Historic Outbuilding, Belmont, Fredericksburg, VA

BELMONT - The Gari Melchers Estate & Memorial Gallery

This historic structure is located to the NE of the Belmont mansion house.

During my visit, a Belmont guide told me that this structure had at one time been occupied by an elderly African American woman who had worked for the Melchers.

My questions are:

1. Who was the elderly African American woman?
2. Where was she from?
3. Had she ever been enslaved? (or was she the descendant of a slave?)
4. What were her (or her family's) ties to Belmont and the surrounding community, if any?
5. This was a tenant house, but was it previously a slave quarter?
6. Were there more like this at that location or was this the only one? (My quarters to community theory.)
7. What is Belmont going to do with it?

This may be a fantastic opportunity to interpret historic African American lifeways.
























Looking SW, one can almost see the Belmont mansion house from the structure:


Maddy McCoy
Fairfax County, Virginia
Slavery Inventory Database

Belmont, Fredericksburg, VA

One of the guides told me this structure had been the overseer's house. It is situated to the north of the mansion:





Maddy McCoy
County, Virginia
Slavery Inventory Database

Unnamed Cemetery, Church Street, Milton, DE

This cemetery is on Church Street, but no church is visible today. I am unsure if these burials even have a connection to this former church or if they are attached to the adjacent Sunrise Lodge #4.

Note the homemade pique assiette mosaic planter that has been placed on a grave (not as the grave marker, but as a planter.)

In my recent travels around southern Delaware I saw only one other planter of this kind. That example was in the nearby Reynold's Church Cemetery. There too, the planter was placed on the grave as a decorative offering as opposed to functioning as the grave marker itself.

Based on the similarities in the application of the mosaic, the shape of the vessel and the choice of found-objects used, my guess is that the two recipients of these planters were kin. Possibly made by a common relative.

Wonderful!

Maddy McCoy
Fairfax County, Virginia
Slavery Inventory Database