Ok. This follows up on trivia series I've been posting about for a while -- the Lawyer House trivia, Judge House trivia; courthouse trivia; and Freedom Riders trivia.
Given how successful faculty lounge readers have been at picking off trivia, I thought I'd try another one. I found a couple of pictures in my stock that might serve well for trivia purposes.
What were the buildings at right used for? And where are they? I have another picture of the one in the foreground below. The only hint this time is that they're purported to be from the antebellum era.
When I re-emerge from teaching in the CLEO program here and also from my paper on jurisprudence in literary addresses at Washington College and the Virginia Military Institute, sometime towards the end of next week, I'm hoping -- I'll talk a little more about that paper and maybe some on cemetery law, and maybe some on the resurgence in reparations for the era of Civil War (not what you'd expect, I'm sure), and on monuments related to the law of monuments, another subject I've been collecting pictures on this year. And once that's all done, I imagine it'll be time for the students to return.
google images betrays the trivia game yet again. I found exactly where this was by making an educated guess and searching for "slave quarters."
Posted by: b | July 23, 2011 at 09:21 AM
I have visited these on many occasions and often take visitors to see them. Although many great homes are preserved in the South, few slave quarters survive. These are much improved over what slaves were normally given. The owner of the plantation was experiencing considerable deaths with his slaves so built these "super" quarters to enhance the chances of his slaves surviving. They are the surviving slave quarters from Stagville Plantation outside of Durham. The barn on the sight is a magnificent structure that was built at the time of the Civil War.
Posted by: Bill Turnier | July 23, 2011 at 10:12 AM
Excellent educated guess, B. You deserve credit for knowing what to look for on google images!
B and Bill -- you are, of course, correct. They're the slave quarters at Stagville. Four families lived in a building -- two on each floor. Each family had one room.
I highly recommend a visit to Stagville; it really drives home what life was like for enslaved people.
Well, that's about it for me for building trivia. I'll have to hunt around for some more good ones. I think I have a couple of monument pictures left, though they're not quite as much fun.
Posted by: Alfred Brophy | July 23, 2011 at 11:47 AM
Al, thanks for posting these and for providing a description of how limited these quarthers were. When one sees them and is informed that these are very high quality slave quarters, one has even more of a sense of shame about what we leaglly allowed as treatment for one segment of our people. We heaped a legal crime upon another legal crime.
Posted by: Bill Turnier | July 23, 2011 at 04:56 PM