Clifton/Worthington Farm Open House

Dear Friends,

Does anyone know what it's called when an artist has a smash debut album and then flops on the second? Me neither, and that's going to bug me, but the good news is that the Monocacy Living Historians did not experience that. Our second event, this time at the Worthington House, was great!

Photo by Liz Richardson, but not at this event.

The Worthington farm open house was the weekend after our big anniversary weekend, so we didn't get an opportunity to run through everything - or anything - in advance the way we did the Best House. I was so proud of us, though, because we just rolled with it.

Diane's mid-19th century wardrobe isn't ready yet, so she dressed in the park's official volunteer uniform. Tracy asked if I wanted to be upstairs or downstairs, and since I didn't realize that downstairs meant the cellar, I didn't speak up quickly enough and say, "Heck, yeah, I want the cellar!" As a result, Diane and I were on the main floor on Saturday - she in the parlor and me in the dining room.

Diane sounded like she was on a roll in the parlor. Diane has spent a lot of time as a docent for another park; she was in her element and it showed.

As for me, I enjoyed getting to talk about the dining room. There are some...er...idiosyncrasies in the dining room that are fun to talk about, but more importantly, the servant access between the cellar kitchen and the dining room was right behind me. The servant access up to the bedrooms was also right behind me, but I was most excited about access from the kitchen. It was so easy to see how the house's operating rhythm would have worked.

On Saturday, I wasn't in the house at all. Tracy offered me an opportunity to give the program on Sunday, and I had jumped at it. I had done spiels before, of course, starting with the 2014 Museums by Candlelight event, but I had never yet done a formal program.

I mentioned that we had limited time to prepare for this event, simply because the anniversary event was the weekend before, and it's all-hands-on-deck until that event is over. But during the week in between the two events, Tracy sent me a bunch of out-of-order bullet points, I organized them and added from my own research, and then she added some more points from the architectural reports, and from there we each massaged it into the story we wanted to tell. This house was a witness of war, but more than that, it was a home. It was a home long before Jubal Early marched his Confederate army through, and it was a home long after. I'm so grateful that Tracy gave me an opportunity to share that story with our visitors.

By the second program, I had lost my stage fright, and by the third one, I was really rolling. It helped that I got a lot of questions, many of them about items I had been actively researching. That told me that others are interested in the same questions I'm trying to answer, and gave me confidence about my program content. I have a lot to learn, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Photo courtesy of Nicole Webb.
Used with permission.

I don't know for certain what I was talking about when my friend Nicole snapped that picture, but it would have been right around the time I started talking about the graffiti in the house added by its residents when it was turned into a barracks for migrant farm workers. Obscene graffiti would merit a grimace, wouldn't you say? (And clearly, I need to practice my programs more in front of a mirror.)

As you can see from the photos, the Worthington Farm has some beautiful scenery. I don't bring my camera when I'm dressed out because it spoils the illusion, but the Worthington Farm is one of my favorite places to go to practice my photography. The Monocacy River runs behind the tree line, and with the foothills behind that, I can easily imagine Mrs. Worthington and her family spending many a happy hour on the back porch enjoying the view.  When Mr. Worthington purchased the farm in 1862, it had been advertised as one of the most prosperous farms in the area; I can't help but think that a view like that would have helped to seal the deal!

History: One Puzzle Piece At a Time

Photo by Elizabeth Richardson. Used with permission.

Dear Friends,

As a volunteer for an historical park, some of my favorite moments are when visitors become part of the research process. With the surge in hobby genealogy, some folks have discovered that their ancestors fought in the "Battle of the Monocacy" - or lived on the land where the battle was fought - and decide to come take a trip to visit the place they're learning about. Sometimes they'll bring a letter or diary or other some other object from that ancestor to show us. When we're very, very lucky, that artifact changes our understanding of history.

That may sound odd, because some would think it impolite to say to a complete stranger, "I noticed you talked about ______. I have a letter from my great-great-uncle who was there, and he talked about that differently." I think there's a common misconception that our understanding of history is static and will never change. After all, something happened or it didn't, right? Well, yes and no.

We can't assess history as it happens; we're too close to see it objectively. The more time passes, the more information is blurred or lost. As historians, no matter the genre, we make assessments and conclusions based on the best information we have at the time, and as we find new evidence, we need to revisit our earlier conclusions to see if they still hold. Understanding our history is sometimes less like viewing a photograph and more like a billion-piece jigsaw puzzle with a blurry picture on the cover; with that many pieces, some are going to be extremely similar. A piece may seem to fit over here, and then 100 pieces later, we realize another piece makes more sense in that spot, and that original piece really needs to go there.

When I started this blog post, I was initially going to talk about an unpublished letter that was brought to the park's attention and has contributed to the conversation around the infamous "Lost Orders," or Confederate General Lee's Special Order 191. However, Ranger Tracy Evans has already written a great article that touches on all the information about S.O. 191; you can read that here. Instead, I thought I'd give a much shorter -and everyday - example using something I found about L'Hermitage.

If you've read my post on Victoire's business acumen, the following advertisement¹ from 1820 will look familiar:

A HANDSOME FARM,
FOR SALE.
THE subscriber offers for sale, her FARM, containing 500 ACRES OF PRIME LAND, the greatest part of which has been improved by clover and plaster. This Farm is beautifully situated on Monocacy River, three miles from Fredericktown, (Md.) on the George-town road, 38 miles from the latter city, and 10 from Potomac; about 60 acres of it are in fine tim[b]er.
   THE improvements are -- good two story STONE HOUSE with six rooms and a Cellar; stone barn; stone stable, large enough for 15 horses; a good two story log dwelling log house; a granary, corn, pigeon, meat log houses; ice house and others; a large well, which, altho' upon a hill, has never less than 20 feet of most excellent lime stone water, even in the driest seasons; a good and well situated garden, of four acres of fruit trees, of several kinds.
   Also, a tract containing 250 Acres of LAND, adjoining the above, and only two miles from Fredericktown, which will be sold with, or seperate [sic] from the first.
   Also, a tract of 37 Acres of Mountain LAND, on the east bank of Monocacy, opposite the above farm. For further information apply to Mr. PETER LAFONT, Baltimore, and the Owner living in said Farm.
                 VICTOIRE VINCENDIERE
   april 28

I found this advertisement very soon after the Monocacy Living Historians participated in the open house for this farm, so the conclusions made about it in the Monocacy National Battlefield Cultural Resources Study² were quite fresh in my mind. On page 59, the study asserts the following: 

The Vincendieres at the same time they were building the main house, probably also had constructed, or outfitted the upper log portion of the log and stone secondary dwelling, as the interior woodwork in the log portion matches that in the south wing of the main house.  The Vincendieres definitely were responsible for the construction of the stone French style barn on the property.  There were probably other buildings on the property, as well.  If Victoire had 90 slaves by 1800, they had to live somewhere, unless she leased them out to other farmers.

The implication from the phrase “probably other outbuildings as well,” is that we don’t have any information on those other outbuildings. Does the advertisement fill in some of those gaps? Yes, at least partially! This is the exciting part of finding real estate advertisements for our properties. We can now add a stone stable, a granary, a corn house*, a pigeon house, a meat house, an ice house, a well on a hill, and we now have confirmation there were other outbuildings as well.

While we still don't know how they were constructed or exactly where they were, knowing this helps us reconstruct in our minds the scenery and rhythm of their daily lives. In fact, with the exception of the stable, all of the listed outbuildings tell us quite a bit about the kinds of foods that could have been part of their diet at L'Hermitage. The reference to the garden and 4-acre fruit orchard, while not a building, does as well. We don't have to go much further than Marie Antoinette's infamous "Let them eat cake" comment to know that diets were very different among the different classes in France (and elsewhere, but the Vincendieres were French); knowing what they ate helps us understand who they thought they were. Did they see themselves as untitled American aristocracy? As part of a wealthier middle class?

Then, too, as we work to give a voice to the voiceless - and in many cases nameless - people who worked on her plantation, every piece of information we find can be tied back to their story. For example, the advertisement above tells us her stable would hold 15 horses. Knowing about the horse power used on their farm tells us more about Victoire's expectations of her slaves. The fewer horses she had, the more she would have needed to make up the difference in labor from people in order to get a maximum yield from her land.

Now if a visitor would just walk through the doors with a diary or letter passed down in their family from someone who was there and talked about what it was like, that would be a cherry on my ice cream sundae because it would help make sure we get it right.

*There is a wood frame wagon shed + corn crib on the farm today, and it is original. However, according to the Cultural Resources Study, it dates from the mid- to late-19th century (translation: well after the Vincendiere era).

  

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1 Vincendiere, Victoire. "A Handsome Farm [advertisement]." Baltimore Patriot, 12 June 1820, p. 1.^↩
2 Reed, Paula Stoner. Monocacy National Battlefield Cultural Resources Study. Interior Department, National Park Service, 1999, pp. 58-60.^↩

Don't Tell Victoire About "A Woman's Place"

Note: This blog post is not intended to be a complete commentary on this subject. Those who have been to the Monocacy National Battlefield may read this and ask,"But what about the slavery at that plantation?" That's not a subject to which I can do justice in a single paragraph on this blog posts; it deserves a more complete commentary in separate blog posts devoted to that subject.

Dear Friends,

The Best Farm, formerly known as L'Hermitage

I'd really like to know what kind of education Victoire Vincendiere had that prepared her for the kind of life she lived. This is a woman who seems to have spent her life defying convention, and she was very successful at it. 

The National Park Service's records indicate that Victoire was born in Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) in 1776. Much of her early life is unknown, but we do know that in 1795 she purchased from Daniel Dulaney 457 acres, and in 1798 she purchased another 291 acres from James Marshall.¹ This would become the home the family referred to as L'Hermitage.

Did you catch that? Victoire -- not her father or her older brother or a male "family friend" -- purchased both tracts of land. In fact, her father decided to set up his own household down in Charleston, South Carolina, while most of the rest of the family decided to stay with Victoire just outside Frederick, Maryland. If the 1776 birth year is correct, she would have been 19 years old when she purchased that first tract of land.

It's on the acreage she purchased from Marshall that she and her family built the manor house and associated outbuildings. Since she purchased that tract in 1798, and was hit with a massive tax assessment that same year for improvements, there is speculation that she may have had an agreement with Marshall that allowed her to begin building before the sale was made official.²

Just two years later in the 1800 census, Victoire is living in a household with 18 free whites and 90 slaves.³ We can speculate all day long why she had so many slaves, and we can debate how much credibility we should lend to data in a census while we work to track down more data, but it's clear that Victoire wasn't interested in running just a small family farm. She really embraced the philosophy "Go big or go home."

She doesn't seem to have been operating on a shoestring budget, either. In 1803, when James Marshall passed away, she had sufficient funds to join with Norm Bruce to lend William and Eleanor Marshall the 10,000 pounds they needed for the administrators bond to execute the will.⁴

Victoire wouldn't ultimately sell L'Hermitage until 1827, but several years earlier in 1820 she ran a newspaper advertisement that listed many of the buildings on the property⁵:

A HANDSOME FARM,
FOR SALE.
THE subscriber offers for sale, her FARM, containing 500 ACRES OF PRIME LAND, the greatest part of which has been improved by clover and plaster.  This Farm is beautifully situated on Monocacy River, three miles from Fredericktown, (Md.) on the George-town road, 38 miles from the latter city, and 10 from Potomac; about 60 acres of it are in fine tim[b]er.
   THE improvements are -- a good two story STONE HOUSE with six rooms and a Cellar; a stone barn; stone stable, large enough for 15 horses; a good two story log dwelling log house; a granary, corn, pigeon, meat log houses; ice house and others; a large well, which, altho' upon a hill, has never less than 20 feet of most excellent lime stone water, even in the driest seasons; a good and well situated garden, of four acres of fruit trees, of several kinds.
   Also, a tract containing 250 Acres of LAND, adjoining the above, and only two miles from Fredericktown, which will be sold with, or seperate [sic] from the first.
   Also, a tract of 37 Acres of Mountain LAND, on the east bank of Monocacy, opposite the above farm. For further information apply to Mr. PETER LAFONT, Baltimore, and the Owner living in said Farm.
                 VICTOIRE VINCENDIERE    april 28 

That sounds almost idyllic. When she did sell the plantation, she sold all 748 acres to John Brien for $24,025.⁶ When she had originally purchased the property back in 1795 and 1798, she had paid 7,023 pounds. Dollars and pounds are not an apples-to-apples comparison, but if we compare that to the value assessment placed on her property for taxes in 1798, we're comparing $24025 in 1827 to $1923 in 1798 for the land only and to $2323 for the land with improvements.² Minimally, she had realized a 10x increase in property value over the 33 years she had managed it, and that doesn't include the revenue she would have seen during her ownership from selling her crops, etc. Not bad for a female immigrant who started as a teenager.

Which practically begs the question: From where did she get this business acumen? I suspect we aren't going to find that her childhood education included classes on how to build and manage a plantation in America. While there is no question that her use and treatment of slaves was wrong, she was using business practices that were accepted during her lifetime. Who was guiding her, at least in the beginning, in these business decisions?

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1 Reed, Paula Stoner, PhD. Monocacy National Battlefield Cultural Resources Study. Interior Department, National Park Service, 1999, p. 58.^↩
2 Ibid, p. 59.^↩
3 United States Federal Census 1800. Frederick, Frederick, Maryland; Series M32, Roll 10, National Archives and Records Administration, pp. 153. ^↩
4 Administrator Bonds Liber Hs No 1-2, 1799-1817. Frederick County, Maryland, Orphans' Court (Frederick County), James Marshall, 15 Jun 1803. Although William Marshall, Eleanor Marshall, Norm Bruce, and Victoire Vincendierre all signed the administrator bond, only the two Marshalls submitted and signed the inventory as executors, so it is likely that Bruce's and Vincendierre's role in administering the will was covering the loan.^↩
5 Vincendierre, Victoire. (1820, June 12) "A Handsome Farm," Baltimore Patriot, p. 1.^↩
6 Reed, Paula Stoner, PhD. Monocacy National Battlefield Cultural Resources Study. Interior Department, National Park Service, 1999, p. 60.^↩