Reading between the Lines: Building the Historic Context for a Female Planter in mid-18th Century Piedmont Virginia
Author(s): Matthew Reeves; Elizabeth Chew
Year: 2017
Summary
Records for females in 18th-century society are often scarce. Such is the case for our investigations into President James Madison’s Grandmother Frances Madison. Widowed in 1732, she ran the Montpelier plantation for the first thirty years of its existence. Using a combination of archaeological evidence, a scattering of court records, and information on her oldest son (James Madison, Sr.), we build a case for her intersection with paternalistic society and the mark she left on the destiny of the Madison family and the making of the "father of the Constitution".
Cite this Record
Reading between the Lines: Building the Historic Context for a Female Planter in mid-18th Century Piedmont Virginia. Matthew Reeves, Elizabeth Chew. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Fort Worth, TX. 2017 ( tDAR id: 435298)
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Keywords
General
Gender Studies
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Landscape Studies
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plantation studies
Geographic Keywords
North America
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United States of America
Temporal Keywords
18th Century
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 464