may have restricted the availability of Chichester’s 
English Pennyroyal Pills and similar products to working-class women, but at least some, 
including one tenant at the Women’s Club site in the early twentieth century, saw them as 
necessary. 
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Other levels created during the time when tenants occupied the site include three fill 
events in Unit 3 (Levels C, D, and E) and a level of yard scatter above the sheet midden in Unit 6 
(Level C).  After the drainage pipe was installed under where we located Unit 5, the tenants used 
that northern side yard between the two houses as a work space.  Artifacts from Unit 5, Level C 
included several tools, such as a wrench, a pair of scissors, a bolt, and a horseshoe.  Given the 
presence of a wrench and bolt, it seems possible that one of the tenants was engaged here in 
repairing engines.  There is not enough material to support any full-time employment in 
mechanics in the side yard, but this tenant may have done some small jobs or worked on his or 
her own car or lawnmower engine to save some money. 
 
 
Levels and Features Dating to the Wright Tenant 
Occupation of 18 Talbot Lane (ca. 1891-1946) 
Unit 
Number 
Level/ 
Feature Interpretation TPQ Artifacts Depth 
1 C1 
Occupation/sheet 
midden 1935 
Coal, clinker, oyster 
shell, brick, mortar, cut 
and wire nails, glass from 
five or more bottles, 
lighting glass, window 
glass, bottle caps, a 
clothespin spring, screws, 
a tire valve, glass 
marbles, stoneware, 
coarse earthenware, 
porcelain figurine 
fragments, creamware, 
pearlware, whiteware, .04 
We cannot say for sure how she would have viewed her purchase and the pills she 
took.  Were they a pathway to control over her reproductive system?  A means of making 
the best of opportunities by limiting family size or the timing of children’s births?  Were 
contraception and abortion necessary evils?  A way of achieving some semblance of 
bourgeois ideal femininity?  What did they mean in terms of her relationships with other 
members of her family?  At this point we have more questions than answers.  Perhaps 
finding out more about the family structure of the tenants who rented space on this 
property in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will shed light on some of our 
unanswered inquiries.  The presence of a toy gun and pieces of a toy fire truck in nearby 
and slightly more recent levels suggest that one of the families of renters here did have a 
child, a young boy who was enculturated into prevailing notions of masculinity in the 
decades that followed the appearance and discard of Chichester’s English Pennyroyal 
Pills sometime around 1903.  The specific meanings of these artifacts for residents here 
surely had much to do with their personal lives.  But they also provide a window into the 
local construction of all of the broader discourses surrounding reproduction, sexuality, 
gender, class, and race in early twentieth-century America. 
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ironstone, and some 
mammal bones 
1 C2 
Occupation/sheet 
midden 1935 
Coal, clinker, brick, 
mortar, cut and wire 
nails, screws, a staple, a 
wing nut, an iron valve 
handle, mason jar, bottle, 
and window glass, glass 
marbles, iron and glass 
buttons, buckles, bottle 
caps, a music box or 
book key, creamware, 
pearlware, whiteware, 
ironstone, coarse 
earthenware, mammal 
bone—much of it 
butchered—and the 
celluloid cover to a 
booklet for Chichester’s 
English Pennyroyal Pills .23 
1 D Sheet midden 1907 
Coal, clinker, handmade 
and machine-made brick, 
mortar, oyster shell, cut 
and wire nails, a screw, 
mold-blown wine bottle 
glass, drinking glass, case 
bottle glass marked 
“LOWELL MASS,” 
other bottle glass, table 
glass, a buckle, a 
suspender clip, a 
fragment of a writing 
slate, a fragment of a 
celluloid comb, white 
clay and porcelain 
tobacco pipe fragments, 
American stoneware, 
creamware, pearlware, 
whiteware, ironstone, 
porcelain, blue-glazed 
whiteware matching 
some from Level C2, and 
much butchered mammal 
bone .35 
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1 E (F5) Postmold 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts 
Coal, clinker, oyster 
shell, slag, bottle glass, 
and iron hardware .74 
2 C 
Natural 
accumulation/sheet 
midden 1900 
Brick, modern mortar, 
coal, clinker, asbestos 
tile, the lid to a can, iron 
wire, a washer, screws, 
cut and wire nails, 
canning jar and green 
bottle glass, window 
glass, a glass bead and 
glass button, two bottle 
caps, a buckle, and 
mammal bone and teeth 
fragments .30 
2 D 
Occupation/sheet 
midden 1907 
Handmade brick, mortar, 
coal, clinker, slag, oyster 
shell, cut and wire nails, 
a hinge, a key, an iron 
button, a nut, a figurine, 
early plastic, machine-
made soda bottle glass, 
clear and blue and amber 
bottle glass, a glass 
insulator for an electrical 
system, ironstone, 
transfer-printed 
whiteware of several 
colors, some creamware 
and coarse earthenware, 
and mammal bone, glass 
marbles, the ladder and a 
wheel from a toy fire 
truck, and a toy iron gun .38 
2 E 
Lens of fill from 
nearby pipe trench 
excavation 1885 
Clinker, coal, slag, 
handmade brick, cut 
nails, clear bottle glass, a 
clay marble, window 
glass, blue bottle glass, 
creamware, pearlware, 
ironstone, whiteware, 
bullet casings, and 
mammal bone, some of it 
butchered .49 
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2 F 
Occupation/sheet 
midden 1935 
Coal, clinker, handmade 
and machine-made brick, 
modern mortar, slag, 
oyster shell, cut and wire 
nails, window glass, blue 
and clear bottle glass 
similar to that in Level D, 
burned glass, stoneware, 
coarse earthenware, 
yellowware, pearlware, 
transfer-printed 
whiteware of several 
colors, annular 
whiteware, a glass marble 
and glass button, a 
buckle, a penny whose 
date was obscured by 
corrosion, a key guide, a 
brass, chrome-plated, 
wall-mounted bottle 
opener, and mammal and 
bird bone .59 
2 G 
Fill (brick 
concentration) 1885 
Handmade brick, slag, 
mortar, oyster shell, cut 
nails, window glass, 
creamware, whiteware, 
one sherd of ironstone, 
one of coarse 
earthenware, and 
mammal bone .64 
3 C Fill 1917 
A nail polish bottle, an 
electrical plug, wire nails, 
and coal .23 
3 D Fill 1885 
Wire nails and lead-
glazed coarse 
earthenware .45 
3 E Fill 1885 
Cut nails, stoneware, 
oyster shell, window and 
bottle glass, and brick .86 
5 C Occupation 1935 
Cut nails, some screws, 
whiteware and porcelain 
plate sherds, window and 
bottle glass, a wrench, 
scissors, a bolt, 
horseshoe, and plastic .20 
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5 D 
Drainage pipe 
trench 1885 
Handmade brick 
fragments, cut and wire 
nails, bottle and window 
glass, creamware, 
pearlware, ironstone, 
yellow ware, and 
porcelain .38 
6 C 
Natural 
accumulation/ 
occupation 1935 
Oyster shell, coal, 
clinker, handmade and 
machine-made brick, 
mortar, wire and cut 
nails, asbestos tile, liquor, 
wine, and medicine bottle 
and window glass, 
storage jar fragments, 
creamware, pearlware, 
whiteware, ironstone, 
coarse earthenware, pipe 
stems, iron hardware, 
glass and ceramic 
marbles, bullet casings, 
glass and celluloid 
buttons, a toy truck tire 
fragment, and a twist tie .30 
6 D1 
Natural 
accumulation/ 
occupation 1907 
Oyster shell, handmade 
brick, lime-based and 
modern mortar, coal, 
clinker, cut and wire 
nails, medicine bottle and 
other bottle and window 
glass, lighting glass, an s-
shaped pothook, staples 
and bolts and other iron 
hardware, bullet and 
shotgun shell casings, 
brass wire, a pencil top, 
fragments of a celluloid 
comb and a bone 
toothbrush, buttons, 
marbles, creamware, 
pearlware, whiteware, 
yellowware, ironstone, 
porcelain, and mammal 
long and rib bone 
fragments, many of them 
butchered .53 
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6 D2 
Natural 
accumulation/ 
occupation 1907 
Oyster shell, coal, slag, 
handmade and machine-
made brick, modern 
mortar, cut and wire 
nails, wine and medicine 
bottle and window glass, 
table and drinking glass, 
creamware, pearlware, 
yellowware, porcelain, 
ironstone, redware, 
Rockingham ware, 
American stoneware, a 
bone toothbrush 
fragment, bone handle, a 
drawer pull, a knife 
handle fragment, and 
mammal leg joint and 
bird long bone fragments .69 
7 C Sheet midden 1840 
Coal, clinker, cut and 
wire nails, storage jar, 
window, and table glass, 
terra cotta and creamware 
and ironstone sherds, and 
a brass button .35 
7 D Sheet midden 1765 
Coal, clinker, cut and 
wire nails, machine-made 
brick, an iron strap 
fragment, medicine and 
other bottle glass, 
window glass, a glass 
bead, and creamware .46 
7 E 
Sheet midden 
(coal ash) 1885 
Oyster shell, handmade 
brick, cut and wire nails, 
ironstone, and butchered 
mammal and bird long 
bone .64 
 
 
Artifacts from the Wright Tenant Occupation 
(ca. 1891-1946)   
Item Count Percent Weight Percent 
Coarse Earthenware 62 0.7 287.3 0.5 
Ironstone/White Granite 170 2.0 553.5 1.0 
Stoneware 25 0.3 198.3 0.4 
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Porcelain 122 1.5 160.1 0.3 
Whiteware 358 4.3 354.4 0.6 
Pearlware 164 2.0 210.6 0.4 
Creamware 85 1.0 61.5 0.1 
Yellowware 32 0.4 108.2 0.2 
Refined Earthenware 
(unidentified) 10 0.1 7.3 0.0 
Other Ware Types 34 0.4 93.1 0.2 
Total Ceramics 1062 12.6 2034.5 3.6 
Table Glass 17 0.2 59.2 0.1 
Bottle Glass 668 7.9 1308.4 2.3 
Lighting Glass 32 0.4 9.4 0.0 
Window Glass/ Flatglass 388 4.6 262.8 0.5 
Other Glass 245 2.9 608.6 1.1 
Total Glass 1350 16.1 2248.9 4.0 
Handmade Wrought Nails 1 0.0 19.4 0.0 
Cut Nails 390 4.6 1633.5 2.9 
Wire Nails 638 7.6 1872.6 3.3 
Unidentified Nails 650 7.7 1574.1 2.8 
Brick 769 9.1 21853.0 39.0 
Mortar 255 3.0 2798.4 5.0 
Plaster 1 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Asbestos 27 0.3 48.2 0.1 
Other Architectural Materials 18 0.2 58.1 0.1 
Total Architectural Materials 2749 32.7 29857.8 53.3 
Iron 211 2.5 1737.9 3.1 
Copper Alloy 14 0.2 64.4 0.1 
Other Metals 101 1.2 387.3 0.7 
Total Metals 326 3.9 2189.6 3.9 
Faunal Bone 494 5.9 807.5 1.4 
Shell (Oyster) 168 2.0 2097.5 3.7 
Other Organic Material 6 0.1 3.8 0.0 
Total Organic Materials 668 7.9 2908.3 5.2 
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Buttons and Fasteners 26 0.3 31.8 0.1 
Toys 8 0.1 114.4 0.2 
Marbles 35 0.4 175.3 0.3 
Coins 10 0.1 3.0 0.0 
Tobacco Pipes 13 0.2 22.0 0.0 
Other Small Finds 14 0.2 69.3 0.1 
Total Personal Items 106 1.3 415.8 0.7 
Coal 1680 20.0 14105.8 25.2 
Clinker 255 3.0 1103.4 2.0 
Slag 181 2.2 1082.9 1.9 
Total Coal/Clinker/Slag 2116 25.2 16293.2 29.1 
Total Synthetics/Modern 
Materials 30 0.4 28.4 0.1 
Total 8412 100.0 55997.5 100.0 
 
 
  
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Late Talbot County Women’s Club Occupation (ca. 1946-2013) 
 
 The Talbot County Women’s Club is the current owner of the property and acquired the 
main house and the yards around it in 1946.  This marked the end of the major domestic use of 
the property, although the Women’s Club currently rents out a back apartment in the Dawson 
addition.  After 50 years of renting, the property and the house were in poor shape.  TCWC 
historian Arianna Porter-King reports that the grounds were overgrown and a dumping ground.  
She is probably describing the sheet midden.  The club embarked on a dramatic renovation and 
restoration of the house.  They dismantled the front porch and rebuilt much of the interior.  Their 
efforts were so extensive that architectural materials make up an extremely high 32.6% of 
counted artifacts and 58.9% of artifact weights in this period.  Although not a large percentage of 
the assemblage, there are more handmade (21) and cut (29) nails than one might expect for the 
twentieth century.  This is because the renovation entailed dismantling much of the existing 
building. 
In addition to the work on the main house, the Women’s Club renovated the back and 
side yards of the property.  Dissatisfied with the overgrown bottle dump that had accumulated 
during the renting years, the club removed much of the large materials in the sheet midden, of 
which rather few large items survived to be documented during excavation.  What had been a 
trash deposit gave way to a grassy lawn as topsoil and sod cover were encouraged over top of 
what was left of the sheet midden.  The top two levels in every unit were this sod and topsoil 
except for Units 1 and 2, where sod and topsoil were lumped together into level A and where 
Levels B were fill deposited by the Women’s Club during the renovation in preparation for the 
laying of sod.  Except for a high number of architectural artifacts, most of the artifacts come 
from the previous occupation that were incorporated into the topsoil and sod that grew over what 
the tenants left behind.  This situation accounts for much of the makeup of the assemblage from 
this period.  Compared with the previous, domestic occupations, this period’s assemblage was 
somewhat light on faunal material, which accounted for only 8% of artifact counts and 12.4% of 
weights, although ceramics, and glass continued to compose roughly the same proportions as 
before. There was a decrease in the presence of coal and clinker.  Surprisingly, the quantities of 
domestic refuse are much higher than one might expect for a non-intensely occupied site with 
modern trash removal service.  Faunal material actually increased as a percentage of the 
assemblage over the previous period.  These percentages can be almost entirely attributed to the 
tenant-period levels on top of which the grass grew. 
As part of the renovation in the 1940s, the Women’s Club removed the tree that had been 
planted south of the frame house during the early Price years.  The tree appears in a before-
picture from a local newspaper article about the restoration, but is gone in an after-picture (Star-
Democrat 1958:Ed8).  Unit 4, Levels C, D, G, K1, K2, and L were fill from this tree removal.  
Levels E, F, H, I1, I2, and R were root holes associate with the tree.  The fill of this twentieth-
century tree hole includes a number of handmade bricks and household waste from the earlier 
tree removal and fill in the Federal Period, into the layers of which the twentieth-century tree 
removal dug.  Whatever occupation levels might have accumulated around the tree were also 
disturbed and mixed into the fill.  The twentieth-century levels of fill thus mix together 
eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century artifacts, including bricks from the building of the 
frame house’s foundation and bricks from a twentieth-century patio around the tree that the 
Women’s Club took down. 
 
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Levels and Features Dating to Talbot County Women’s Club 
Occupation of 18 Talbot Lane (ca. 1946-2013) 
Unit 
Number 
Level/ 
Feature Interpretation TPQ Artifacts Depth 
1 A Sod and topsoil 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts None -.08 
1 B Topsoil/fill 1907 
Coal, brick, cut and wire 
nails, glazed handmade 
brick, auto glass and a 
tire fragment, 
creamware, pearlware, 
and coarse earthenware -.02 
2 A Sod and topsoil 1907 
Coal, mortar, handmade 
brick, a nail, asbestos 
tiles, clear bottle glass, a 
painted chip of wood, 
ironstone, creamware, 
and mammal bone .25 
2 B Lens of fill 1965 
Mortar, brick, coal, wire 
nails, asbestos tile, 
plastic bag fragments, 
plastic insulation for a 
wire, burned glass, clear 
bottle glass, painted 
bottle or table glass, 
pearlware, and butchered 
and broken mammal 
bone fragments .25 
3 A Sod 1973 Plastic and glass .00 
3 B Topsoil 1965 
Plastic, coal, wire nails, 
and a fragment of a 
plastic bag .06 
4 A Sod 1907 
A plastic-coated wire 
fragment, wood 
fragments, and a 1982 
US penny .00 
4 B Topsoil/Occupation 1965 
A pull tab, a bike tire 
valve, glass marbles, a 
pocket knife, fragments 
of toy truck wheels, 
canning jar fragments, 
and a few pearlware and 
lead-glazed coarse 
earthenware sherds .49 
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4 C Lens of fill 1885 
Ironstone, window and 
bottle glass, two cut 
nails, coal, and brick .39 
4 D Fill 1938 
Cut nails, one large 
handmade nail, wine 
glass fragments and a 
base, a screw, fragments 
from 2-3 table glass 
vessels, clay and glass 
marbles, a button, 
creamware, pearlware, 
annular whiteware, 
ironstone, canary ware, 
coarse earthenware with 
paint or glue fragments 
on it, coal, brick, mortar, 
and oyster shell .59 
4 E Root hole 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts Window glass .54 
4 F Root hole 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts None .59 
4 G Fill 1907 
Cut nails, fragments of 
3-4 table glass vessels 
matching those in Level 
D, fragments of a 
handmade glass bottle, 
buttons, a porcelain 
doll’s arm, coarse 
earthenware with paint 
or glue on it matching 
that in Level D, 
creamware, pearlware, 
annular whiteware, and 
ironstone .59 
4 H (F3) Root hole 1885 A wire nail .71 
4 I1 (F3) Root hole 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts 
Handmade brick and nail 
fragments .74 
4 I2 (F3) Root hole 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts None 1.10 
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4 J (F3) Root hole 1805 
Oyster shell, handmade 
brick, a wrought nail, 
and a fragment of a 
bluish bottle glass base .70 
4 R (F3) Root hole 
No 
Datable 
Artifacts None 1.25 
4 K1 Fill 1935 
Cut nails, one large 
handmade nail matching 
that from level D, 
handmade brick, mortar, 
coal, oyster shell, a 
bottle opener, iron and 
plastic buttons, 
fragments of one or more 
table glass vessels 
matching some of those 
from Levels D and G, an 
iron buckle, and sherds 
of lead-glazed coarse 
earthenware, creamware, 
pearlware, black 
transfer-printed 
whiteware, annular 
whiteware, and canary 
ware .67 
4 K2 Fill 1820 
Handmade brick, coal, 
clinker, oyster shell, 
mammal bone, cut nails, 
fragments of one or more 
table glass vessels, 
window glass, buttons, 
creamware, pearlware, 
lead-glazed coarse 
earthenware, and black 
transfer-printed 
whiteware .85 
5 A Sod 1973 
Fragments of several 
different plastic items, a 
bike inner tube cap, a 
clay marble, insulation, 
grout, and nail fragments .00 
5 B Topsoil 1907 
Fragments of plastic, a 
paper wrapper to a 
Snickers bar, and a metal 
bottle cap .10 
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6 A Sod 
No 
datable 
Artifacts None .07 
6 B Topsoil 1907 
Coal, oyster shell, 
handmade and machine-
made brick, mortar, 
asbestos tile, wire and 
cut nails, a stainless steel 
screw, green and amber 
bottle glass, table glass, 
window glass, plastic, 
creamware, pearlware, 
ironstone, coarse 
earthenware, and 
mammal bone .18 
7 A Sod 1805 
Coal and a cut nail 
fragment -.02 
7 B Topsoil 1958 
Clinker, oyster shell, 
wire nails, plastic, and 
mammal bone .14 
 
 
Artifacts from the Talbot County Women’s Club 
Occupation (ca. 1946-2013)   
Item Count Percent Weight Percent 
Coarse Earthenware 20 1.3 42.9 0.4 
Ironstone/White Granite 20 1.3 51.0 0.5 
Stoneware 2 0.1 22.2 0.2 
Porcelain 12 0.8 23.2 0.2 
Whiteware 37 2.4 34.0 0.4 
Pearlware 41 2.6 38.5 0.4 
Creamware 40 2.6 39.3 0.4 
Yellowware 1 0.1 0.0 0.0 
Refined Earthenware 
(unidentified) 1 0.1 7.3 0.1 
Other Ware Types 6 0.4 32.5 0.3 
Total Ceramics 180 11.6 290.6 3.0 
Table Glass 4 0.3 40.9 0.4 
Bottle Glass 147 9.5 334.3 3.5 
Lighting Glass 6 0.4 1.2 0.0 
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Window Glass/ Flatglass 61 3.9 43.4 0.5 
Other Glass 99 6.4 132.7 1.4 
Total Glass 317 20.4 553.4 5.8 
Handmade Wrought Nails 21 1.4 150.0 1.6 
Cut Nails 29 1.9 211.6 2.2 
Wire Nails 36 2.3 100.9 1.1 
Unidentified Nails 116 7.5 328.1 3.4 
Brick 180 11.6 4166.5 43.6 
Mortar 64 4.1 551.2 5.8 
Plaster 6 0.4 5.1 0.1 
Asbestos 41 2.6 101.3 1.1 
Other Architectural Materials 13 0.8 20.8 0.2 
Total Architectural Materials 506 32.6 5635.0 58.9 
Iron 20 1.3 79.4 0.8 
Copper Alloy 2 0.1 2.4 0.0 
Other Metals 37 2.4 134.4 1.4 
Total Metals 59 3.8 216.2 2.3 
Faunal Bone 30 1.9 38.0 0.4 
Shell (Oyster) 98 6.3 1150.5 12.0 
Other Organic Material 5 0.3 1.6 0.0 
Total Organic Materials 133 8.6 1190.2 12.4 
Buttons and Fasteners 9 0.6 22.2 0.2 
Toys 3 0.2 6.5 0.1 
Marbles 15 1.0 67.5 0.7 
Coins 1 0.1 2.1 0.0 
Tobacco Pipes 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 
Other Small Finds 3 0.2 19.4 0.2 
Total Personal Items 31 2.0 118.1 1.2 
Coal 213 13.7 1447.4 15.1 
Clinker 12 0.8 62.0 0.6 
Slag 1 0.1 16.0 0.2 
Total Coal/Clinker/Slag 226 14.6 1525.5 16.0 
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Total Synthetics/Modern 
Materials 99 6.4 35.2 0.4 
Total 1551 100.0 9564.2 100.0 
. 
 
  
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CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 
 
 During the past 220 years, the property we have studied here was owned by three 
different families and then by the Talbot County Women’s Club.  Each owner reconfigured the 
built environment to suit their needs and the archaeological record reflects many of these 
transformations.  The Prices established an elite lifestyle that existed through, and was made 
possible by, the labor of enslaved African Americans, including a cook.  This tradition was 
emulated by the Dawsons, and after the Civil War their free African American cook, Harriet 
Anderson, moved into the kitchen the Prices’ cook had established and took on the same role.  
The Prices and Dawsons maintained a division, however permeable, between their private living 
quarters and the work buildings and spaces in the backyard, where the kitchen was located.  
When the property passed to William Wright, this division vanished as several families crowded 
into the main house and a new one Wright had built to the north.  The backyard became alike a 
place for work and play and trash disposal.  One can well imagine the psychological and health 
effects of overcrowding that prompted concerns over family size and how to raise children well 
in a rented environment.  By the time the Women’s Club took control of the property in 1946, 
years of landowner neglect and tenant crowding had made the yards so cluttered and the house in 
such bad repair that the Club had to spend a great deal of effort to fix the house and replant the 
lawn and garden before it would serve the needs of the club.  Yet, beneath the sod the Women’s 
Club well preserved the story of the previous occupants. 
The preoccupation of this excavation and this report has been with artifacts and features 
associated with free African Americans and with tenants, who may sometimes have been the 
same people.  Identifying African Americans in the site’s archaeology has proven difficult but 
not impossible.  During the first century of inhabitation, both property owners and others lived 
on the site at the same time and contributed to the same landscape and its archaeological traces.  
This is the case for the Prices and James Price’s apprentices, hirelings, and enslaved individuals, 
and it is also the case for the Dawsons and Harriet Anderson’s family and other servants.  Much 
of the yard scatter during these periods is therefore the product of many hands and tying specific 
archaeological remains to specific people is difficult.  Unlike on many plantations from the 
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one cannot assume black labor as the means of constructing 
any buildings, though it is a distinct possibility.  However, other artifacts and features can be 
more positively identified with black residents, enslaved and free. 
The most significant piece of archaeology during the Price and Dawson occupations that 
can be firmly tied to African Americans is the kitchen.  James Price almost certainly held an 
enslaved cook at this site from at least 1820, if not earlier.  At this date, the census shows that the 
household included only the Prices and their slaves, so one of the enslaved individuals must have 
served as cook in the kitchen that dates to that time.  When the Dawsons moved in after 
Emancipation, they brought Harriet Anderson to fill that role and prepare meals for them as well 
as for her family and other servants.  The excavations that we conducted here revealed the 
northeast corner of the kitchen and portions of the yard around it to the north and west.  From 
these layers, we recovered a great deal of animal remains, as well as the broken sherds of pottery 
and glasswares that inevitably result from work in a busy kitchen that was in service for a 
century.  Further excavation of the kitchen and of the yard around it, where much food 
preparation probably also went on, will reveal much about a common occupation for both 
enslaved and free African Americans in Easton in the nineteenth century and provides an 
opportunity to compare the experiences of the Prices’ enslaved cooks with Harriet Anderson’s.  
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How did Emancipation affect the work of the black cook serving a white family?  We have not 
yet had an opportunity to study in depth the food waste in these layers, but identifying the diet 
through analysis of the faunal remains is one way to address this question and the changing work 
experiences of different members of the African-American community on The Hill.  In addition, 
comparing the dietary patterns at this site over time with those on outlying plantations in Talbot 
County could help to illuminate the role of foodways in the process of urbanization in Easton.  
Lastly, an intrasite comparison between the diets of the white families with black slaves/servants 
and the diets of the later tenants would help to highlight the material and ecological dimensions 
of social hierarchy.  These further studies are all possible without the excavation of additional 
materials. 
This excavation was also principally concerned with the lives of tenants.  Often, not 
much is known about how they lived their daily lives at home because, like many African 
Americans, they do not make it into historical records in a big way.  Initially, we had hoped that 
the early Price years might give some insight into the lives of African-American tenants, but new 
information from historical sources indicated that in fact the likelihood of free black tenants 
living on the property at the time was slim.  However, the Wright period of ownership has 
proved to be a treasure trove of information on tenancy from an archaeological point of view.  
Chief among the features related to tenants for learning about daily life is the sheet midden 
deposited from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries across most of the 
backyard.  Here the several families that rented from Wright deposited their kitchen and other 
refuse and children played, while nearby between Wright’s two tenant houses one tenant worked 
on repairing machinery.  We have only sampled this midden and more information about the 
lives of these tenants remains in just a few layers below the surface of the backyard.  Already, 
however, there is much material from six decades of tenant occupation.  Identifying more in the 
historical records about the tenants and who they were would go a long way towards being able 
to more rigorously interpret the archaeological remains of their lives. 
Although the kitchen and the midden are the most significant finds from this excavation 
for interpreting the lives of African Americans and tenants, we uncovered hints of other features 
and artifacts that also relate to our main research questions about both of these groups.  During 
the Federal Period, it appears that the Prices may have allowed some blacksmithing activity on 
the back portion of the lot.  Though we were unable to locate a forge on the portion of the 
property that we excavated, such a forge may have existed and is likely to have been used by 
African-American blacksmiths.  Land records indicate that many of Price’s neighbors in these 
early years were free African Americans (Cynthia Schmidt 2014, personal comm.).  
Blacksmithing activity in the back portion of Price’s property may be related to the first sermon 
in Easton by a minister from the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1818.  The AME 
Church has used blacksmith iconography in memories of its denominational history and perhaps 
the location for the sermon in Easton was chosen in part because of the nearby forge (Jenkins 
2014).  However, the relationship between the forge and the sermon is still not well understood.  
Excavations to the east of the Women’s Club property could confirm the presence of a forge 
there and help to further illuminate not only the relationships between the Prices and their 
neighbors, but also the history and development of African Methodism and free black 
community in Easton. 
Other work areas associated with African Americans include the possible wagon shed in the 
northeast corner of the site, most of which lies on an adjacent lot but was once part of the 
property.  This was probably where black servant Scipio Thomas cared for the Dawsons’ horses.  
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It may also have been in place and in use by an enslaved manservant during the Price years.  In 
later years, tenants also engaged in various work activities on the property, including in the yard 
north of the main house.  Of these activities, and in truth of those around the kitchen and midden 
as well, we have so far discovered only a glimpse in the brief excavation described in this report.  
Many of the details of these fragments of African American and tenant life at the Women’s Club 
site could be further illuminated by more excavation, especially at the kitchen and the adjacent 
property to the east.  The former would yield a more comprehensive look at the activities of 
black cooks like Harriet Anderson, while the latter might locate the forge that produced the coal, 
clinker, and slag that appears in so many late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century contexts 
here.  Excavation in the yard to the north would also grant data about the tenant family that were 
that house’s first inhabitants in the early twentieth century.  Thus, further excavation both on the 
Women’s Club property and adjacent to it would be fruitful.  Excavation at these locations is 
recommended when time, labor, and funding allows. 
The excavations determined that the archaeological record at the Talbot County 
Women’s Club is intact and bears significant information on the lives tenants in Easton in the 
late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.  Although there are several properties in the 
town that could shed light on tenant-landlord relationships across this time span, the Women’s 
Club site’s clear association with enslaved and free African-American cooks and later with 
tenants, and its demonstrated high level of archaeological integrity make it of particular 
importance to local, state, and national narratives of struggles for freedom and equality across 
both racial and class lines.   Both the Women’s Club and The Hill are therefore eligible for 
inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places under criterion D.  Because of the integrity 
and uniqueness of the archaeological record at the Talbot County Women’s Club, we 
recommend that the site be protected for further archaeological research.  Additional testing here 
and in the adjacent lots that make up the northern half of the town block, which were once part of 
James Price’s property, may provide additional information on the lives of tenants in three 
centuries, and on their relationships with landlords.  This is important to the story of The Hill.   
The excavation detailed in this report is a preliminary step with many promising lines for 
future research into social relations on The Hill over the past two hundred years.  The 
assemblage from this site can be further analyzed to provide more depth of interpretations, 
especially in terms of the ways food can reflect and constitute social relations.  However, the 
overwhelming concern of The Hill Community Project, the search for information on community 
formation processes, directs that the primary attention of archaeologists should turn to other 
sites.  We have learned a great deal about life at the Talbot County Women’s Club property over 
the years, but this site alone cannot tell us the whole story of community life and development on 
The Hill.  To fully understand what role the people who lived here played in Easton’s social life, 
we will have  to excavate elsewhere to develop a greater archaeological and historical context for 
the material record at this site.  We may then return to gain new insights into the assemblage and 
what it can tell us about the past. 
 
  
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