- September 04, 2026
- By Karen Shih ’09
- Photos by Stephanie S. Cordle
JUST STEPS FROM PRESIDENT JOHN MADISON'S white-columned, brick Georgian mansion, Elizabeth McCague knelt in the red clay of a shallow excavation pit and dusted off a shard of ceramic.
It wasn’t an uncommon find: Pieces of scalloped tortoiseshell plates, Chinese-style blue-and-white porcelain dishes and plain storage vessels are scattered in the soil across the rural Virginia plantation. But three raised capital letters, L-I-B, made this one, discovered in the ruins of enslaved people’s homes, stand out.
McCague called down to the archaeology lab, and soon, her colleagues brought another fragment of broken white pottery. The two fit together perfectly, forming the basis of a tobacco pipe bowl that spelled out “liberty.”
“It’s one of the most powerful artifacts I’ve ever encountered,” says the University of Maryland doctoral candidate, who made the discovery at Montpelier as a field crew member in 2016 and is now the estate’s archaeology lab director. “Someone who was enslaved under the watchful eye of James Madison, the father of the Constitution, serving him and his family, decided to own this. It was an aspirational endeavor. They knew: Liberty is out there, but not for you.”
The "liberty" pipe pieced back together and on display at Montpelier.
Courtesy of Montpelier
UMD doctoral candidate Elizabeth McCague holds a piece of the “liberty” pipe shortly after unearthing it in 2016.
Thousands of relics uncovered and analyzed by UMD researchers and students at the historic homes of Madison and his neighbor and fellow Founding Father Thomas Jefferson are shedding new light on the complexities of their lives.
The statesmen are celebrated not only for their roles in winning American independence, but for boldly forging a new system of representative government that inspired rebels fighting for democracy around the world. Jefferson’s radical pronouncement that “all men are created equal” might be the most influential expression of human dignity ever written; Madison, whose Bill of Rights secured individual freedoms in the Constitution, later called the United States “the workshop of liberty to the civilized world.” But those lofty ideals didn’t apply at their estates, or even at the White House, where they held men, women and children in bondage.
As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, hundreds of thousands of people are expected to visit the two former plantations this year to explore restored rooms and walk the grounds. Now, thanks in part to UMD discoveries incorporated into exhibits and tours, visitors can better understand the humanity, ingenuity and resilience of enslaved workers who enabled these former presidents to dedicate their lives to a fledgling nation.
A Thomas Jefferson reenactor walks across the lawn in front of the main house at Monticello.
ARRIVING BY CARRIAGE AT MONTPELIER or Jefferson’s Monticello at the turn of the 19th century, visitors might leave their horses with a farrier for reshoeing, enjoy fresh peas or sweet peaches served on imported dinnerware, or see in the distance vast fields of tobacco or wheat. Just a few white family members resided in the main house (only two of Jefferson’s children by his wife survived to adulthood, and Madison’s heir was his one stepson), while hundreds of enslaved workers lived and worked across the thousands of acres.
Both men were broke when they died, so neither family held on to their bustling estates for long—a common outcome for many notable early Americans. Some homes fell into disrepair while others were sold off and remodeled dramatically. The earliest attempt at historic preservation started in the 1850s, when the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association formed to save George Washington’s deteriorating house after federal and state governments declined to step in.
“These women were not trying to recreate his life there,” says Susan Kern, director of UMD’s Historic Preservation Program and former director of Monticello’s archaeology department. They reopened the property along the Potomac River as a shrine, she says, highlighting his military leadership, farming innovations and presidency.
The same happened at other historical homes up and down the East Coast, as private nonprofit organizations raised money to preserve them by selling admission tickets. Even after historians and archaeologists entered the scene in the mid-20th century, the focus has remained on the accomplishments of white men (and sometimes women, like first lady Dolley Madison and her famous hostessing skills).
What got lost in these romantic tellings were their ecosystems of wealth and bondage.
“Jefferson was held up as a paragon of the sturdy backwoodsman, as a solitary self-made man, but in reality, every Jefferson child had an enslaved child as their body servant,” says Kern, noting that his parents enslaved more than 60 workers when he was born. “At 2 years old, he owns another 2-year-old on paper. The house is set up to serve him.”
Just 30 miles down the road, Madison’s family wealth provided the means for him to study at Princeton and serve in the Virginia legislature. Despite writing in a 1785 letter that he wished “to depend as little as possible on the labour of slaves,” by the time Madison inherited the property in 1801, the enslaved community there had grown to more than 100.
Only in 1979 did Colonial Williamsburg establish the first department of African American interpretation at an early U.S. historic site. It took decades for others to follow suit.
Susan Kern
Ephraim Chase, part of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences’ Summer Research Initiative, at an exhibition called “The Mere Distinction of Colour” at Montpelier. James Madison is superimposed over the Constitution on the screen.
AS AN ENSLAVED BLACKSMITH NAMED MOSES sweated over molten metal, pouring and pounding to create tools and weaponry that supplied not only Montpelier but also clients throughout Virginia and even the Continental Army, the sounds of his work would have carried up the small hill to Madison’s main house.
There, the man who later became the fourth president pored over centuries of political philosophy to write the Virginia Plan—the basis of the U.S. Constitution—enshrining rights that remained out of reach for most.
“This is one of the coolest things we get to learn about in archaeology: the people who didn’t get memoirs written about them, the folks who left their mark in the form of nails and horseshoes and things left in the ground,” says McCague, part of the archaeological team that excavated the blacksmith shop this summer and is advised by UMD anthropology Chair and Professor Barnet Pavão-Zuckerman.
The site was chosen in collaboration with the Montpelier Descendants Committee, an organization of people whose ancestors were enslaved there and nearby. In 2022, it became the first group in the nation to gain structural parity with the nonprofit foundation that runs a presidential home, giving it equal say in the research conducted, exhibits created and tours offered. It’s a new model that MDC member Henry Anglin, whose great-grandfather was enslaved at the adjacent Newman Plantation, hopes others will follow.
“It’s really essential for descendants to have a true voice to end up with a realistic, truthful story,” says Anglin, who’s leading efforts to build a memorial for the enslaved next to Montpelier’s unmarked burial ground, now shrouded by woods and overgrown vegetation.
Drawing from oral histories, the committee has filled in gaps in knowledge as the archaeological team combines historical ledgers and papers with discoveries like a whittled children’s toy or rusted pocketknife.
Sara Thiam MAA ’26
One such family story came from MDC member Bettye Kearse, whose ancestor, Mandy, was captured in Ghana, transported across the Middle Passage and bought by Madison’s father. She was said to have worn a red bead in her hair and passed it down to her daughter, Coreen. But as generations served the Madisons in the kitchen, this bead was lost—possibly until archaeologists recovered a reddish quartz ring centuries later.
Encountering the artifact felt like destiny to Sara Thiam MAA ’26. While applying to UMD, she’d taken a trip to Mali and Senegal, where she has ancestors, and she immediately recognized the intact circle of carnelian from Montpelier because she’d bought several similar pieces of jewelry at traditional markets.
Initially, researchers thought the ring originated in India, a better-known source of carnelian, and had been traded to Africa. But Thiam reviewed European accounts, largely in French, showing that West Africa also held extensive deposits that supported a quartz mining industry dating back to the first century. She also delved into what the carnelian was and is still used for: Women across the region adorn themselves with the quartz as a symbol of fertility and protection, whether braided into their hair or worn on a finger.
“One of the greatest mysteries of all of those who are descendants of the enslaved, stolen from the African continent, is the essence of our identity. That’s something that DNA tests can’t give us back. That’s something that genealogy research can’t give us directly,” says Thiam. “I was naturally drawn to this opportunity to restore an aspect of that, and to work with the descendants from start to finish.”
A red carnelian ring that an enslaved person likely brought across the Atlantic
Ocean.
Catalogued animal bones found at Montpelier.
IN JEFFERSON'S SUN-DRENCHED, BUTTER-YELLOW DINING ROOM, America’s “founding foodie” and his family were served what was then exotic cuisine. Macaroni and cheese, crispy fries and refreshing scoops of ice cream—all unfamiliar to the States and inspired by his time as U.S. minister to France—appeared via a revolving food service door and a wine dumbwaiter built into the side of a fireplace.
But out of sight, toiling in the tunnels beneath them, were enslaved people like brothers James and Peter Hemings and sisters-in-law Edith Fossett and Frances Hern, who bought or grew the ingredients and prepared the dishes.
“These enslaved cooks brought creativity and ingenuity in creating a whole new food system, combining ingredients and techniques from many cultures,” including West African and Native American traditions, says Pavão-Zuckerman.
As a zooarchaeologist studying bones, she and her students offer a glimpse into the everyday lives of people on the plantations, from the owners to the overseers to the enslaved people. Animals interacted with humans daily, whether horses pulling carts, caged birds singing, or livestock providing wool and meat.
Her research at Montpelier goes back to 2001, and just before the pandemic she added Monticello to her portfolio. That’s led to insights about the types of meat that the Jeffersons and Madisons would have eaten: an assortment of wild game pre-1800s, and later, domesticated young livestock like suckling pig and veal.
What’s been more eye-opening is the variety of animals found at the homes of enslaved workers. Given meager rations of just cornmeal, preserved fish and pickled pork, they were expected to supplement their own diets to survive. For domestic workers, that might take the form of growing a small garden (which they could tend only at night or on Sundays, ostensibly a day of rest) or raising poultry.
“Chickens were often the only way enslaved people could earn money,” says doctoral student Kristen Hickey, poring over bags of bones and broken eggshells in the zooarchaeology lab at UMD’s Woods Hall. Eggs could be sold in town or even to enslavers so they could buy extra cloth for clothes, blankets or other household items.
A surprising number of fish bones have been found around the homes of carpenters and blacksmiths. Tasked with making a certain number of chairs or nails a day, they had more control over their time than other enslaved workers and could visit nearby rivers or ponds, says Pavão-Zuckerman.
Even field workers, who labored from sunup to sundown, were found to have remains of raccoons, possums, squirrels and other small game in their homes, likely trapped or killed with slingshots as the animals crept among the crops.
“Humans are extraordinarily resilient, even under the worst circumstances,” says Pavão-Zuckerman, whose findings are displayed in reconstructed homes next to the main house at Montpelier. “These enslaved people exercised whatever control and power they could to survive. They found ways of doing what they needed to preserve their own humanity, and the humanity of their families.”
UMD anthropology Chair and Professor Barnet Pavão-Zuckerman holds an animal bone as she lectures to field students at Monticello.
Archaeology field school students and staff at Montpelier dig next to the icehouse and “the temple,” where they’ve found horseshoes, nails and gun parts.
The view from 24 feet underground in the icehouse.
TWENTY-FOUR FEET UNDERGROUND, enslaved workers packed frozen blocks into an icehouse each winter so the Madisons could store meat, cream and other perishables throughout the year. Concealed by “the temple,” a domed, open-air neoclassical structure held up by eight white pillars (itself a symbol of freedom and enlightenment used by abolitionists to point out the hypocrisy of enslavers), the pit was built into the back of a hill, invisible to visitors coming down the road to the main house. The small opening above, letting in just a spear of sunlight, would have felt as far away as the liberty promised by the Founding Fathers.
That’s where Pavão-Zuckerman found herself in June, standing in the dark with a couple of undergraduates from the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences’ Summer Research Initiative. It was a world away from the airy, painting-filled drawing rooms they’d toured at Monticello a day prior, says anthropology major Pierce Smith ’29. “It feels more real.”
Bringing undergrads along on her visits to both sites each summer is an opportunity to pique their interest in history, archaeology and preservation as well as deepen the connection between UMD and the scholars at the two plantations. She gives lectures to field students and checks in on the excavations and labs; over the last decade, a half-dozen of Pavão-Zuckerman’s students have been involved.
Elizabeth McCague
Anthropology doctoral candidate and Montpelier archaeology lab director
Working with Terps “is great because we’re able to do research we would never have the resources to do our ourselves,” says Matt Reeves, Montpelier’s director of archaeology. “Their specialized analyses advance our research and what we’re able to present to the public.”
This fall, Montpelier archaeology intern Lee Stamey will continue the tradition as they pursue a master’s degree in applied anthropology at UMD. Over the past year, Stamey has been working with the archaeological team to excavate the blacksmith’s shop and adjacent homes of enslaved people.
“People will veer off the path and come ask, ‘What are you digging up?’” says Stamey, who has held out a button from a shirt or earthenware dinner dishes, for example, to help visitors relate findings to their own lives. The “liberty” pipe McCague helped find, meanwhile, is part of an exhibit in the Montpelier cellars.
That’s the impact of an artifact. When the smoke clears from the nationwide celebrations of America’s 250th, Stamey hopes people will see beyond the familiar tales of the Founding Fathers, one clay-encased find at a time. “It’s really rewarding to show somebody something new, and see the moment when something changes in their mind.”
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Fall 2026Types
FeaturesTags
America 250