"That Kind of Place": Re-Illuminating Enslaved Women at Buffalo Forge Plantation, Rockbridge County, Virginia

Summary

Often unacknowledged in archival documents and recent historical research, enslaved women’s diverse roles in industrial contexts shaped antebellum Virginia’s infrastructure, economy, and culture. This paper on the Buffalo Forge iron plantation in Rockbridge County, Virginia, uses archaeological, documentary, and architectural research to illuminate enslaved women as active agents within the plantation’s complex built environment. Archaeological examination of yards around two extant quarters in particular reveals how enslaved women and their families shaped their spaces, selves, and surrounding and overlapping landscapes. Although this research focuses primarily on enslaved women’s antebellum work, experiences, and stories, their influence on postbellum narratives, memory, and local understandings of antebellum places will also be discussed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Reckoning: Landscapes and Legacies of Slavery   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 767