I Went To Hampton National Historic Site, And We Should Definitely Eat The Rich

 

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:

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:

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.

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!

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:

I like how they covered the front of the fireplace so kids don't fall in.

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!

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:

Check out the Prussian Blue! Of course you remember that George Washington Carver was the first person to create a natural Prussian Blue, using Alabama soils:

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!

Freefalling into Fifty, Because If You Don't Nearly Vomit On Your Birthday Then Did You Even Have One?

So, I just need to preface my story by telling you two things:

1. I would absolutely, 100% tandem skydive again in a heartbeat. It was WONDERFUL, I loved it, and dissociating myself back there got me through my last dental cleaning.
2. The literal first thing I did after touching ground and being unclipped from my instructor was roll over onto my hands and knees and dry-heave onto the grass. 

But I did not actually vomit!

But anyway! My fiftieth birthday earlier this summer was excellent. I ate a lot of cookie cake and spent the whole day with my favorite people, accruing experience gifts like a dungeon crawler collecting loot boxes (Guess what I'm currently reading, lol!). The little kid and I solved a murder mystery. Mr. Craft Knife and I decided to ride a ferry up the coast of Norway this winter so we can see the Northern Lights. And the big kid arranged for the two of us to go tandem skydiving, something that we've talked about together for years, but always with that sort of "someday, I wish" vibe.

Turns out that Someday, I Wish is an actual calendar date in August!

The big kid has always been my fellow adventurer--remember the time we strapped ourselves to cables and walked around on top of the CN Tower?--and given a choice among all the people on the planet, she's exactly who I'd want to throw myself out of a plane with.

I mean, look! It even says DANGER right there on her harness!

MY harness doesn't proclaim any such thing!

It was a perfect day for skydiving, and although it took a good two hours from arrival to flinging ourselves out of an airplane, sitting in the shade of an airplane hanger, reading my Matt Dinniman and watching parachutes meander down to Earth was a quite lovely way to spend an afternoon.

The big kid and I each got our own personal photographer for the trip, but since Mr. Craft Knife and the little kid had also wanted to tag along to watch us fall out of an airplane, I gave them my camera to take photos, too, so the big kid and I basically had a whole entire paparazzi experience. We got photos of ourselves from one side--

Fun fact: I wasn't sure what to wear, so I got onto Skydive Indianapolis' Insta to see what everyone else was wearing and then matched it, including cropping a pair of my leggings with scissors. I did a great job, because even my instructor is rocking the cropped leggings look!

--and the other!

You can't tell, but that's me BEAMING and waving from inside the plane. I was so excited to finally be off! 

My only previous look at the inside of a plane used for skydiving was in this SNL video--

--and shockingly, they don't actually look like the inside of a sound stage! This plane had two long benches running parallel along the inside, and we straddled those, facing the back of the plane, our instructors behind us, so they could busy themselves strapping us to them while the plane got high enough:

I'd had it in my mind that I'd better not forget to just double-check that my instructor had attached us before we jumped, since, you know, he was the only one entrusted with the actual parachute, but my god. When this dude was done, I was basically carabinered to him like I was in a metal-forward Baby Bjorn. When he was ready to skydive, he shuffled himself over to the edge of the plane, and I, too, found myself there like luggage strapped to the roof of a car:

My photographer did protest at how tightly he strapped on my goggles, though, and made him loosen them a little bit, which he did not want to do but after looking at my photos I am SO GLAD he did. Goggles so tight that they cut straight into the apples of your cheeks that are already doing weird things in the 120 mph wind are NOT a cute look for the photos that you paid a lot of good money for. The big kid's instructor kind of did her dirty that way, but hey--the important thing to him was that her glasses stayed on her face. And they did!

Anyway, guess who got to go first?!?

Check out my cool as hell photographer clinging like a spider to the OUTSIDE OF THE PLANE.

That's how she gets the shot of my face the first time I see the world this high and not through an airplane window!

Those fucking goggles! Very jealous of the proper skydivers who get to wear the cool-ass helmets.

And here we go!

I swear that I was feeling pretty normal about things, everything considered, but I cannot stop cackling every time I look at that photo. Omg my FACE!!!

The big kid was next, so her photographer also got a couple of shots of me while her instructor was shuffling them into place. Do I look less close to mental collapse in her photos from the plane?

Hahahahaha... nope!

Also, my head is supposed to be BACK. My instructor was griping to his co-workers on the flight up that none of his students had done a single thing he'd told them to do all day, and I guess I'm one of them. Sorry, Dude! My brain wasn't online for instruction-following just then!

This one's a little better, mostly because you can't see my face as much, lol:

And okay, to be fair, I had not exactly visualized what the jump would feel like, but I also had not anticipated that we would do so much tumbling end-over-end. It was fine, though! Just gotta let my dude get settled and release his drogue, and then it became the most insanely disorienting/best experience of my life:

All better!

So, to me, it actually did not feel like falling. Like, at all. It did not even occur to me at the time that I was falling. There's not really any perspective--even if you look at the ground, it's so far away that it doesn't look like you're falling towards it. It's just blue and white all around you, and honestly hard to see anyway partly because of those goddamned goggles but also because there's so much wind. Like, yes, you're feeling the wind because you're falling at terminal velocity, but if you've never done that before then that's not actually what falling feels like. So it's just weird and disorienting and awesome.

It's funny because the big kid actually did not prefer this part of skydiving. You'd never know it, though, because unlike her mother, who has a cartoon for a face, she is the picture of stoicism:

She still loved it, though! She just liked the parachute part better:

The freefall, though, was my own personal absolute favorite thing ever. Check me out--I'm FLYING!!!

The little kid made fun of me because in almost every photo my hands are locked into thumbs-up position. The photographer thumbs-upped me, I thumbs-upped her back, and then forgot that my hands existed and therefore never changed it up!

I'm pretty sure my instructor physically un-thumbs-upped my hands for me, lol. 

Sooo... I had a little bit of an issue when my instructor deployed our parachute. I was 100% completely fine through the tumbling end-over-end and the falling through the air belly-first at 120 mph, and even the jolt of the parachute was totally fine, but I guess then the instructors have to steer us over to the actual landing site, and they've got to do whatever parachute-steering maneuvers they have to do to get us in the right spot and make sure we're not knocking against the other parachutes, and so on. And for us, this meant that all of a sudden my happy freefall fun time was taken away and instead we did a bunch of spins.

A whole bunch of spins.

If there's one thing that you might not know about me but should, it's that I. Do. Not. Spin. My eardrums are kind of fucked up and my sense of being upright and on balance in the world is iffy at best. Spin me, and any hope that I will ever be able to rearrange myself properly on this planet is over, at least until after I've had some ginger ale and a very, very, very long nap.

So all that fun, all the flying in an airplane and then jumping out of a plane and then falling through the air like a goddess, and I'm taken out by some spins.

Meanwhile, though, look how Mr. Craft Knife got photos of us up so high!

My parachute is the one at the bottom. Apparently we are spinning AND we are sideways. I had no hope.

Leveled off, at least! And we seem to have stopped spinning, yay!

Here's a good shot of the big kid's parachute:

Right behind me out of the plane, and right behind me back on the ground!

So, um... did you notice anything about that photo of my beautiful, brave daughter parachuting to the ground?

Yeah...

But I did not vomit! I just really, really, really felt like I was going to.

Ugh. Of all the things that could have gone wrong, it had to have been SPINNING!!!

Anyway, NEXT time I go skydiving, I will take two Dramamine an hour before I jump.

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!