Alexandria | Sugar House | Potteries | Glass Company
For more than one hundred years before the Civil War, African Americans, slave and free, helped to manufacture Alexandria's major products, which included ships, rope, biscuits, and sugar. Many free blacks were self employed as draymen, seamstresses, laundresses, coopers (barrel makers), and market gardeners.
In the first several decades of the 19th century, black men had a variety of skilled occupations ranging from trunk maker to house joiner, ship carpenter, baker and soap maker. Several free black men ran their own taverns. Increased mechanization in the mid-19th century brought about a reduction of blacks in the skilled trades as new European immigrants were hired to work in the railroad, iron foundry, locomotive shop, and the new cotton manufactory. By the late 19th century, blacks owned shoe shops, groceries, barber shops, funeral homes, drug stores and repair shops.
The excavation of several manufacturing sites provided archaeological information about the technology used by skilled blacks to make products such as sugar, pottery and glass.
Working at the Alfred Street Sugar House
Excavations at the Moore-McLean Sugar House (1804-1828) on the 100 block of North Alfred Street were the first at any urban sugar refinery in North America. By 1810 Alexandria had two five story brick sugar houses and was the third largest manufacturer of refined sugar in the United States. Each refinery operated with six to thirteen slaves.
On the main floor of the refinery, the slaves boiled and filtered the raw sugar with lime water. This boiling and skimming process must have involved some safety risks. George Berry, a slave at the McLean refinery, was later described in the Free Negro Registry of 1821 as having "a scar on his right wrist caused by a burn."
More than 10,000 fragments of sugar molds and syrup jars used in the refining process were found in excavations. Archaeologists also uncovered oyster shells and Caribbean coral believed to have been used in the production of the lime water. A Spanish coin found among the coral was apparently imported from Cuba along with the raw sugar.
To learn more about the Sugar House, read "How Sweet is Was: Alexandria's Sugar Trade and Refining Business", by Keith L. Barr, Pamela J. Cressey, and Barbara H. Magid in Historical Archaeology of the Chesapeake, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C., 1994.
The Piercy Pottery
Alexandria's potters manufactured earthenware and stoneware utilitarian vessels from 1792 until 1876. The earliest reference to African Americans associated with Alexandria potters is in 1800, when earthenware potter Henry Piercy offered a five dollar reward for the capture of a Negro runaway named Nace. Nace was the property of a Mrs. Peake, and so may have been hired out to Piercy to work at his pottery, which operated at 222 South Washington Street from 1792 to 1809. Earthenware manufactured at Piercy's pottery has been found at many Alexandria sites, including the site of a china shop at 405 King Street, which he owned in 1795-1796.
The Wilkes Street Pottery
The Wilkes Street Pottery produced stoneware and some earthenware from 1813 to 1876 under three different owners: John Swann, Hugh Smith and B.C. Milburn. Rescue excavations in 1977 recovered more than 16,000 artifacts from the waster piles, and stoneware produced at Wilkes Street has been found on many other sites. Records show that African Americans, both free and slave, worked at the pottery under the tenure of each owner.
David Jarbour, a free black potter who worked at Wilkes Street from 1816 to 1840, left a unique legacy--a personally signed stoneware jar, now in the collection of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA). This large pot, the only extant Alexandria piece with a personal signature, may have been a special show piece which marked the end of Jarbour's apprenticeship, or some other level of accomplishment. To what degree were David Jarbour and other blacks at the pottery responsible for the development of the Alexandria pottery tradition? It appears that Alexandria's stoneware was produced in part by blacks, and as such should be recognized as an element of African American material culture.
To learn more about Alexandria stoneware, see the on-line exhibit The" Potter’s Art, or order The Potter’s Art and other papers from our Publications Catalogue.
Working at the Old Dominion Glass Company
By 1920, the Old Dominion Glass Company (ca.1901-1925) employed 250 people--black and white--in the manufacture of beer, soda, food, and medicine bottles. During construction of the Ramada Inn in 1972, a variety of glass making tools and wasters were collected.
Some of the glass company workers lived in a black neighborhood, called Cross Canal. An oral history study conducted with one resident provided a glimpse of what it was like to work at the glass factory:
The glass was made in something like a furnace. It was runny, well, it was more soupy than dough. I'd say it would be more like the dough you make pancakes [from]. They had these long tools that they stick in there and wind around until they got a certain amount...on the stick when they take it out...it looked like a stone...they rolled it up and down, up and down, and there'd be two of us sitting at the molds...I was a mold girl once, and then I also [did] what they used to call "snapper" when it came out of the mold. [I'd] be right there with my...gadget and snap it off...
To learn more about Alexandria's glass factories, read about the dig at the Virginia Glass Company.
