Landschaft and Placemaking at George Washington’s Ferry Farm

Summary

Ferry Farm is perhaps most well known as the site of George Washington’s boyhood home. However, between the early 18th century and the Civil War, it was intermittently the site of multiple occupations, including the home of a former indentured servant, the home of an overseer and his enslaved wife, in addition to the Washington's and their enslaved domestic servants.

The homes these families constructed were part of a dynamic landscape that shifted meaning and context throughout time. This paper pursues how these disparate households; their orientations, demographies, and material conditions, illustrate Landschaft – or the link between community, custom, and identity that defined a sense of land as a relative space. Our analysis seeks to reveal the multiscalar dimensions of how activities and social relations within and around these households were inscribed on the Ferry Farm landscape with a shifting sense of place for the different occupants across time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Tearing Down Walls: The Architecture of Household Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

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Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 520