BY ANDREA TORTORA
The Cincinnati Enquirer
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Melissa Gordon, right, and Kurt Rademaker search for artifacts on the Boone County farm where Margaret Garner lived.
(Jeff Swinger photo)
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RICHWOOD, Ky. - The grassy hills once walked by Margaret Garner - a runaway Boone County slave who killed her daughter rather than see her returned to slavery - are now dotted with tiny colored flags.
The markers pinpoint the spots where archaeologists hope to uncover the ghosts of Ms. Garner's past.
The wrenching, tragic story is well-known, immortalized in Toni Morrison's 1987 novel, Beloved, and in a movie starring Oprah Winfrey. The Garner family escaped to freedom 143 years ago, making their way across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati. When slave catchers found them, the 23-year-old Ms. Garner killed her 3-year-old daughter.
This week, on land adjacent to a wood and brick kitchen building, five men and one woman from the Kentucky Archaeological Survey are digging down through the years, back to 1850, when Ms. Garner lived here at Maplewood, a farm owned by brothers John and Archibald Gaines.
"This is a story we are anxious to unravel," said Richard Jett, who examines historic sites for the Kentucky Heritage Council, the state agency focusing on historic preservation. "We don't know much more than when we started. Until we get further along, we still have lots of questions and only a handful of answers."
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Margaret Garner would have worked in the old cook house on the Gaines farm.
(Tony Jones photo)
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Through written records, oral history and the help of a woman descended from neighbors of Maplewood, staff archaeologist Jay Stottman and his crew are trying to get a picture of what the farm looked like when Ms. Garner worked here.
Maplewood today is a large tract of land with a handful of buildings. Maplewood in the pre-Civil War era was a complex of smoke houses, living quarters, kitchens and barns.
"Their job is to piece things back together, sort things out and solve a piece of the puzzle," Mr. Jett said.
Mr. Stottman said the group hopes to find old building foundations and other artifacts that might help determine the age of the structures still standing. As the dig, they study the layers of earth, looking for pieces of pottery, utensils, garbage - anything that tells a story.
Next week, Mr. Jett and survey coordinator William Macintire will complete more work on the kitchen house and a brick building probably used as a smokehouse.
Archaeologists and historians hope the new research fills in the gaps about Ms. Garner's life before she became nationally known. After killing her daughter, Ms. Garner was tried for murder. She was convicted and returned to slavery in Kentucky. Later shipped to Mississippi, Ms. Garner died of typhoid fever in 1858.
If the buildings date from the 1850s, Ms. Garner likely worked in them, said Joanne Caputo, 43, a Yellow Springs, Ohio, freelance writer working on a manuscript of the Garner case.
The Enquirer reported Oct. 2 that Ms. Caputo determined Maplewood was where Ms. Garner was a slave. She said she thought the two old buildings came from the period. (OCT. 2 STORY)
"It's very exciting," Ms. Caputo said. "My dream is that the land will be nationally landmarked. This feels like all the right steps."
Most of Ms. Garner's life was spent as a house slave on the Gaines farm, now the property of Cincinnati businessman George Budig, who bought it from family descendants about 15 years ago.
Documentation that Ms. Garner lived at Maplewood includes a state historic marker on the road identifying the land as that of John Gaines; property transfers by the Gaines family; newspaper accounts of Margaret Garner's trial; a bill of sale of the slaves recorded at the trial; nearby church records, and considerable testimony by witnesses at the trial that Ms. Garner lived and worked on the farm.
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