Author: Evan Nicole Brown / Source: Atlas Obscura
Maryland Route 178, also known as Generals Highway, is an eight-mile thoroughfare loosely connecting Baltimore and Annapolis. Before it had exits for shopping malls, the historic road was used by George Washington for his journey from New York to Annapolis, which was the capital of the United States for parts of 1783 and 1784.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, nearby Chesapeake Bay was a major port for the trade of enslaved people recently brought from Africa. Plantations started popping up along Generals Highway, and the enslaved people there tended to labor-intensive tobacco for export to Europe. Recently, scientists studying the area for clues into the lives of Africans living in Maryland at the time made a relatively minor discovery—a tobacco pipe—that held extraordinary evidence of the life of an enslaved woman 200 years ago.
Pipes are fairly ubiquitous finds on archaeological sites from the period. This one was found in the slave quarters at Belvoir, a historic house in Crownsville, Maryland, that belonged to the grandmother of Francis Scott Key (of “Star Spangled Banner” fame). The slave quarters, about 500 feet downhill from the manor house, were found somewhat accidentally, as researchers were looking for French commander Rochambeau’s Revolution-era campsite when they stumbled upon the large stone foundation.
A team from the Maryland Department of Transportation, State Highway Administration, began excavating the 32-by-32-foot building in 2014. Julie Schablitsky, chief archaeologist with the department, noticed a pipe stem sticking out of the brick floor and subsequently dated other artifacts in the soil layer to determine its age, somewhere between 150 and 200 years old. But a more thrilling detail emerged upon further analysis. Schablitsky and her team tested the tobacco pipe stem for…
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