While we can acknowledge that the Sisters of the Visitation of Monte Maria were brought from Baltimore to Richmond to help with the restoration of life in Richmond, in particular, the re-establishment and rebuilding of the Catholic Church and to build a girls’ school, that they were working for racial healing and reconciliation in the city is unclear. The Catholic Church itself enslaved many African Americans and Bishop Joseph McGill who brought the Sisters to Richmond was widely recognized as a Confederate sympathizer. The primary donor for the construction of this chapel was Ida Barry Ryan, wife of Thomas Fortune Ryan, a banker and financier and the 10^th richest person in the country when he died in 1928. When he and his younger brother were just teenagers, they were the owners of three enslaved individuals. Ida, born Ida Mary Barry, used the sizable sum of money she inherited at her father’s death to build and renovate many Catholic institutions, though she made this explicit caveat: none of her funds could be used for “colored work” including schools and hospitals for Virginia’s freed blacks. Nonetheless, Pope Pious X gave her the cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice for distinguished service to the Catholic Church.

We lift up the painful history associated with the initial funding of this chapel. We lift it up in order to reckon with it as part of Richmond Hill’s renewed mission of racial reconciliation, a mission that calls for sustained action on racial justice issues.

Click the video to listen to the song!

I’ve got a babe but shall I keep him
‘Twill come the day when I’ll be weepin’
But how can I love him any less
This little babe upon my breast
You can take my body
You can take my bones
You can take my blood
But not my soul . . .

From Rhiannon Giddens in an interview on NPR with Michel Martin in April 2018

I’ll play the other song that was inspired by being a mother called “At the Purchaser’s Option” that was inspired by an ad that I saw in the late 1700s that was for a young woman who was for sale. This was very common, like used car ads. Seriously, you needed some cash, you just put an ad in the paper. It was horrible; these are human beings. But it was so common and it said at the end of it: She has with her a nine-month-old baby who is “at the purchaser’s option.” And those words said everything to me. I tried to put myself in her position. Her frame of mind.

Another exciting day of shovel testing at Richmond Hill! We collected some GPS points and excavated one test along the transect we laid in yesterday and one in the path of the new walkway.

The transect test produced a mixture of glass, historic ceramics, nails, and a couple of pieces of plastic including a vintage Listerine bottle cap (Listerine has been around since 1879!). While we seem to be outside of the intact, herring bone-pattern brick pavement the gardener has seen before, we believe we encountered a feature filled will brick, mortar, and a lot of slag and other burned materials like oyster shell and glass beneath the mixed fill about 50 centimeters below the ground surface. We’ll be back later to expose more of the feature to learn more about it.

The walkway test identified a thick layer of mortar beneath mixed fill about 25 centimeters below the ground surface. Beneath the mortar, another 10 centimeters of artifact bearing soil was excavated before coming down on sterile sandy clay subsoil. Each test is a clue to unravelling some of the mysteries of the history of life at Richmond Hill.

Pam Smith

We had a great first dig! This from archaeologist Tim Roberts from Cultural Resource Analysts:

“This morning we excavated one square, 50-x-50-centimeter-wide shovel test pit about 15 meters northeast of the slave house, careful to stay out of the beautiful garden plots. While we didn’t identify any archaeological features, we did recover a range of artifacts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and maybe a few quartzite flakes from pre-colonial stone tool-making, all from within the first 25 centimeters of the ground surface. We still have to clean and examine the materials back in the lab, but we know we have plenty of brick fragments, some terracotta pot sherds or drainpipe fragments, wire and cut iron nails, a piece of wrought iron hardware, green and colorless vessel glass, lamp glass fragments, burned animal bones, coal and slag, whiteware sherds, clay pipe bowl fragments, a glass marble, and few pieces of plastic and aluminum foil.”