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New exhibits at Stratford Hall tell stories of people who lived there before the Lees and the people who served the famous family Date published: 7/25/2009
BY FRANK DELANO The famous Lees may have lived in the big house, but they were not the only inhabitants of the 1,900 acres in Westmoreland County known as Stratford Hall Plantation. The great house became the monument to the Lees. Now the people who came before them and the people who later served them are getting their own monuments in the form of wayside exhibits. Hundreds of years before Thomas Lee built the mansion around 1738, American Indians lived on what became its front lawn. "The Indians lived here for the same reason as the Lees," said Douglas Sanford, an archaeologist at the University of Mary Washington. "All of them wanted to be close to the freshwater springs down the hill in the woods." Nor were the Lees the first to clear the ancient forests. Much of that work was done by forgotten settlers and slaves in the 17th century. Seventeen of them--seven white and 10 black--were buried outside the palisade that surrounded a barn-like house that Thomas Lee tore down. And, of course, there were African-Americans who died at Stratford as slaves and, after the Civil War, as free blacks. Nine members of the Payne family are among an unknown number of blacks buried in the slave cemetery near Stratford's Dining Hall. Exhibits installed this week, funded in part by a $21,550 matching grant from the National Park Service, will also enhance visitor knowledge of the importance of Stratford's great river, cliffs and forests, said Jim Schepmoes, Stratford's director of marketing and public relations. The plantation's sublime landscape may be as important to its future as its history, he said. The exhibits "accentuate and start featuring Stratford's environment," he said. Two of the waysides will stand above Stratford's 150-foot-high cliffs. One tells about the cliffs' 10 million-year-old fossils. The other outlines how pollution has greatly diminished the bounty of the Chesapeake Bay and estuaries like the Potomac River. Two other waysides will be located on hiking trails. One of the exhibits reveals that much of the timber for the White House came from Stratford. Like many parks and historic places in the region, Stratford is a member of the National Park Service's Chesapeake Bay Gateways Network. baygateways.net/ Frank Delano: 804/761-4300
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