Archaeology Magazine - July/August 2017 - 36

1793, monroe purchased land just down the road
from Monticello, the home of his mentor Thomas Jefferson, who had urged friends to form a "society to our
taste" in the countryside. Hoping to earn an income from
farming, Monroe moved his wife, Elizabeth, and two children to the Highland property at the end of the eighteenth
century. His political career often took him elsewhere, and
Monroe doesn't seem to have formed a deep attachment
to the place. "There wasn't this 'I can't wait to get back to
Highland' sense in his writing that you see with Jefferson and
Monticello," says architectural historian James Wooton, the
former curator of Highland. Nevertheless, Monroe and his
family called Highland home from 1799 to 1823. Seeking to
pay off debts, he sold the core of the property in 1826. The
last private owner bequeathed the estate to its present owner,
the College of William & Mary, in 1974.
Today Highland is dominated not by the cottage, but by
an 1870s residence built by an obscure Baptist minister, the
Reverend John Massey. The hulking house overshadows both
the cottage and a squat wing, sometimes called the "connector," that links the two into a single rambling structure. The
complex edifice and complicated history perplexed archaeologist Sara Bon-Harper, who became executive director at
Highland in 2012. "I didn't quite understand this building,"
Bon-Harper recalls. She soon turned to a technique close to
her heart. "I'm an archaeologist," she says. "So many problems
get solved with a shovel."
n

o one knows how and when locals began to believe

the cottage was Monroe's house. An 1885 newspaper article notes that despite an earlier fire, "There
remains yet in use a wing of the President's home." Monroe
himself may have contributed to the misunderstanding by
referring in a letter to his Highland house as his "cabin-castle,"
suggesting something diminutive and homespun. Even documents from Monroe's day seemed to confirm that he had lived
in the cottage. Drawings in insurance papers held by Monroe
show a house with a smaller kitchen wing and a larger dwelling
wing. The existing cottage, coincidentally, is roughly the same
size as the kitchen wing. "The dimensions, if you squint, fit
pretty well," says Bon-Harper. "So it was not unreasonable to
think the cottage was the smaller of the two wings."
Still, some pieces of the puzzle didn't seem to fit, among
them the connector. Supposedly, it was built after much of
the house was destroyed in the fire, atop a surviving fragment
of foundation. "[That was an explanation] I couldn't quite
get my mind around," Bon-Harper says. Then there were
the observations Christopher Owens, a restoration craftsman based in Orange, Virginia, shared with Bon-Harper.
He'd noticed that the wall between the connector and the
cottage was actually two walls thick. This suggested that the
cottage had originally been a freestanding structure and that
the connector had been added later.
Bon-Harper began to wonder whether the cottage was
Monroe's house at all. Perhaps it was the "new house" that
Monroe mentioned in an 1818 letter to his son-in-law. In
36

that letter, held in the James Monroe Museum and Memorial
Library in Fredericksburg, Monroe writes that the structure
is for lodgers. Another letter shows that Monroe and his family moved into their house at Highland at the end of 1799. At
Bon-Harper's request, outside experts combed through the
cottage and came to an unsettling conclusion: Everything in
the cottage dates to the decades after 1800. The nails, for
example, had been made with a technique common from
1805 to 1820. In the rafters of the connector, architectural
historians found marks left by a circular saw, a tool used
only after 1850. Next came an expert in dendrochronology,
a technique for dating wooden timbers based on tree-ring

These nails excavated at Highland help confirm that the
original structure dates to the late 18th century.

measurements. The results show timbers used in the cottage
had been made from trees harvested between 1815 and 1818.
The dating, Bon-Harper says, was "not refutable." Where,
then, was Monroe's actual house?

n 2014, a team led by Benjamin Ford of Rivanna Archaeological Services, a Charlottesville consulting firm, dug more
than 200 round holes circling the buildings, each roughly
1.5 feet in diameter and reaching down to the subsoil. All of the
holes dug in the boxwood-lined formal garden of the Massey
House produced brick, wall plaster, and other types of debris.
Two of them struck something more intriguing: what looked
like the remains of a stone structure.
The following season, the Rivanna team excavated a fivefoot-square trench where they'd hit stone the previous year.
What slowly emerged was a beautifully preserved foundation
made of sandstone conglomerate sourced from the property.
By the end of their 2015 excavations, the researchers had dug
10 similar trenches, ranging from 1.5 to three feet deep, and
discovered several segments of the foundation. And by the end
of the 2016 season, they had dug 12 more trenches and built
a picture of what Ford calls the remains of "a very impressive structure" that he thinks is the 1799 or 1800 Monroe
residence. The trenches, spread over an area half as big as a
basketball court, revealed evidence of an eastern wing 30 feet
wide by 40 feet long, just as shown in the insurance drawings.
The team couldn't excavate the entire western wing, because
it extends under the existing Massey House. The portion they
did uncover is 18 feet wide, as is the western wing in one of

ARCHAEOLOGY * July/August 2017

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