The Colonization Movement

I recently did a Zoom presentation for the Montgomery County, Maryland, History Society about the Maryland Colonization Society. As I say in the presentation, my interest in the subject began when my research on Yarrow Mamout suggested that members of the American Colonization Society were progressively minded on racial issues and helped Yarrow's son in his move to Washington County, Maryland. In addition, I had come across another painting by James Alexander Simpson, someone who painted Yarrow, of a mixed-race woman who moved to Africa in the colonization movement. That launched me into more extensive research on the subject.  The recorded presentation is here on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4iAiUuiSjA

More on Black History of Georgetown

      The Montgomery County History Society put online an article that Kate Whitmore and I wrote, Maryland's Gift to the Nation: A Capital City, about Maryland's session of parts of Montgomery and Prince George's Counties to the federal government for the capital, the District of Columbia. The article has a lot about the early history of Georgetown and what happened to it as a result of cession. We also devote considerable attention to the effect on Black Georgetowners. 

 https://montgomeryhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/ur_issue-03_johnston-whitmore_2026.pdf

PBS progam on Yarrow Mamout

     PBS has developed a series of programs on Muslims in America, produced by Graham Judd. One of those is about Yarrow Mamout and is based on From Slave Ship to Harvard. It may be found here. The program is designed for schools, but is available online to the public. 

The book has become a best seller

 Twelve years after publication, From Slave Ship to Harvard was listed on Amazon today as a "best seller." I don't exactly know how Amazon reached that conclusion, but I'll take it.

Prospective readers, here is the introduction to the book

     Fordham University Press has the introduction to the book online here if you want a fuller account of what the book is about.

More on Polly's grave

      When I was working on my book, a man who lived around Yarrowsburg told me that when he was a boy, he was shown two plain stones that stood upright in a field near Yarrowsburg Road. One was Polly's grave; the other was her son's grave according to what he remembered.  So one Saturday, he and I went to look for them. He showed up in big boots and heavy denim jeans with two shovels.  I wore shorts. We spent two hours whacking at the thorny vines along the road with the shovels.  All I had to show for it were some badly scarred legs.  

      I've marked the location on this view from Google Earth.  I've also marked where I was told Polly's house was.  Just north of the abandoned school house.  It's gone now of course.  If she was buried on her property, as The Blue Hills of Maryland said, an unreliable source, then her grave could not have been where we searched.  

      Highway 67 runs up the right side of the image.  This is Pleasant Valley.  Elk Ridge is on the left.  Harpers Ferry is off the image at the bottom left.  The Kennedy Farm, where John Brown and his men stayed for months before the October 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry is marked. In the 19th century, a road went from Yarrowsburg over Elk Ridge and down past the Kennedy Farm.

Yarrow's neighborhood

     Related to the two, somewhat morbid posts about graves, I want to mention my research about Yarrow's neighborhood. As said in earlier posts, it was in the Beatty and Hawkins Addition, which was platted in 1760. The image below is taken from that plat.

     Beatty and Hawkins included in the addition three double lots for churches. Just as any good real estate developer would have done in those days, they thought the lots would sell better if buyers knew a church was nearby. Beatty and Hawkins weren't going to build those churches, but they did provide for them. The three were the Lutherans, the Church of England (Episcopal), and Calvinists (Presbyterians).  Bear in mind that Georgetown proper was south and east of the Beatty and Hawkins Addition.  The Addition was outside the city limits of Georgetown proper.

     The Church of England lot (in yellow on Fifth/Q Street) lay vacant until 1876 when the first houses were built there. The Episcopal congregation built St. John's on O Street instead.  When a schism developed about 1817, part of the congregation broke away to form today's Christ Church on the east side of High Street/Wisconsin.  The Lutheran double lot, not shown on the map, was where the Lutheran Church is today on Wisconsin.

      The Presbyterian Church and graveyard was on Bridge/M Street and Market/32nd Street.  But around 1800, the Presbyterians bought land in the Beatty and Hawkins Addition adjacent to where the plat set aside a double lot for them (in yellow).  They then converted most of that block into what has been called the Old Presbyterian Burying Ground (in yellow).  That became the principal cemetery in Georgetown until Oak Hill was developed around 1850. However, towards the end of the 19th century as the Beatty and Hawkins Addition was finally being filled in with houses, the city of Washington supposedly moved all the bodies to other places. Even before then, many families had moved their ancestors remains elsewhere.

     But in addition, bodies have been found along the north side of Q Street including in the Church of England lot. A newspaper reported the first set of human remains being found there in 1867.  Since then, an estimated 40 sets of remains have been found, some as recently as 2020.  There is no record that this was a recognized cemetery, but obviously people were being buried there.

     Legally, human remains in the Church of England lot would seem protected by an 1828 ruling of the United States Supreme Court. In that case, the Lutheran congregation sued to prevent Beatty's heirs from reclaiming the lot set aside for them.  The Court noted the the Lutherans had built a crude church on the lot and that both Lutherans and others had buried people on the land. Once these things had been done, the lot became dedicated to religious purposes. This precedent suggests that any human remains found on the Church of England lot may enjoy some kind of protection. And conceivably, Yarrow Mamout's remains lie there if they have not already been removed or disintegrated.  

        

Polly Yarrow's grave

      Polly Yarrow (Mary Turner Yarrow) was the wife of Yarrow's son Aquilla and, hence, Yarrow's daughter-in-law.  She was born in 1796 in Montgomery County, Maryland, by my research, and died in 1885.  From Slave Ship to Harvard details the research.  That research also gave the reasons for believing that Polly was the great, great aunt of Robert Turner Ford, who went to Harvard. 

      My conclusions are buttressed by this page from The Blue Hills of Maryland, History Along the Appalachian Trail on South Mountain and the Catoctins by Paula Mary Strain, published by the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club in 1993.

     I didn't come across this until after my book was published.  The fact that she was called "Aunt" Polly tends to confirm my conclusion that she was the aunt of Simon Turner, who was Robert Ford's grandfather.  I found similar honorifics in use among the congregation at Mount Moriah Church in Yarrowsburg.  

     I had been told the story about Polly allegedly cutting off her toe because she thought it was a black snake but dismissed that as a racist joke and did not include it in the book.

     I do know where her cabin was.  However, Robert Bowers of Yarrowsburg told me that when he was a boy, someone pointed out several plain stones about a half mile north along Yarrowsburg Road. One was said to be Polly's grave, the other the grave of a son.  We spent several hours whacking down bramble bushes but turned up nothing except terribly scarred legs from the thorns.

     Ms. Strain's book credits her story about Yarrowsburg to E Russell Hicks, Our Washington county heritage,  Hagerstown Board of Education 1974.  I contacted the board of education but was unable to locate the publication. I doubt it had any more on the story especially since it probably came from the same people that I talked to in Yarrowsburg.
 

Yarrow's grave

       Yarrow's obituary in the Gettysburg Compiler was surely written by Charles Willson Peale because the facts match his diary entries about Yarrow.  

    The obituary says Yarrow "was interred in the corner of his garden, the spot where he usually resorted to pray." How Peale would have known this is a mystery. There is no evidence that he was in Georgetown at the time. Someone in Georgetown, such as his in-laws Joseph Brewer and William Marbury who had originally told him about Yarrow, must have written him.

     The archaeological work in 2015 assumed the "garden" was on his property, and so a great deal of the archaeology focused on trying to find the grave and his remains. However, the obituary doesn't say the garden was on Yarrow's lot. A friend who had lived in England pointed out that the English don't necessarily use the word garden the way we do today.  But of course the question is, what did Peale mean by garden. He had lived in England.  At the time of Yarrow's death in 1823, Peale was living on his farm at Belfield outside Philadelphia.  He had a 24-acre "garden" there.  It had vegetables and ornamentals.  It was a place of repose and retreat for him.  It even had a gazebo where he could sit and think.  He painted this landscape of it.

     This raises the obvious possibility that the garden where Yarrow resorted to pray had reminded Peale of his own garden at Belfield.  But where would that garden be in Georgetown?  Yarrow's lot was just 35' X 150'.  It couldn't be on his property.  One answer is that Yarrow's garden was right next to his lot. Yarrow's lot was in the Beatty and Hawkins Addition to Georgetown. The plat for the addition reserved a double lot directly southeast of Yarrow's for the Church of England.  The two lots shared a corner, but the Church of England lot was four times the size of Yarrow's. What is more, human remains have been found on the Church of England lot in recent times.  Was it a cemetery?  

    Once the American colonies declared independence from England in 1776, their legislatures, including that of Maryland, in which Georgetown then lay, separated themselves from the Church of England, and the Episcopal Church took its place.  In theory then, the Church of England double lot belonged to the Episcopal congregation in Georgetown, which was formed in 1794.  

    William Deakins, Jr., a member of the church's vestry, proposed building the congregation's church on the double lot, but this was rejected.  The vestry voted to build its church, St. John's, on O Street instead, probably because it was closer to the main part of Georgetown.  The fact Deakins owned a number of lots in the then-new Beatty and Hawkins Addition may have contributed to his desire to locate St. John's there.  At his death in 1798, his son Francis must have inherited at least some of his father's lots, for Francis is the one who deeded Yarrow his lot in 1800.

      The point of this is that in 1819, when Peale painted Yarrow, Yarrow must have excused himself from the sitting to go outside and pray. Peale saw Yarrow go to the Church of England lot to pray.  It was vacant then and perhaps landscaped.  Given the fact that bodies have been found on that property in recent years (in fact human remains have been turning up all along Q Street for almost 160 years), it seems likely that Yarrow was not buried on his property but rather on the Church of England lot.  It appears to have been a de facto burying ground. It is still a mystery though since houses were built on the church's lot beginning in 1876. That said, I have asked Muslim friends what Islam says about praying in graveyards.  They say that it is clear that one should not pray around a grave unless there is something between you and the grave, but they point out that Yarrow might not have learned this before being taken out of Africa at age sixteen. Yarrow's lot is marked in red on the excerpt from the Beatty and Hawkins plat below and the Church of England lot is highlighted in yellow.

Reporting on Yarrow's property in Georgetown

     I recently realized that this blog has older posts, from 2015, about the archaeological work on Yarrow's lot in Georgetown, but nothing about the results. So this and the next post will get into that subject.

     The archaeological work lasted about five months.  Almost the entire lot was excavated.  Part was done by hand and the dirt filtered through screens.  The rest was done with a backhoe. In addition, the entire lot was examined with ground-penetrating radar.  

      Nothing earth-shaking was found.  The 19th century frame house that had stood there was not the house Yarrow lived in.  Worse, it was in such disrepair that the city razed it, apparently leaving the debris in what had been the basement and then simply covering it with dirt. Thus, the ground-penetrating radar was of no aide for the street part of the lot, and no hand excavation was done there. The previous owner had put a swimming pool behind the house and on the west side of the lot.  No archaeology was done in that area either. All the hand digging was in the back of the lot.  This was complicated by the fact that when the pool was dug, the spoil was dumped on the back half of the lot. So most of the effort was put into digging through the spoil in order to get down to the ground level of when Yarrow lived there.

      The artifacts that were recovered were bagged and reviewed later. Although the artifacts included fragments of plates and cups, a doorknob, buttons, clay smoking pipes, and such, none could be definitely attributed to Yarrow.  For example, a fragment of a dish might be dated to between 1770 and 1850 based on when that particular design was manufactured, but there is no way to know if it was Yarrow's or a later owner's. Indeed, even something dated to 1810, when Yarrow owned the lot, might not have been Yarrow's because a later owner might have brought it on the land.

      Later, however, someone who was not involved in the archaeology was able to tell me more about the lot.  This individual was a map expert.  He carefully examined the so-called Boschke map of Washington, which appears in an earlier post, and reached several interesting conclusions.  First, he said that the buildings shown on that map vary in their dimensions, and he, therefore, believes the shapes of the building on Yarrow's lot, a square, represents the shape of his house. Since log cabins are square, he concluded Yarrow's house was made of logs.  Second, he noted the house is shown precisely on the street (now Dent Place) and not set back from the street as houses in Georgetown are today.  He suggested that even as late as 1859, when the map was drawn, the road by Yarrow's probably wasn't a "street" as we think of it.  Finally, he opined that Yarrow's lot sloped downward towards the river. His house, therefore, sat on relatively level ground right on the street, but the back of the 35' X 150' lot was rather steep.  The slope of the land was apparent from the dig.

     I also learned, after the book was published, that Yarrow had a "log house." This fact comes from an 1836 newspaper announcement that his lot, the eastern half of Lot 217, would be sold for taxes.  The announcement said a log house was on the land.  It also said the land belonged to "Yarrow's heirs." Since Yarrow died in 1823 and his son Aquilla died in 1832, it seems likely that Aquilla had been paying taxes on the land, but that stopped at his death. I found no other facts to fill in the narrative.  However, my guess is that Yarrow's heirs at least included his niece Nancy Hillman who sued in 1840 to recover on his loan.  But perhaps the term Yarrow's heirs also meant his sister and a wife, but we don't know.

     This is a picture I took of a reproduction of a circa 1770 log house in McLean, Virginia.  It is simply a log cabin with siding covered with pitch to keep out rain and wind.

     Note the location of the window.  The photograph below was taken inside the house looking to the the window and fireplace.  Notice how the light from the window strikes the back wall, which was whitewashed to make the house lighter. If you look at Peale's portrait of Yarrow, below, you can see that Peale may have posed Yarrow in a chair by a window. The light comes in from Yarrow's right, lights up his face, and strikes the wall behind him just as this photograph suggests.

Another Death Notice

 In the New York American of March 4, 1823. Notice that the editor decided to give Yarrow the title "Colonel" and placed notice of his death after that of General Ryan.

Yarrow's Obituary in the Times of London

      Years after writing From Slave Ship to Harvard, I discovered this death notice in the Times of London. A common practice at the time was for a newspaper to pick up news that had already appeared in other newspapers. In this case, it had taken months for newspapers from New York to reach England via a sailing ship; hence, the gap between Yarrow's death on January 19, 1823, and this notice in the Times. And of course, the New York newspaper must have gotten the news from some other newspaper in the United States that had carried the original notice.

"A New York paper on the 29th Jan. states, that Yarrow, a moor, died at Georgetown, Columbia, on Sunday last, aged 139!"

The Times of London Saturday March 1st 1823, page 3.

Yarrow at Philadelphia Museum of Art

 The Philadelphia Museum of Art recently opened a new, large exhibit in its Early American Galleries in a space designed by the architect Frank Gehry.  Charles Willson Peale's portrait of Yarrow is on prominent display.  https://philamuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/new-early-american-galleries.  I even convinced the museum to say in the label for the painting that his name was probably Mamadou Yarrow.  Yarrow's importance to the museum and Peale is demonstrated by how the portrait is arranged.  It is the first thing the visitor sees entering the Peale exhibits.  In the center is Peale's famous "Staircase" painting, a trompe l'oeil of Peale's sons on a staircase.  Peale had it in his house, and it fooled George Washington who, according to Peale's diary, did a double-take when he walked past it.  On the right is a self-portrait of the artist himself.  

Recognition has come late to Yarrow, but it is deserved.  

Black Neighborhoods in Old Georgetown

 

               The red dots mark the residences of African Americans in 1855 on an old (1855) map.

                The map below shows where African Americans lived in 1871.

Yarrow's Name

        References in newspapers and magazines to Yarrow Mamout as “Mr. Mamout” make me cringe.  He was never called that when he was alive.  In my book, I followed what I felt was his preference and used Yarrow as his surname.  Still, writers and especially editors insist on mindlessly thinking of names in terms of English naming conventions that require a given or Christian name first followed by a surname, usually that of the person’s father.  Infant naming conventions differ around the world.  Trying to fit the name of a man from West Africa into English naming conventions reflects a cultural insensitivity.

There is no such thing as a universal naming convention.  The convention in most Spanish-speaking countries is to put the Christian name first, the father’s surname name second, and the mother’s surname name last.  Wikipedia gives the example Jose Fernandez Martinez.  In my book Murder, Inc., I mention that the FBI followed the practice of putting the father’s name in capital letters as Jose FERNANDEZ Martinez to be doubly sure that its agents understood.  In Korea and China, the surname is put first.  Men with names that begin with Kim should, therefore, be addressed in English as Mr. Kim, not by their last names, which are given names.  

Yarrow Mamout was a Fulani, so we must look first at Fulani naming conventions.  The Fulani equivalent of a surname is actually a clan name.  These clan names are rarely used because there are only five or six, e.g., Diallo, Bah, and so adding them to someone’s name doesn’t help identify the person.  We don’t know what Yarrow Mamout’s clan name was.

A 1940 study by French sociologists attempted to explain how Fulani parents chose names.  Commonly they consulted a holy man.  The convention was to first chose a birth order name.  Yarrow, as an example, was one of the many male names available for a woman’s fourth child.  The Fulani were Muslim, so a second name would be chosen from the Quran.  The French sociologists referred to this as a child’s Quranic name.  These are names shared throughout the Muslim world just as Christian names are shared in the Christian world with variations in the different languages, e.g., the English James is Jacquea in French and Iago in Spanish.  Among the Fulani, Mamoud was one of many male names for a boy born on a Monday.  Mamadou, which sounds similar, was preferred for the woman’s first male child regardless of birth order or day of the week.  In any event, the name Yarrow Mamout suggests he was his mother’s fourth child and born on a Monday.  

It is important to understand that both Yarrow and Mamout were given names, and so an individual might use them in whichever order he preferred.   

This explains how Yarrow Mamout got his name in Africa, but it doesn’t explain how he was referred to once he got to America.  It is rather remarkable though that he was able to keep his African name since most slaves were given a single, Christian name by their American owners.  

The name and spelling Yarrow Mamout has come to us in a roundabout way.  The name doesn’t appear on the portrait’s canvas which artist Charles Willson Peale painted in 1819 and displayed at his museum in Philadelphia.  When the museum finally closed in 1852, his grandson Edmund had all the paintings boxed up and put in storage.  The portrait of Yarrow was mistakenly labeled “Billy Lee” because Edmund mistakenly assumed this was a portrait of a servant of George Washington.  However, in 1947, Peale’s biographer and descendant Charles Coleman Sellers matched the portrait with Peale’s diary and figured out that the portrait was that of the man Peale had referred to as Yarrow Mamout.  The name and spelling, therefore, come from a single reference in Peale’s diary.

We don’t know how Peale learned and spelled the name.  He may have asked Yarrow while he was painting him, but Yarrow couldn’t spell his name in English.  His signature on a deed to his house seems to be signed “Josi.”  So, it’s possible that the name and spelling came not from Yarrow but from Peale’s in-laws, William Marbury and Joseph Brewer, who told him about Yarrow in the first place.  

There are other written records of Yarrow’s name.  He is referred to as Negro Yarrow in his two manumission documents, in the deed for his property, in the manumission for his son, and in tax records on his property in Georgetown.  Tax records after his death indicate the property was owned by the heirs of Yarrow.  Writer David Bailles Warden referred to him as Yaro in his book on Washington, D.C. that was published in 1816.  Since Warden had served as counsel from France and published the book in Paris, the spelling may borrow from the French spelling.  

The will of Yarrow’s first owner, Samuel Beall, contains a bequest of his body servant Jarro that I believe was intended to be of Yarrow since Beall did not own any other slave with a similar name.  Moreover, the name Yarrow is commonly found in records of other slaves in early America.  There were few if any dictionaries in the colonies to standardize spelling in those days.

The census provides a different view.  Census takers typically talked to the individual although lazy ones might take the shortcut of asking a neighbor.  The 1800 census records him as Negro Yarrow, but the 1820 census, listing individuals by first and last name, records him as Yarrow Marmood.  This suggests either that Yarrow was giving this as his name at this time or that this is how he was known in Georgetown.

But the best evidence available, directly from Yarrow, is that he thought of Yarrow as his last name.  An 1803 deed on his property, signed and sealed by him and Francis Deakins, recites that a deed in 1800 which had conveyed the property to Negro Yarrow was wrong.  The property should have been conveyed to his son, “Negro Aquilla or Aquilla Yarrow.”  Aquilla was fifteen years old at the time and probably living with his father.  

Thus, the only document that Yarrow himself signed shows him using Yarrow as a surname.  This would be consistent with the naming conventions the sociologists found.  A child might be given the name of a respected ancestor or relative.  Thus, he might have wanted to pass his own excellent reputation to his son by giving him the name Yarrow.  Or, he might have felt that English surnames were like Fulani birth order names and that his Muslim name was more like a Christian name in America.  Yarrow certainly understood American naming conventions:  The name Aquilla that he gave his son was the same as that of his owner’s brother.

Aquilla Yarrow was called that the rest of his life.  His wife took the name and became Mary “Polly” Yarrow and “Mrs. Yarrow.”  And she passed it on to a community in Maryland that is still known as Yarrowsburg because it is where the midwife Mrs. Yarrow lived.  

In more recent times, there have been suggestions that the proper spelling is Yero Mamoud or a variation because that is the way those names are spelled in West Africa today.  But those spellings come from Senegal or Mali, former French colonies, and are how the French colonists heard the sound of the unwritten African word and the sound of the Arabic Mamoud.  There is no reason to use the French spelling for the name of a man whose name was surely put in writing for the first time after he was in America.  The name Yarrow appears in slave records throughout America.  More than thirty years after his death, Yarrow was recalled in a Georgetown lecture by someone who knew him as “Yarrah,” giving us hints of how the name may have been pronounced or at least how the pronunciation was perverted.

In sum, while Yarrow or someone else in Georgetown may have told Peale that the name was Yarrow Mamout and while he or someone else may have given that name to a census taker, the fact that he named his son Aquilla Yarrow seems indisputable evidence that the African understood the naming conventions in the United States and intended Yarrow to be his surname. 

 

Yarrow Reimagined

      Yarrow Mamout's portrait is among those featured in the new "Early American Art" galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  The galleries were designed by famed architect Frank Gehry and intended to provide a fresh way to view art.

https://philamuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/new-early-american-galleries

Yarrow Mamout in The Muslim World

      The July 2020 issue of The Muslim World is a special issue on Black Muslim Portraiture in the Modern Atlantic.  Three of the articles are on Yarrow Mamout.  I wrote the first and co-authored the second.

       I wrote this article about Yarrow and his family.    Rethinking Yarrow Mamout. 

       Asma Naeem, chief curator of the Baltimore Museum of Art, and I co-authored this article about James Alexander Simpson's portrait of Yarrow and Asma's work in displaying the portrait at the National Portrait Gallery for three years.  Two Museums and the Simpson Portrait of Yarrow Mamout.  

      Carol Soltis, the Peale curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, wrote this third one.  Yarrow Mamout and the Charles Willson Peale Portrait of 1819

 

Simpson portrait at National Portrait Gallery

      In the summer 2017, the Georgetown public library loaned James Alexander Simpson's portrait of Yarrow Mamout to the National Portrait Gallery for three years.  NPG curator Asma Naeem had it prominently displayed in a gallery with portraits of colonial, European Americans.  The exhibit recently received honorable mention as one of the best exhibits in 2017 even though it was an exhibit of only one painting. 

https://hyperallergic.com/417933/best-of-2017-our-top-20-exhibitions-across-the-united-states/

Ground Penetrating Radar arrives

     Today, Elizabeth Wilson, owner of a company called Tomb Geophysics, arrived to conduct a survey of Yarrow's lot using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR).  Like so many who have contributed their time and money to this project, Elizabeth is not charging for the survey.  

       GPR provides an image of what lies under the ground much like an MRI shows what's inside your body, although the technology is different.  The quality of the image and how far it reaches below ground depend on several factors.  However, Elizabeth said the sandy soil that showed up in the test pits is conducive for getting good images.  

  

       Of course, interpreting GPR results takes training.   The images are not like photographs and show things in three dimensions, not two.  They are another tool, though, that the archaeologists can use to figure out what's under the ground and where to dig next.

        Since Elizabeth is donating her time, her business deserves a plug.  It's Tomb Geophysics, www.tombgeophysics.com.  And she can be reached at (771) 733-0930 and ewilson@tombgeophysics.com.   

Visitors to the dig

      On August 14, members of several mosques in Washington D.C. visited Yarrow's lot.  Reasoning there might not have been anyone around to offer an Islamic prayer for the dead when Yarrow was interred on the property at his death in 1823, those attending this August joined in giving the prayer.

      On August 22, some of Yarrow's "family" visited.  He has no living blood relatives, but his daughter-in-law, Mary "Polly" Turner Yarrow does.  Alice Truiett is her great, great, great, great niece. Alice's grandmother, Emma Turner, knew Polly Yarrow, although she did not pass down any stories about her.  Still, the volunteers who have been doing the archaeology to unearth traces of Yarrow were pleased to meet Alice and her daughter Robin Truiett-Theodorson and make a human connection to the man.  Pictured below are Robin, Ruth Trocolli, the city archaeologist, Alice, and Jim Johnston.   The photograph below that shows the volunteers at work during the visit.