The best looking speaker at the recent Germanna Seminar was Dr. Kerri Berile but of course her competition was nothing. She was also the youngest. As a student at the University of Mary Washington (nee Mary Washington College), she worked on the Germanna home of Spotswood. Later, in her doctoral studies at the University of Texas, she did a more involved analysis of Spotswood's home. There are limitations in doing this as so much of the house is gone.
What she did was to classify and count all of the objects found such as 27,000 nails. Using a computer, she plotted the locations where they were found which yielded density maps. The highest density can be associated with stairs which use a lot of nails. She also plotted the distribution of some other classes of objects. This led to some thoughts about the interior of the house and how it was used.
There were many different materials used in the construction. What she found was that all of these could have been provided by nearby sources, i.e., within ten miles. This is the only major house of this era in Virginia which is constructed only of local materials. This suggested to her that the builders were a different group than the ones who built the other houses.
She was able to show pictures of the floors in the basement. These floors were original. When the house was burned, parts from above fell into the basement and covered up the floor which had protected it over the course of time. When these photos of the sections of the basement floor were projected, there were some gasps. Many people in the audience thought they had seen something similar before.
It is the hypothesis of Dr. Berile that Germans had played a role in the early construction of the house. The pattern in which stones were laid in the floor suggested work done by Germans.
Her work gives a possible new meaning to the description of the work by Albrecht and Holtzclaw. They said they were engaged in "mining and quarrying" up to December of 1718. This quarrying might have been the finding and extracting of several kinds of "rock" to be used in the construction. It was all from the near vicinity and of types not commonly employed in house construction. Actual construction might have occurred later and might even have used the labor of some of the Second Colony people. Though this latter group was supposedly involved in naval stores, Spotswood was notorious for pulling people off one project and assigning them to other projects.
I must move Dr. Berile to the head of the class for an interesting talk.
(05 Aug 05)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.