Site of the Old Cupola House Kitchen?

Site of the Old Cupola House Kitchen?. . , This location in the back garden may well be the site of the original kitchen as outlined above in the Sanborn Five Insurance Map of 1883. An excellent example of a surviving 18th century kitchen is found at Somerset Place, across Albemarle Sound in Washington County, North Carolina. Author Michael Twiddy writes:, “This restored antebellum North Carolina plantation kitchen shows some of the features that enslaved cooks contended with…heavy pots, large hot hearths, mice, smoky airsearing summers, and making thousands of sumptuous meals that they were usually not allowed to taste….The job of a cook was one of the most arduous jobs on a Southern plantation - often requiring the assistance of a spouse and children ……the rituals of cleaning, making ready the daily bread, preparing two or three meals a day, washing dishes, sweeping and mopping the brick and cypress floor would have seemed interminable.”, While not a plantation like Somerset Place, the Cupola House had similar needs for the Dickinson and Bond families. Made of brick because of the danger of fire, the slaves may well have been quartered in the upstairs loft. The kitchen was also the place for laundry and other chores. The subsequent Sanborn Map of 1893 shows no such structure existing. How and why it was removed remains a mystery.