CEAC-2022-08-August

American Street Guide
200 Years of History Unearthed at
Former Slave Quarters
By Maia Bronfman, The Natchez Democrat
NATCHEZ, Miss. (AP) — Two hundred years of history has
been unearthed at Concord Quarters, an 1820s original slave
quarters in Natchez.
Below a garden fence wrapped in vines and buds of fuchsia,
wrought iron hides in the dirt. It could be the structural
support for a brick extension built in 1819 off of the main
plantation house.
Though the above-ground house burned down in 1901,
Shawn Lambert, professor of anthropology and archaeology
at Mississippi State University, hopes the iron feature will
lead them to the base of a column. Lambert is two weeks
into an archeological dig on the grounds where Concord’s
mansion once stood.
Debbie Cosey and her husband, Greg, own the last building
standing from the original construction. They invited
Lambert’s team to narrate the “ingenuity and skill that the
enslaved people had,” Cosey said. “It’s important to remember
the lives and the work of the enslaved people, many with
forgotten names.”
Concord Mansion was first built in the 1790s by Manuel Gayoso,
governor of Spanish Louisiana, as a plantation home. He
built police and fire stations for Natchez, too, and adorned
his own home with a double marble staircase which went up
to the second floor. The stone was shipped from Spain for his
architectural exceptionalism in a town of cypress construction.
In 1799, Gayoso died of yellow fever and Stephen Minor,
Gayoso’s secretary and captain in the Spanish army, moved in
with his wife Katherine. Then 10 years later Minor died, and
Katherine ran the house until she passed it to her daughter,
also named Katherine.
In 1844 the Minors owned 147 enslaved people. Concord
Quarters, the Coseys’ current home, was where many of
them lived.
Unique to the records kept at Concord are last names of
enslaved people. First names, even, are rare. Because of the
detail in Katherine’s documentation, genealogical research
and collaboration with descendant communities can be used
to uncover direct descendancy to people in the current Natchez
community.
“That makes it a very important public archeology opportunity,”
Lambert said.
Open to student-led tours every Thursday, the archaeological
field study is a “testament to the powers of combining the
tools of archeology with the cultural heritage of the community,
and the people who have these important historical
connections to these places,” Lambert said.
“This kind of archeology hasn’t been done very much in Mississippi
when it has been done. It’s the future of archeology,”
he added.
One of their main excavations was prompted by a few bricks
disrupting the lawn from below. They’ve since uncovered a
cistern 17 feet wide. Typically, they are a third of that size.
“We thought tree roots had destroyed it,” Seylor Foster,
junior archeology student at MSU, said of the still intact
cistern.
The cistern, once a cavernous water storage tank for the
original mansion, was likely built by enslaved people. There
are three depressions facing up in one of the bricks which
forms the border of the cistern. Cosey has been looking for a
brick like this for years.
The depressions are fingerprints. When enslaved people
would make bricks, they often had quotas. To identify which
bricks were theirs, they would sometimes push their fingers
into the clay before it went to the kiln. The number of fingers
they used as their signature was specific to each person.
The enslaved person who made the brick uncovered in the
cistern used three.
“As I held that in my hands,” Cosey said, “we live in history.”
“Your thumb is on their thumb. For someone like Debbie
who’s been searching for one of those bricks for 6 or 7 years,
she has an even deeper connection,” Foster said.
Emily Cohlmia joined the project from the Oklahoma Public
Archeology Network. After her two sons graduated from
high school, she decided to leave her job teaching 8th grade
to study public archeology.
She hopes to get youth groups involved with public archaeology.
While still teaching, Cohlmia remembers her students
asking if she was going to find dinosaurs.
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