Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: Notes & Summary of Indian Wars Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 5 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-08-31 18:11:57 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 05:42:05 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 05:42:05

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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LEGEND STRUCTURES ¢ LOTS LOCATED ew By Archeesiogy THE VILLAGE EE concreray er © Londings, Aporonimate 3 eS © u ge att hme IS-78 00". Perea ‘ . ~~ \ my" LIFE IN THE CHESAPEAKE: VIRGINIA AND MARYLAND 49 How do historians know what seventeenth-century settlements looked like? Recent excavations at St. Mary’s City, Maryland, founded as the capital of Calvert's colony in 1634, demonstrate the importance of cooperation between bistorians and archaeologists. St. Mary’s City is unique, since it is the only major seventeenth-century English settlement in America not now buried underneath a modern city. (The site was abandoned in 1696 when the capital was moved to Annapolis, and the land was “incorporated into a tobacco plantation.) Working only from writtex documents like deeds and wills, bistorians then had to endure recurrences of malaria, along with dysentery, typhoid fever, and other diseases. As a result, approximately 40 percent of male servants did not survive long enough to become freedmen. Even young men of twenty-two who had successfully weathered their seasoning could expect to live only another twenty years at best. For those who survived the term of their indentures, however, the opportunities for advancement were real. Until the last decades of the century, former servants were usually able to become independent planters (“freeholders”) and to live a modest but comfortable existence. Some even assumed such positions of political prominence as hypothesized that the layout of the town resembled that ~ illustrated in the figure on the left. When archaeologists began digging into the soil, however, they discoveredthat the documents alone had not told the whole story and that the tentative map bad to be refined in several ways (figure on the right). Yet at the same time the —archaeologists would have had difficulty interpreting their findings bad it not been for the detailed archival research completed by bistorians prior to the excavations. Photo: Historic St. Mary’s City Commission. justice of the peace or militia officer. But in the 1670s tobacco prices entered a fifty-year period of stagnation and decline. At the same time, good land grew increasingly scarce and expensive. In 1681 Maryland dropped its legal requirement that servants receive land as part of their freedom dues, forcing large numbers of freed servants to live as wage laborers or tenant farmers instead of acquiring freeholder status. By 1700 the Chesapeake was no longer the land of opportunity it once had been. Life in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake was hard for everyone, regardless of sex or status. Farmers (and sometimes their wives) toiled in the fields alongside the servants, laboriously clearing