Germantown Exhibits

Clusters of sacred items beneath the hearthstones and etched figures in the fireplace surround are indicative of BaKongo rituals from West Central Africa. In particular, the quartz crystals were thought to control ancestral spirits, envisioned as shafts of light, as they entered the house from the chimney and ascended the adjacent stairway.

To judge from the topography, around a hundred years ago, a wagon path, fairly level but gently rising northeastward, may have skirted the slope base and the current brambly property line. Originally the ground surface was a shallow loam, formed on top of glacial till clay. A midden accumulated around the Parsonage in the late 18th Century, continuing through the 19th. Between the Civil War and the 1950s, a septic system was emplaced, with ceramic drainage pipelines set into the midden. In the mid-20th Century, topsoil for a lawn was laid down several inches thick over much of the yard. Student excavators have uncovered a buried pile of sandstone slabs, possibly a building foundation, that may have functioned as a retaining wall as midden accumulated. Midway along the wagon path, we have found high concentrations of bone and shell, suggestive of food refuse disposal: a clue that a detached summer kitchen was nearby in earlier times. On the other hand, the shells of oyster and clam, marine and riverine, may have been crushed for mortar and daub manufacture. Yet salt-glazed pottery sherds are abundant, indicative of food storage and preparation in the vicinity.