Although I’d long supposed that someplace on W&M’s original 330 acres is a burial ground for those the College enslaved over some 170 years, I’m now of a mind that we more likely buried our enslaved at a largely forgotten potter’s field of some sort near the Williamsburg Inn, as I explore in
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3074&context=aspubs
But I’ve also found an account in the student newspaper, the Flat Hat (April 10, 1925; p. 1d<http://hdl.handle.net/10288/4841>), of a burial or burials off the north west corner of the Wren Building speculatively linked to a “tradition” that there was a farm there dating from ca. 1627.
I know of no such “tradition."
If there was a farm there, the place might be a family burial plot. It not a farm, it might conceivably be a burial ground for enslaved.
Is it possible to determine whether a farm was there from before 1693 or not?
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Terry L. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, Emeritus, The College of William and Mary, in Virginia, Williamsburg 23187
Offset Your Carbon Footprint? Choose at https://tinyurl.com/5546274z
Control Methane? https://earthworks.org
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Have we got a college? Have we got a football team?....Well, we can't afford both. Tomorrow we start tearing down the college. --Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."
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Terry L. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, Emeritus, The College of William and Mary, in Virginia, Williamsburg 23187
Offset Your Carbon Footprint? Choose at https://tinyurl.com/5546274z
Control Methane? https://earthworks.org
————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Have we got a college? Have we got a football team?....Well, we can't afford both. Tomorrow we start tearing down the college. --Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."
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