The cemetery

Old Meeting House

    That Yarrow was buried in his backyard would not have seemed as odd in 1823 as it does today.  This isn't because people were routinely buried in their yard; they weren't.  Rather, this is because Yarrow's yard backed on a cemetery.  The old Presbyterian cemetery was located between 33rd and 34th Streets and Volta and Q.  The Tudor style house in this photograph is believed to have been used in connection with the cemetery.  But it is also thought that this building later served an African American congregation, and the graves of several African Americans have been found north of Q Street, meaning they were in the same block as Yarrow's.  In fact, one of those graves was located perhaps less than 100 feet from the back of Yarrow's property.  All this suggests that the African American congregation at this church was burying its dead on the periphery of the old Presbyterian cemetery on the north side of Q Street, perhaps as far as Yarrow's backyard.  Hence at the time, the rear of Yarrow's yard was so close to the cemetery that it would not have seemed unusual to bury him back there.

The hand made bricks

    By the second day of demolition, the cellar at Yarrow's property was exposed. This picture looks at the southwest, back corner.  It looks as though the back wall of the cellar, which is to the left, is lined with machine made bricks.  The ones on the far wall look different.  They appear to be hand made.  This is what the concern has been about all along, that these bricks may have been made by Yarrow Mamout.  Previous posts on this blog have a picture of bricks from the same wall but taken from outside the cellar several several years ago.  That picture was sent to an archaeologist who said it showed hand made bricks and suggested the cellar, at least this part, pre-dated the house. This is the reason for thinking these bricks might have been made by Yarrow.  To enlarge the picture, just click on it, or you can download it to your photo editing software and then enlarge it.

No Preservation for Yarrow's Property

     Demolition equipment moved onto Yarrow's property on November 12 and began tearing down the house as reported in the Georgetowner.
With that, any hope for archaeological inspection of the property is apparently gone.  It's a curious result.  If you read the quotes in the Georgetowner article and indeed if you follow what happened, the city seems interested in saving buildings but not history.  Lost was an unprecedented opportunity to use archaeology to study how a slave from Africa adapted to life in the United States and how the man in Peale's wonderful portrait lived.
     Yarrow wasn't just a freed slave as the Georgetowner article labels him. He was a man who came from Africa on one of those terrible slave ships. And he didn't merely get out of slavery, he prospered. (Saying he was "freed" sounds like it was something that Africans needed to earn). He saved enough money to buy this lot in Georgetown. That was highly unusual. He learned the rules in America, buying bank stock and loaning money to white merchants in Georgetown. He was a black Ben Hur in going from slavery to status. He was so prominent that no less an artist than the great Charles Willson Peale painted his portrait -- for free. And four generations later, one of his family went to Harvard. There was no reason to save this building, which was put on the property after he died. There was reason to let archaeologists onto the property before this happened to see how he lived, but that wasn't done. Joni Mitchell warned about such things in her song, Big Yellow Taxi. "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you got till it's gone."

Chestertown, Maryland

    Last week, I gave a book talk at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.  Washington College, my host, Ted Maris-Wolf, and the audience were wonderful.  It is a great place to speak, and the town has a picture-book setting.  But as with many of my speaking venues, Chestertown has a connection to the book.  Artist Charles Willson Peale lived there for a short time when he was a boy.  He had been born in Centerville, Maryland, and later his father, a teacher, took a job in Chestertown.  Peale didn't live there long because his father died and his mother moved the family to Annapolis.  Nonetheless, while there, I naturally had to track down Peale's house.  It is gone, but I was told it was at the intersection of Queen and Cannon streets.  The gray house on the right side of the street in this photograph is where the Peale house used to be.

Peale''s boyhood home

Peale liked the water, so I took the picture below to show how close this house was to the Chester River.  This is more or less what Peale would see when he ran out his front door.  The green frame house on the right is an inn from the colonial period.  I don't know if it was standing when Peale lived in Chestertown, but the historical sign next to it said that George Washington stayed there.

View of Cannon Street and Chester River

Naturally there are many other things to see in Chestertown.  My favorite was what I call "lawyers' row."  Across the street from the courthouse are the buildings in the photograph below.  They are lawyers' offices.  I don't know when they were built, but they are still in use today.  I was there on a beautiful September morning, and the doors to some of the offices were open.

Lawyers' offices 

Sotterley Plantation

  In June, I spoke at Sotterley Plantation in St. Mary's County, Maryland.  http://www.sotterley.org/  The restored plantation is an historical gem.  It is the physical embodiment of Chapter 2 of From Slave Ship to Harvard:  Tobacco and the Importation of a Labor Force.  Situated on the Patuxent River, just up from the Chesapeake Bay, it had a wharf for the plantation owners and others to use to load tobacco directly onto sailing ships bound for England and to buy slaves from arriving slave ships from Africa. Sotterley's first owner, James Bowles, was married to Rebecca Tasker Addison.  She was the niece of Benjamin Tasker, Sr., who would become acting colonial governor of Maryland in 1752.  Governor Tasker's inaugural address to the colonial legislature was delivered the week Yarrow Mamout arrived in Annapolis on a slave ship.  In fact, Tasker's daughter had married the merchant and transatlantic slave trader, Christopher Lowndes.  Lowndes and the governor's son, Benjamin Tasker, Jr., placed the advertisement for the arrival of the Elijah which brought Yarrow, in the Maryland Gazette.
slave ship,

Maryland Gazette, May 1752

Guinea Sarah

Guinea Sarah turned up in my research after From Slave Ship to Harvard was published.  I'm trying to get an article about her published and so won't go into detail right now; stay tuned.  But I will say this.  Guinea Sarah was a companion painting by James Alexander Simpson to the one he did of Yarrow.  She was described as a 100-year-old black woman.  No one knows what happened to the painting.  I've been looking.  It may have burned in a fire or it may have been thrown away.  Hopefully, it suffered neither of those fates.  Instead, it might be tucked away in someone's house, someone who hasn't the foggiest idea of what he or she has

Archaeological work on Yarrow's property postponed

According to this article in the Georgetown Current, the promised archaeological work on Yarrow's property will not take place pending the outcome of a lawsuit over title to the property.  According to the article, one of the two individuals claiming title has consented to the work.  There is no indication as to whether the other has or whether her consent has been requested.  Presumably, the work could go forward if both parties to the court fight would permit it.

http://www.currentnewspapers.com/admin/uploadfiles/GT%2008-21-2013.pdf

Submission to DC Preservation League to declare Yarrow's property one of the city's most endangered places

The property at 3324 Dent Place NW in Georgetown is an important site for black history with likely archaeological relics that are threatened by already-approved plans for demolition even though the two-block long street is on the city’s historic register.   The property also holds at least one unmarked grave, that of Yarrow Mamout.  Listing it as endangered would spotlight the potential loss of significant artifacts that require investigation and preservation. 

Yarrow Mamout once owned this place.  Yarrow (his last name) was an extraordinary individual.  Even though he came to America on a slave ship in 1752 at age sixteen, he eventually became a freeman and indeed one of the most prominent in Washington D.C.  Yarrow’s story is unusual in three respects.  First, he is one of the few identifiable individuals known to have arrived on a slave ship.  Second, his lineage has been traced to living relatives of his daughter-in-law.  Third, we know what he looked like because two artists, Charles Willson Peale and James Alexander Simpson, painted his portrait.  Indeed, the Peale portrait is one of only two formal portraits by a major artist of a slave ship passenger.

Peale was interested in the African because, as he wrote in his diary, Yarrow owned not only a house and the lot on Dent Place but also bank stock.  These were obviously no small accomplishments for a man who had come to America via the Middle Passage.  Peale also wrote and perhaps believed, wrongly, that Yarrow was 140 years old.  In any event, the artist went to the property in December 1818 to engage Yarrow for a sitting and in late January 1819 painted the portrait there.  The portrait is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

James Alexander Simpson did his portrait of Yarrow three years later.  It hangs in the Peabody Room of the Georgetown Public Library only a few blocks from the property.

Yarrow was a man of many talents and among them was brick-making.  He was considered the best brick-maker of his day in Georgetown, commanding one and a half times what white brick-makers could.  His last owner, Brooke Beall, told Yarrow he would free him if he made the bricks for his new house.  Yarrow carried out his part of the bargain, but Brooke died before fulfilling his.  Brooke’s widow kept the promise.

Yarrow acquired this property four years later in 1800.  But within a few years, Yarrow lost all his savings because the man to whom he had entrusted his money ran off with it or lost it in insolvency.  The only thing of value Yarrow had left was this property.  So he cleverly put it out of the reach of his creditors by transferring title to his teenage son.  The National Archives has the Recorder of Deeds’ copy of that document showing the West African signed in Arabic.

Yarrow died on January 19, 1823.  According to an obituary in the February 1823 Gettysburg Compiler, he was buried in the corner of the yard where he, a devote Muslim, was known to pray.  (The old Presbyterian cemetery was just a block away, between 33^rd and 34^th Streets and Volta and Q.  However, graves of African Americans have been discovered on the same block as Yarrow’s property.   What connection, if any, there may be among these three burial places hasn’t been established).

 The heirs of Yarrow were listed as the owners of the property on tax records until 1837 when it was sold for delinquent taxes.  The purchaser then flipped the lot to the wealthy Francis Dodge, who presumably rented it out. 

At some point in time, the original house burned down or was torn down because the house on the lot today is of later design and construction.  Estimates date it to around 1870 although it is hard to be sure.  It seems clearly not the house Yarrow lived in.   However, as will be explained, a part of the structure, the foundation, may well be original.

The house is in great disrepair, and the city has declared it beyond saving.  This came about because it had been vacant for several years when, in the fall of 2011, a large tree crashed through the second floor.  Tax delinquencies on the property began to mount, and so in the spring of 2012, the property was sold, once again, for taxes.  The buyer applied for and received permission to demolish the house.  This is where things have stood for more than a year.  At this writing, a crushed, vacant house that is subject to demolition sits on the land. 

But the house isn’t what is important about property; the historically and archaeologically important parts are the land, what is under the land, and what is in the house.  The contents of the house are important because the former owner has said that a collection of papers about the house’s history, which she inherited from her father, were in a study on the second floor when the tree fell.  She said they may still be there. 

Yarrow’s grave and his remains were once there and presumably still are.  He was probably buried in the southeast corner of the lot, or perhaps just southeast of the original house, a place where he bowed to Mecca to pray.  These parts of the property appear not to have been disturbed since his death.

Then there is the foundation or cellar.  The existing house, supposedly of 1870s vintage, sits on a brick cellar.  An archaeologist has looked at photographs and opined that the bricks are older than the house.  He said they appear handmade, and brick-making machines came into use around 1850.  Hence, the cellar may be original.  In fact, it may be made of bricks fashioned by Yarrow Mamout himself, the best brick-maker of his day in Georgetown.

Finally, there is an expectation that other artifacts from Yarrow’s occupancy are on the property.  The cellar reportedly has a dirt floor, so things Yarrow once owned may be embedded in the dirt down there.  The same is true of the yard.  One can fancy finding a used paintbrush that Charles Willson Peale threw out the window or pieces of a broken smoking pipe of Yarrow’s, such as the one he holds in the Simpson painting, in a privy or trash heap on the property.  More likely, of course, would be pedestrian things, such as oyster shells, kitchen utensils, and brick-making implements.

            In sum, 3422 Dent Place is an endangered site of major historic and archaeological importance.  Its significance seems underappreciated, but it is hard to overstate.  This is the only property in the United States that is known to have been titled to an ex-slave from Africa.  It is the oldest lot in Washington known to have been owned by an African American.  Archaeological work on the land has the potential to give us details on how free blacks lived then, what they owned, what they ate, and how skilled they were as craftsmen.  And, of course, the property probably still holds the mortal remains of Yarrow Mamout and perhaps other African Americans.

House as of June 2013

Gettysburg Compiler, Feburary 1823

National Gazette

Foundation with handmade bricks

Questions and Answers published in the January/February 2013 issue of Historically Speaking