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."
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