Literally nobody needs a house this big. Or 25,000 acres surrounding it that nobody else can use because they also belong only to you. Or upwards of 300 human trafficking victims that you're holding hostage and forcing to do all your work for you.
ANYWAY. First, do you want to see the stupidest thing that I did on this trip to drop my baby daughter off at college halfway across the country from me?
I was tooling around on my nook, looking for what I wanted to read next, when I was all, "Ooh, Hamnet! I've been wanting to watch that movie! I should read the book first!"
If anyone was in a Hampton Inn in Maryland in late August and noticed a grown woman silently sobbing over her DIY toast, scrambled egg, turkey sausage, and fried potato sandwich at the free breakfast buffet, you should have come over and said hi!
Anyway, that book is very, very, VERY sad. NOT suitable for reading the weekend that one drops one's kid back at college.
The Hampton Inn did have hot chocolate packets, though, so I could also make myself a DIY cafe mocha. Gotta appreciate the little things especially when you're sad!
Another little thing to appreciate? Hampton National Historic Site, which is open for about a minute and a half every week, a schedule that has historically never aligned with my kid's college drop-offs or pick-ups, this time DID! This is the first year, as well, that I haven't had to organize two college drop-offs to schools with slightly different start dates on the same road trip, so that helped a lot.
In other news, if you know of any job openings for early-career environmental scientists, please let me know! My woman in STEM is grateful for but a little tired of her part-time job slinging pizzas!
And if you could recommend her a job that would allow her to afford her own orangery, we'd both be grateful, because this thing is SICK:
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| The orangery is one of the very few buildings that aren't original. It burned down in the 1920s, and this is a reconstruction on the original foundation. The Ridgely family had one of the largest collections of citrus trees in the US in the 1800s, thanks to the work of the enslaved people who hauled the trees in and out of the garden seasonally. |
We'd also like to afford terraces upon terraces of formal gardens on her salary, with, of course, the extensive full-time staff required to maintain them. And, unlike the Ridgely family, we'd be actually PAYING our staff, thank you very much. Also, we wouldn't be holding them hostage, so they'd be free to leave if they wanted:
It turns out that you can have a LOT of pretty stuff if you force people to work for you and you don't pay them!
This grass path lets you walk up and down all the terraces without climbing steps. The Ridgely family also used it as a sledding hill, lol. In this picture, you would be able to see straight to the south side of the mansion if not for the foliage.
The mansion is unreasonably large, but to be fair, it IS very pretty how you can see it from a distance:
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| At the east side of the house there's excavation--or maybe construction?--on the site of an octagon-shaped building where servants used to live. It also burned down! |
I wanted to walk over to see the family cemetery entirely because our tour guide had told us that there was also a pet cemetery outside the gates, enclosed in an "oval of trees." I was bummed, though, that there weren't any signs pointing it out when we got there. Do we think this is it?
Inside the family cemetery, there are actually two non-family members:
Nancy Davis' story is especially sad. The second owner of the property (Charles--there were lots of guys named Charles in this family) wrote a will that freed a lot of the enslaved people, but it was actually a really shitty, incredibly cruel deal because it was only people within certain ages, and they couldn't take any money or stuff with them when they went, and their family members who didn't fall within the prescribed age range, including children and the elderly, couldn't go with them. One of the freed people was Nancy's mother, Polly, but Nancy was only five years old at the time, so didn't fall into the age range to be freed, and Polly wasn't allowed to stay with her.
Also, Charles Ridgely's son, John, literally just bought a whole bunch more slaves right after this will, so the overall result was in some ways worse. And even though this was Maryland, this guy's son (another Charles), was SUPER Confederate. Genuinely, the Ridgely family sucked SO badly.
HOWEVER, Nancy built a life for herself on this plantation. She cared for three generations of Ridgely children, including my personal favorite of the Ridgely family, Margaretta. Margaretta never married, but instead moved to Liberia, founded a girls' school, and taught there for 28 years.
Horse barn, because if you own a plantation you also have to be obsessed with thoroughbreds:
And again, the mansion in the distance IS very pretty!
One of the reasons that I'd really wanted to visit Hampton is the existence of original slave quarters. Most housing for the enslaved was built of wood and therefore didn't last, but here, stone was in good supply, and so there are two buildings meant to house the enslaved workforce here that were built of stone and still remain. They're right next to a farmhouse where the overseer and his family lived, which must have been hellish since it meant you couldn't even let your guard down in front of your own home. The whole area was built to remind one of a charming little rural village (think Marie Antoinette's hobby farm at Versailles), and was deliberately placed in sight of that super tall cupola on the Hampton mansion, so that the family could stand up there and watch the enslaved people trying to live their lives and pretend like they were the lords of their own little fiefdom.
What a bunch of assholes.
All that to say that I hadn't realized that this part of the property is actually under construction right now and you can't enter any of the buildings, and there was enough construction fencing around them that I didn't think you were probably even supposed to go over there, so I didn't. But in the photo below, the two stone buildings you can see to the right are the housing for some of the enslaved people, and the white house is where the overseer lived. Much later, when the last remaining Ridgely family sold the property, they moved into this house.
I thought the Great Hall looked pretty normal--bunch of paintings, few chairs and end table things along the walls--but later I read the Hampton National Historic Site guidebook and saw some old photos of the Great Hall while the family was still living there (although very late in their residency, of course), and Dude, that room was FULL of crap! We're talking chairs and end table thingies times a billion, plus giant vases, PLUS a bunch of animal skin rugs all across the floor, including some with the heads still on! It was very "Stately Homes of England," all chock-full of what I can only imagine was all the generations of heirlooms and tchotchkes and knick-knacks that nobody felt right getting rid of but that eventually made the place look not unlike Mamma and Pappa's den after a lifetime of post-Depression hoarding. Like, the rich person version of the complete set of Reader's Digest Annotated Books and five thousand angel figurines and all my county Spelling Bee plaques and seventeen lamps, only two of which still work.
Anyway, have you ever heard "Stately Homes of England?" It's my favorite Noel Coward song.
This painting, or rather, the original of this painting that used to hang here, is the inciting incident of Hampton National Historic Site. In 1945, the director of the National Gallery came to Hampton to check out this painting to see if he wanted to buy it (he did! It's hanging in the National Gallery right now!). During that visit, he and the current owner of the house, John Ridgely Jr., got to talking about how this place was clearly impossible to maintain and falling apart and the property taxes alone were bankrupting the last of the Ridgely line, etc. When the director got back to D.C. he started asking around, and was able to finagle a rich foundation to purchase the property and then donate it to the national park service. They wanted it because the house, itself, was seen as architecturally important--the existence of the slave quarters, which I think is the most unique and precious part, was just a happy coincidence.
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| The original of this painting is important because it's a rare full-length portrait by the important early nineteenth-century artist Thomas Sully. Sully also did a pretty iconic portrait of Andrew Jackson--that dude's HAIR!!! |
The tour guide was talking about a famous earthquake that had hit Maryland within living memory, and everyone else just nodded along knowingly so I did, too (maybe this 2011 one?), but interestingly, it damaged the great hall, and during the repairs the workers uncovered this part of the wall that shows what the building material is like inside. They thought it was cool, so they kept it open!
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| bells to call servants to different rooms, Downton Abbey-style |
The summer kitchen that was basically a lean-to outside the mansion is gone, but we got to see this kitchen, built from stone to preserve it from fire--there were a LOT of structure fires at Hampton!
You can actually see the path worn down in this brick:
This second-floor room is "interpreted" as a children's bedroom, because the real probable location of the children's bedrooms is on the third floor, where we're not allowed:
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| I like how they covered the front of the fireplace so kids don't fall in. |
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| Little toys set for a tea party! As a contrast to this, one of the Eliza Ridgely women (there were also several Elizas) kept a record of the Christmas gifts that she gave to the enslaved children on the property. The enslaved girls mostly got dolls, too, while the boys mostly got drums and trumpets. But get this--she literally noted in her list which kids didn't get a toy that year because she decided they'd misbehaved. What an asshole! |
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| Proof that Ridgely women were literate! They were taught at home as children, and then went to finishing school. |
As usual, I'm obsessed with the wallpaper:
We were waaaaay over our tour time so I didn't ask about these books, but I remain curious to know if they, too, were Ridgely possessions:
Even though I didn't see the actual slave quarters that I came for, I do think that Hampton National Historic Site does an excellent job centering the experiences of the enslaved peoples. I'm currently partway through their ongoing ethnography that traces the lives of the enslaved people and their descendants, and it is FASCINATING.
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
