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Photographer: Bernard Fisher
Taken: October 24, 2009
Caption: Free Black Settlement
Additional Description: Recreated within Freedom Park is a purposefully established community whose inhabitants consisted of Free Blacks. Here visitors can see three types of dwellings that they occupied between 1804 and the 1860s. In 1802 William Ludwell Lee bequeathed his slaves their freedom and specified that comfortable homes were to be built for them on "the Hotwaters", a subsidiary farm of nearby Green Spring Plantation. Lee died in 1803 and soon after his executor had begun building houses for the former slaves. This interpretation draws upon historical and archaeological research to convey a sense of what life was like for these men, women, and children. It also takes into account the rigors of everyday life and the economic hardships that James City County's Free Blacks experienced nearly 60 years before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Submitted: October 25, 2009, by Bernard Fisher of Richmond, Virginia.
Database Locator Identification Number: p81861
File Size: 1.196 Megabytes

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