The Cultural History of Marlborough, Virginia. C. Malcolm Watkins
in northeastern Virginia. Marlborough Point has interested Dr. Darter especially since it is the site of one of the Virginia colonial port towns designated by Act of Assembly in 1691. During the town’s brief existence, it was the location of the Stafford County courthouse and the place where the colonial planter and lawyer John Mercer established his home in 1726. Tangible evidence of colonial activities at Marlborough Point—in the form of brickbats and potsherds still can be seen after each plowing, while John Mercer’s “Land Book,” examined anew by Dr. Darter, has revealed the original survey plats of the port town.
In this same period and as early as 1938, Dr. T. Dale Stewart (then curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution) had commenced excavations at the Indian village site of Patawomecke, a few hundred yards west of the Marlborough Town site. The aboriginal backgrounds of the area including Marlborough Point already had been investigated. As the result of his historical research connected with this project, Dr. Stewart has contributed fundamentally to the present undertaking by foreseeing the excavations of Marlborough Town as a logical step beyond his own investigation.
Motivated by this combination of interests, circumstances, and historical clues, Dr. Darter invited the Smithsonian Institution to participate in an archeological investigation of Marlborough. Preliminary tests made in August 1954 were sufficiently rewarding to justify such a project. Consequently, an application for funds was prepared jointly and was submitted by Dr. Darter through the University of Virginia to the American Philosophical Society. In January 1956 grant number 159, Johnson Fund (1955), for $1500 was assigned to the program. In addition, the Smithsonian Institution contributed the professional services necessary for field research and directed the purchase of microfilms and photostats, the drawing of maps and illustrations, and the preparation and publication of this report. Dr. Darter hospitably provided the use of his Marlborough Point cottage during the period of excavation, and Mary Washington College administered the grant. Frank Setzler directed the excavations during a six-week period in April and May 1956, while interpretation of cultural material and the searches of historical data related to it were carried out by C. Malcolm Watkins.
At the commencement of archeological work it was expected that traces of the 17th- and early 18th-century town would be found, including, perhaps, the foundations of the courthouse. This expectation was not realized, although what was found from the Mercer period proved to be of greater importance. After completion, a report was made in the 1956 Year Book of the American Philosophical Society (pp. 304–308).
After the 1956 excavations, the question remained whether the principal foundation (Structure B) might not have been that of the courthouse. Therefore, in August 1957 a week-long effort was made to find comparative evidence by digging the site of the succeeding 18th-century Stafford County courthouse at the head of Potomac Creek. This disclosed a foundation sufficiently different from Structure B to rule out any analogy between the two.
It should be made clear that—because of the limited size of the grant—the archeological phase of the investigation was necessarily a limited survey. Only the more obvious features could be examined within the means at the project’s disposal. No final conclusions relative to Structure B, for example, are warranted until the section of foundation beneath the highway which crosses it can be excavated. Further excavations need to be made south and southeast of Structure B and elsewhere in search of outbuildings and evidence of 17th-century occupancy.
Despite such limitations, this study is a detailed examination of a segment of colonial Virginia’s plantation culture. It has been prepared with the hope that it will provide Dr. Darter with essential material for his area studies and, also, with the wider objective of increasing the knowledge of the material culture of colonial America. Appropriate to the function of a museum such as the Smithsonian, this study is concerned principally with what is concrete—objects and artifacts and the meanings that are to be derived from them. It has relied upon the mutually dependent techniques of archeologist and cultural historian and will serve, it is hoped, as a guide to further investigations of this sort by historical museums and organizations.
Among the many individuals contributing to this study, I am especially indebted to Dr. Darter; to the members of the American Philosophical Society who made the excavations possible; to Dr. Stewart, who reviewed the archeological sections at each step as they were written; to Mrs. Sigrid Hull who drew the line-and-stipple illustrations which embellish the report; Edward G. Schumacher of the Bureau of American Ethnology, who made the archeological maps and drawings; Jack Scott of the Smithsonian photographic laboratory, who photographed the artifacts; and George Harrison Sanford King of Fredericksburg, from whom the necessary documentation for the 18th-century courthouse site was obtained.
I am grateful also to Dr. Anthony N. B. Garvan, professor of American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania and former head curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s department of civil history, for invaluable encouragement and advice; and to Worth Bailey formerly with the Historic American Buildings Survey, for many ideas, suggestions, and important identifications of craftsmen listed in Mercer’s ledgers.
I am equally indebted to Ivor Noël Hume, director of archeology at Colonial Williamsburg and an honorary research associate of the Smithsonian Institution, for his assistance in the identification of artifacts; to Mrs. Mabel Niemeyer, librarian of the Bucks County Historical Society, for her cooperation in making the Mercer ledgers available for this report; to Donald E. Roy, librarian of the Darlington Library, University of Pittsburgh, for providing the invaluable clue that directed me to the ledgers; to the staffs of the Virginia State Library and the Alexandria Library for repeated courtesies and cooperation; and to Miss Rodris Roth, associate curator of cultural history at the Smithsonian, for detecting Thomas Oliver’s inventory of Marlborough in a least suspected source.
I greatly appreciate receiving generous permissions from the University of Pittsburgh Press to quote extensively from the George Mercer Papers Relating to the Ohio Company of Virginia, and from Russell & Russell to copy Thomas Oliver’s inventory of Marlborough.
To all of these people and to the countless others who contributed in one way or another to the completion of this study, I offer my grateful thanks.
C. Malcolm Watkins
Washington, D.C.
1967
The Cultural History
of
Marlborough, Virginia
HISTORY
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I
Official Port Towns in Virginia and Origins of Marlborough
ESTABLISHING THE PORT TOWNS
The dependence of 17th-century Virginia upon the single crop—tobacco—was a chronic problem. A bad crop year or a depressed English market could plunge the whole colony into debt, creating a chain reaction of overextended credits and failures to meet obligations. Tobacco exhausted the soil, and soil exhaustion led to an ever-widening search for new land. This in turn brought about population dispersal and extreme decentralization.
After the Restoration in 1660 the Virginia colonial government was faced not only with these economic hazards but also with the resulting administrative difficulties. It was awkward to govern a scattered population