Westwood

I spent yesterday down at Quantico, helping my crew record Westwood Plantation as an archaeological site. Westwood was once a grand plantation, with more than 2,000 acres of land and two dozen slaves. The first house on the site was built before 1720. Reverend James Scott bought the site in the 1740s and built a grand brick house there, described in 1762 as

a very good and large Brick House, two Stories high, with Cellars under the Whole, and completely finished, all Necessaries and convenient Offices, with a Garden, Orchards, and fine Meadows.

Scott was a member of the Virginia elite, a friend of the Lees and the Masons and one of the original partners in the Ohio Company. His son John was involved in one of the most famous events in local history, a duel fought with pistols behind his father's church in Dumfries. The duel seems to have been fought because the other man, Colonel John Baylis, was saying in public that the Reverend Scott's wife Sarah was crazy and had murdered one of her slaves, and that an inquest in the slave's death had been intimidated or bribed into returning a verdict of accidental death. The duel ended in confusion, with Baylis shot by John Scott's second, the magnificently named Cuthbert Bullet. Baylis later died of his wound. John Scott decided this would be a good time to take up higher education in Britain. Bullet was tried for the murder of Baylis but the jury acquitted him on grounds of self-defense. A subsequent investigation into whether that coroner's inquest had been rigged was recorded in the county deed book, where it can still be read, a sad story of a possibly demented old woman who, in a fit of rage, struck her favorite servant in the head with her cane, a blow from which he died the next day.

Anyway, a decade ago I spent two years looking for Westwood on National Park Service property before I realized, based on property records, that it must be on Marine Corps property across the road. A few years after that I happened to be working in the base, not far away, so I stopped by what I thought was the site of Westwood and found a few colonial artifacts on the surface.

Yesterday we made an official expedition to the site to record it and verify that it is indeed Westwood. The site is complicated. The most obvious remains are those of a farm dating to the early 20th century, including concrete foundations for outbuildings and this long concrete pad, which is almost certainly the porch of a now vanished house:

Pouring these concrete porches was a habit of farmers in the 1910s and 1920s, and they often outlast the wooden houses they once served, so it is quite common to find them standing alone. Testing near to the porch seemed to show that the attached house had indeed been wooden, and it was built with machine cut nails, so it dates to the 1800s.

What I think are the remains of Reverend Scott's house turned up about a hundred feet away. In this picture Emily and Robin from my crew are digging a shovel test into some kind of hole more than three feet deep, filled with packed brick rubble (piling up around the screen). The brick is hand-made and the mortar made with burned oyster shell, so this structure dates to the 1700s. This is almost certainly the cellar hole of a large brick house, and the only one in the neighborhood was the Reverend Scott's Westwood. The house must have burned or simply become derelict -- it often happened that the foundations of colonial houses were poorly set, so they started to fall down not long after they were built -- so it was abandoned and knocked down, and a new house built nearby. By that time Westwood was a much smaller property, the Reverend Scott's wealth having been dissipated among a large number of heirs, so the new house was probably more typical for rural Virginia.

Other evidence of the plantation is scattered about, including the well at the top of this post. It will be tricky to sort out the remains of different periods and to figure out how much of the 18th-century landscape remains intact, and we won't have enough time to figure much out on this trip. But we have already discovered several things, and we still have two more days. In this picture I am standing next to a large oak tree growing on a berm that may mark the boundary of a garden extending along one side of the lane leading up to the house. Amidst the woods of the base, where Marines learn to be scouts and snipers, the remains of the colonial past lie waiting to be found.