Gary Stanton, a folklorist and historic preservation professor at the University of Mary Washington, examines the exterior of this mid-19th-century slave cabin on the Moter property near Ladysmith in Caroline County. Richard Moter hopes to share the artifacts he has found in the cabin with the public through a museum. View More Images from this story Visit the Photo Place

Slave cabin whispers of past

Caroline man preserves slave quarters, artifacts

BY EDIE GROSS

Date published: 9/28/2009

BY EDIE GROSS

The weathered cabin with the stone chimney regularly coughs up pieces of its past.

A blue glass slave bead.

A Civil War-era pipe.

Kitchen utensils. A silver wedding band. Porcelain doorknobs.

Richard Moter carefully collects each offering, cataloging and dating the items as best he can.

Here's a Navy button, dating to the 1870s, that he scraped from inside the chimney.

And a bottle of cologne he pulled from under the front step, probably from the 1890s.

There's a silk stocking from beneath the floorboards. And an egg beater found in the wall. And a pewter cameo discovered near the cistern.

"There's a lot of history here," said Moter, 44, the caretaker of the cabin, which stands on his family's Woodford property.

"A lot of these sites have been destroyed by loggers and landowners. I'm in here just trying to piece together the story."

More than 150 years ago, the cabin housed slaves who toiled at the Poplar Grove plantation.

After the Civil War, it was likely home to farm laborers.

Over the years, a series of residents patched up holes, modified doors, painted the beams and hung floral wallpaper, scraps of which still cling to the walls.

Sometime after 1936, when electricity came to rural Caroline County, someone screwed light bulbs into the cabin's ceiling.

No one has lived in the two-story structure for probably 50 years, and its wood frame is weak and drafty.

But as a surviving example of slave housing, it offers history buffs like Moter--along with archaeological experts--a unique window into the past.

"This is a real survivor," said Gary Stanton, a folklorist and historic-preservation professor at the University of Mary Washington who recently visited the cabin. "Usually this stuff's plowed up and we never see it."

SLAVE CABINS ARE RARE

Stanton and UMW colleague Carter Hudgins, a historian who also has training in historical archaeology, were invited by Moter to visit the cabin, along with a Free Lance-Star reporter.

Both professors have visited the remains of slave cabins throughout the area, working under a National Endowment for the Humanities grant secured by UMW Historic Preservation Chairman Doug Sanford and Dennis Pogue, associate director of restoration at Mount Vernon.

Doug Sanford, chairman of UMW's Department of Historic Preservation, is working with a team of historians and archaeologists on a study of slave housing in Virginia. If you have information on existing slave quarters, contact him at dsanford@umw.edu.

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Date published: 9/28/2009