Montpelier Day 1: CALM Lab Introduction

 CALM stands for Community Archaeology Lab at Montpelier, but for me, it was also a very calm space. This is where the magic takes place.

Located in the former Montpelier Supply Company Store (the ESSO building) since May 2025, CALM is where the artifacts are processed, and some are stored. With over 3,000,000 artifacts and growing nearly daily, it would be hard to find a building large enough to both store it all and allow space for processing.

On the day of the April 2024 solar eclipse a fire took out the former lab. Miraculously they were able to save 98% of the pottery, despite it being covered in soot. 

Thirteen months later they moved into the historic ESSO building located directly across the street from the historic Montpelier train station. They retained much of the history, including the tin ceiling, wood shelves, and the talking stone that people remember gathering around. They spent a year fixing the roof and foundation, making it livable again. In May 2025 they hosted an open house and invited the community to see the transformation. 

When it was a store, it was the center of the community. Everything came from there. It was the major gathering spot in town.

There are three floors, including a full nine-foot basement which they use as a
photo station and storage. We did not see that. Upstairs is a library and offices with furniture from the University of Virginia surplus store, hence the dining room table and chairs. They lost 1,100 volumes in the fire and are slowly rebuilding their library. In its heyday, this is where the store's supplies were kept.

After our introduction we had a one-hour artifact handling session with Liz. It was more of an artifact show-and-tell than a handling session. Based on the I was expecting more lessons in the proper way to dig around them in the field, but it was literally us touching artifacts that have been found, washed, and processed. The types of items later we might see in a museum behind glass.

This was our opportunity to touch and feel green stone, quartz, round stones, limestone, coal, slag, ironworks, brick, mortar. Then we moved on to clipped iron, rusty iron, nails, rose head nails,  hand wrought nails, farrier nails. 

Animal bones: pig, cow, chicken, sheepgoats (said as one word since their bones are interchangeable), butchery marks. Enslaved ate older animals and also hunted. They had a wider diversity of diet than those in the main house. The Madison family ate younger, blander, domestic animals. They have found eggshells and oyster shells. 

The enslaved population participated in a market economy. The Madisons bought eggs from the enslaved. They had their own farm animals. The enslaved population had to buy their own dishes, etc. The heartbreaking reason for this was if they were saving up to buy a plate, they could not also save up to buy their own freedom. Unlike what I believed, their needs were not being met. Hence, the market economy.

A green wine bottle was found. Looks almost black today. James Madison's wine bottles had his seal on them. Other glass has been found. Window glass. Medicine bottles. 

Ceramics. There are many different varieties of ceramics from creamware to Delft to utilitarian redware to Tortoise ware (dubbed "puke ware" by some) that was favorited by Nelly Madison (James Sr.'s wife) to Dolley's blue and white China to bamboo and peony China to transferware. Transferware is fun to find because it came and went out of style quickly making it easy for those in the know to date. In 1806 they used Nast, the Presidential China featuring overglazed ceramic with gold leaving that can easily peel off. There is also stoneware that feels like an orange peel in texture and salt-based stoneware.

We saw saw bone and iron utensils. These were sent out to a professional preservationist. They were made by blacksmiths on the property. We also saw a reproduction tobacco pipe stem much larger than anything I have seen while digging.

They have also found pencils and tablets, which indicate the enslaved had access to reading and writing. They have also found a bone tooth brush, and bone buttons, glass beads, and jewelry.

The piece de resistance is the Carnelian ring. It is made from quartz and possibly came from India or West Africa. It feels like plastic as it is so perfectly round. It will soon be on display.

Sadly the family burned their plantation records soon after Madison's step son's death taking away the names of many of the enslaved population. This is why the oral histories gathered from the Montpelier Descendant's Committee (MDC) are so important in helping to tell the story.  

We left CALM and headed across the street to become oriented with the site where we would be digging for the rest of the week. We returned to CALM on Thursday (Day 4) to work.