I can’t seem to find any scholarly histories or accounts of potter’s fields in colonial Virginia—can anyone help?
Many burials of whites, of course, were in family plots and churchyards. And many enslaved would have been buried on land set aside for that at plantations.
But there were many indigent whites and free Blacks as well as the enslaved in urban households who must have been interred someplace.
I ask because in seeking the burial place for the hundreds of men, women, and children enslaved by William and Mary over some 172 years, I for a long time assumed it would be on our original 330 acres. But we have no documentation of such a site and a place that seemed most likely gave up no evidence of graves.
I did finally find a record from 1837 of W&M’s president, Thomas Roderick Dew, apparently outsourcing the burial of “Joe,” an expense Dew noted as ".50 cts for digging Joes Grave + ,50 $4 to R. Bucktrout 5 00.” R. Bucktrout was Richard Manning Bucktrout, the son of Benjamin Bucktrout, both, among other things, undertakers to rich and poor, Black and white.*
Behind the Bucktrout house (and today just east of the Williamsburg Inn) is an extensive burial ground for which I can make a compelling case (I think) for its being a very old potter’s field containing the graves of, among others, the French soldiers who died in Williamsburg after the Siege of Yorktown.
There’s some evidence, in fact, that more than the indigent were buried there—it may have been something akin to a main burial ground before the opening in 1859 of Williamsburg’s municipal cemetery, Cedar Grove.
Dew’s note make me think that perhaps Joe was buried off campus, perhaps behind the Bucktrout house. I had always assumed that the College’s enslaved would bury their own, but if Joe’s burial was outsourced, perhaps others were as well.
As far as I can tell, btw, other colleges and universities appear to have buried those they enslaved on their own grounds, so if I’m right W&M would be an outlier…..
*See RMB’s Daybook and Ledger for more:
https://libraries.wm.edu/um/archive/bucktrout//cf.swem.wm.edu/exhibits/bucktrout/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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."
______________________________________
To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at
https://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
This list is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
|
