FREDERICK, Md. – Shayla Monroe rises at 4 a.m. for her commute from Washington to Frederick, Md., eagerly anticipating the work ahead: digging through the trash.
Monroe is one of six area university students hired this summer through a grant by the U.S. Department of Interior to excavate former slave dwellings on what is now the Best Farm in Monocacy National Battlefield.
“There are mornings when I can’t wait to get my hands in this dirt,” Monroe said, brushing away clumps of soil that clung to late 18th century to early 19th century porcine jaw bones and bits of ceramic in a midden the team discovered.
The midden is a sort of trash heap kept outside the dwellings where the slaves threw away old or broken items, Monroe said.
The French-Catholic family that fled the growing slave revolt in St. Domingue (now Haiti) in 1793 had by 1800 amassed about 90 slaves on a 748-acre plantation just outside Frederick, making them the county’s second-largest slave holder.
Archaeologists discovered the site in 2003 but postponed their work until this summer, when a Youth Intake Program grant allowed the excavation to continue.
Monroe and the others have sifted through broken dishes, wine jug shards, a horse bit, an animal’s tooth, and a large penny coin from 1825 or 1826, trying to get a sense of what daily life was like for the enslaved population that toiled there. Lives barely, if ever, recorded in the public record.
