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."