Questions and Answers with Deborah Kalb

    Each time I'm asked about the story, I see new angles and tell it slightly differently.  An example is this Question and Answer session I had with the book blogger Deborah  Kalb.
http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/2014/12/q-with-james-h-johnston.html

PowerPoint Presentation

I've given about a hundred book talks, using a PowerPoint presentation. Audiences have liked it, so I decided to experiment with sharing it online.  I've substituted text for my narration but the slides are the same.  Warning: it is long and it only runs on computers, not iPads or tablets.  Let me know what you think of the presentation.  To view the presentation, click on this link:  PowerPoint Presentation

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