Guest blog written by Colleen Betti, current doctoral candidate at UNC-Chapel Hill and long-time Fairfield Foundation friend. In 2019, I wrote a guest blog post talking about the research I was doing on Gloucester’s schools. In the year and a half since then, I’ve excavated 54 test units at three of Gloucester’s black schools. Woodville […]
Happy 20th Anniversary Fairfield Foundation
In November 2000, we dug our first shovel tests at Fairfield, beginning 20 years of public archaeology on the Middle Peninsula. To dig at Fairfield had been a dream held by Co-Directors David Brown and Thane Harpole for several years- we never thought it would come to fruition so quickly. The two decades that followed […]
A Golden Lion’s Paw
Yep. You read that title correctly. A golden lion’s paw. While this certainly ranks highly on any list of “coolest things ever found,” it is also the inspiration for an amazing collaboration between three institutions that value meaning and substance as much as they do the “Wow” factor. As organizations dedicated to public archaeology and […]
Three Weeks as a Fairfield Intern: Rachel Shin, 2019
Guest blog by summer intern Rachel Shin, a high-school student from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Week 1:On the first day of my internship, I got to dive into field work right off the bat. We made the short trip to Tucker Store in Gloucester Courthouse, a lot where a general store once stood. I began excavating a […]
Delving into Gloucester’s Public School Past
Guest blog written by Colleen Betti, current doctoral candidate at UNC-Chapel Hill and long-time Fairfield Foundation friend. In 1912, Gloucester County’s surveyor and superintendent of public schools, R.A. Folkes, illustrated a map showing all of the public schools in the county. At the time, he identified 20 black schools and 20 white schools. This nearly […]
Students across the Middle Peninsula: Fairfield’s Educational Outreach in 2018
Since our founding in 2000, the Fairfield Foundation has been dedicated to involving the community in our efforts to discover and preserve local history through hands-on learning experiences. These include public dig days, lab nights,school programs and activities at local events and festivals. We offer educational programming to schools across the Middle Peninsula (see our […]
Gone Before We Knew to Look: Searching for Green Book Sites in Rural Virginia
This project arose out of a seemingly random email. Dr. Jessica Taylor (Virginia Tech) caught a reference to the Watkins Motel and Florist at Gloucester Courthouse when she was conducting background research for our collaborative oral history project on Main Street (supported by the Gloucester Main Street Preservation Trust). She passed along a link to […]
What’s Under the Rust? Preserving and Conserving Fairfield’s Cast Iron Stove
We love doing archaeology at a variety of sites across the Middle Peninsula, but Fairfield Plantation will always be our home. There are thousands of fascinating artifacts that have been recovered from the manor house and surrounding property, and we don’t always have the time or resources to give them the attention and care they […]
Join us for Adventures in August!
Where else can you work with historic ruins, 3-D models, artifacts, and drones? For the seventh year in a row, Fairfield Foundation is teaming up with Adventures in Preservation to host enthusiastic and curious preservationists who want to learn how to excavate, document, and preserve our past. The week-long experience (August 12 to 18, 2018) […]
Anything But Ordinary
Twenty years ago, two young archaeology students, David Brown and Thane Harpole, surveyed a farmstead site located in Gloucester County, Virginia, dating to the late 17th to early 18th centuries. The property was originally patented in the 1670s by Robert Bryan and was eventually part of the adjacent Belle Farm plantation. After the Civil War, […]
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