it freedom of the use of the press, and it is freedom to print things and publish things. it's not freedom institutionally as the press. >> lectures in history on "american history tv" on c-span3. each week, "american history tv's" american artifacts visits museums and historic places. located in south central virginia near lynchberg, green hill was once a vast plantation operated by a slave dealer. we visited green hill with jobie hill, founder of the saving slave houses project and a team of preservationists and 3d scanning technicians, who documented several buildings associated with slavery. she was introducing the team to green hill when we arrived. this program is about 50

minutes. >> okay, so -- >> oh, goodness. >> so here's the auction block and auctioneer's stand. so that's the brick dependency. that's the duck house. >> duck house? >> a duck house. this is the wash house. this one has a neat feature on the back side of it. it has a drain in the wall where they would just dump -- >> yeah, i can see it. >> yep, they would dump the water out. so this is the slave house. my name is jobie hill and we are at green hill plantation, which is in campbell county, virginia.

and i'm here with the company trimble, and they are here with me for my independent project which is called saving slave houses, which is doing documentation of all the known slave houses in the united states. when i was in school for my masters thesis, i started doing research with the historical american building survey collection, which is a wpa program that started in 1936 to get architects back to work. so 1,000 architects were hired to go out and document significant historic structures all across the united states. and part of that documentation was slave houses. not necessarily intentionally, but they did document slave houses and sometimes -- a lot of times it was just you got like one photograph or you would see a slave house in the background of a picture behind the main house.

for my masters thesis, i looked at that collection and identified all of the sites that had a slave house in them. so like the historic american building survey has 485 sites that have a documented slave house. and my fieldwork of going back and doing my own documentation of these buildings started -- i was a summer intern, so i was a summer architect interning for the summer with them. we went out and saw some of them. so they helped me kind of get started. once i started going out and visiting some of these, i just didn't stop. i just kept going. and trimble is a company that makes the survey equipment that i use, and one of the pieces of equipment they make is 3d laser scanners and that is a piece of equipment that i currently don't use for my surveys. it takes a little more setup and technical skill, and sometimes people, so that's one of the reasons i don't use it.

i would like to start using it, but it is right now kind of the highest level of documentation that is out there that you could do for buildings or objects, is to do 3d scanning. so they're here to document some buildings with me so i can have kind of the highest level of documentation for a few of my favorite sites. so this site, green hill plantation, has the original slave owner. he was very active in slave trade, so one of the things he decided to put in his yard is a slave auction block, an auctioneer stand. in addition to that, there also were originally like 30 outbuildings on the property. so it's just a very rich site both historically and -- like the history of it and material culture-wise. the site was -- when he first acquired the property, it was

like 1796, so about 1800 the site was 600 acres. then when he died in 1864, he had expanded it to 5,000 acres. so he was very active in growing his plantation. so in addition to farming, you know, he was active in slave trade. and the plantation was large enough that it was divided into two separate what they called towns. so upper town was the buildings up by the main house, such as where we're standing right now. then down by the river was called lower town and that was more where the enslaved people lived and worked. >> earlier today you walked through the area with the trimble team. what are the challenges they're facing today? >> so, they're facing -- one of the challenges is, one, the size of the site. i was hoping to maybe be able to scan the -- kind of the walk from the river, because slaves

would have been brought to the site on the river. and then had to walk up from the river to the auction block. i was hoping to maybe capture that. but it's quite a distance to capture. and because it is august and everything is in full bloom, a lot of the landscape is overgrown with trees and bushes and stuff and it's not a straight path. so that was one of the challenges. and we decided that laser scanning is not the best way to show that. there's now other technology that can capture that walk. so distance, the size of the site is one. like i said, the other one is the time of the year that we're here is that the overgrown bushes around the buildings have made it a challenges. but it's not only a challenge for us, it's also a challenge for the property owners. you know, they recognize the historical significance of these buildings and when they bought the property they had good intentions, and they still do, of maintaining these buildings.

but having 30 outbuildings to maintain but working full-time, you can't do it. it takes a lot of upkeep to take care of these buildings and, again, when buildings aren't being used, that's when they start to disappear from the landscape. and also just natural, you know, disasters happen, like when we were walking the site we saw a giant tree that had fallen. a tree can fall and take out any building. so once that happens, you've lost a building. >> what's back there? >> so back there, this is where the other slave houses were. you can see the pile of stone. i think there were two. so that's actually the chimney of another slave house, right next to this one. i think there might have just been three. but down here you can kind of

see behind the trees, is the chimney of the kitchen. that's all that survives for the kitchen. if you look on the other side, it has, i think, three fireplaces in it. bread ovens. it's pretty cool. this is the last -- so this is the brick dependency. this is the one that we can look inside that might be full of stuff. yeah, it is. i don't know what the standard is now. it's full of stuff. so this also has a cellar space under it. >> and an attic? >> yeah. it's just kind of an interesting space underneath there, but it

does have kind of a full cellar space. she has the little hand thing to cut stuff back with. >> a couple of these buildings would be perfect for that. we could take out a lot of the brush in the front. >> i'm richard hassler. i work at trimble as a market manager, and i've been involved in the atlantic slave trade project, a philanthropic project that trimble has been working on for three or four years now. and as part of that project, jobie has asked us to come and help her document some of the slave houses in the virginia area. and when we laser scan, we run our scanner on a tripod and then replace it with a camera that can take panoramic slr images and we can map the color from the images onto the laser scan and that provides a three-dimensional point cloud from which we can pull models using our sketch-up software or use other software to pull

measurements and other kinds of useful information out of it. >> the scanning that's happening here today, when they're done, what is the product that you're going to use or what are you going to see? >> so the final product can be a variety of things, actually. they're able to process the material -- or the data in many different ways. really what it is is a 3d model. so the 3d model can then be used in different applications. one of the applications is it can be put into a drafting program so i can use it tot create measured drawings of the buildings, floor plans and elevations. it can be used -- the 3d model can be used to do just viewing of the building. you have a 3d model and you can rotate it around and look inside it and play around with the views to get a sense of the space. they can take those3d models

and do virtual reality applications with them. you can take those 3d models and put into your program to do 3d printing of buildings and objects. so kind of the deliverables are kind of open-ended. it just kind of depends what software products you have. but i'm going to use it primarily just to show a 3d model so people have an idea of what these buildings looked like in real time and able to spin around and not just rely on two-dimensional views of the building, just photographs and drawings of the building. but to be able to give them a 3d model that helps people kind of relate better to the building and the space.

so i have invited some people from kind of a local organization that i've been working with and that have supported my project. so we have people from virginia foundation for humanities, preservation virginia, duncan parnell, which is like a local retailer of trimble equipment that has worked with me. i'll have people from colonial williamsburg coming out. some architectural historians. that also be exciting because he was -- colonial williamsburg documented the site in the '80s, so it will be interesting to get his perspective to see what it looks like now back in 2017. because the last time he was here was back in 1980, and the site was originally documented by the historic american

buildings survey in the '60s. >> my name is ed chapall. i'm an architectural historian and sometime archeologist. i work for colonial williamsburg responsible for architectural history and for a while architectural archaeology. i worked for 36 years and some change and retired in 2016. one of the principal things that our generation at colonial williamsburg did was to broaden the fishnet, if you will, to look at regional buildings. and so we know that buildings we have in williamsburg tell powerful stories, but they don't tell the whole story because not everything survived. so it was our responsibility to try to put back pieces that tell a fuller story, particularly a story that african-americans,

their race, their slavery. so we mounted a campaign of 37 years to go into countrysides and towns and study early buildings, particularly slave buildings. houses for enslaved people like this one, but also houses at green hill, in which enslaved people were domestic workers. so the whole plantation ensemble, whole urban ensemble if you will. since i retired, i'm continuing to do this kind of work. i love doing fieldwork in the countryside. there's amazing material in the countryside that is largely overlooked, and it tells a powerful story. so we were at green hill this morning in campbell county. it's a remarkable plantation.

green hill is probably the most, or has been the most, or certainly one of the most intact plantation ensembles from the early 19th century after the american revolution, in virginia or i'd say in maryland or north carolina as well. so we were here about 20 years ago. so i'm back with this team to look further and try to record more. it's one of many places, i guess, that has this rich variety of buildings that people worked and lived in in the virginia countryside, and so it's worth coming back. it was actually photographed before we came by the historic american building survey, so there's very good photographic recordings from then. then we came back and did another layer of measured drawings of eight or ten buildings, plans, sections, elevations. a number of those extraordinary

buildings are now gone, or only the chimney is standing. but today we're using new technology that reminds me of a medieval system of measuring and drawing everything by hand. and there's a role for that still, i think. but we're also here doing extraordinary scanning and digital recording that takes the kind of texture, recording the textures of the buildings to a degree that we weren't able to do 20 years ago using old-fashioned pencil, paper. and measuring sticks. but we did an amazing amount of reporting 20-some years ago. we did drawings of all the buildings i just described except for the main house. >> there is a professor, my thesis adviser from the university of oregon, traveled from oregon to be here.

he has been here with me all week. really enjoyed it. i am the senior archaeologist with heritage research associates in eugene, oregon. i met jobie when she came to the university of oregon the take a degree in historic preservation. i teach a course called historical archaeology and historic preservation. she was a student in the course. she stood out because she came in with this great idea of -- beginning with an inventory of standing slave houses. and then she subsequently asked me to be on her master's committee. and we have just maintained a contact and relationship ever since. i went out to visit her when she had a fellowship at williamsburg one time. and so i teach historical archaeology and i do historical archaeology in the west. but the beginnings of historical

archaeology were in the east. so it just really helps to get out to see some of these places. you know, you can read about them and talk about them. but to actually be here is special. so she invited me here to -- just to participate in what she's doing. and african-american archaeology was a real stimulus for us studying the slavery period in the united states. and it really didn't get going until, i think 1969, was the first slave house excavation in florida. so it was a real stimulus for looking at the whole slave experience. so it was a really important thing in the history of the united states and the history of archaeology to document this -- what was going on here.

>> what are your impressions of the place where we are now, green hill? >> well, this is the most impressive and extensive site that we have been at. this is the third. and it just goes on and on. and it -- it must have had a really sizable population. it's the most overgrown, but, also, there was natural sources of stone here. so a lot of the buildings were constructed of stone. so they are really well preserved more so than at that log or frame structures. so there is just a lot going on here, and much of it is still under the brush. and it's going to take a lot to reveal it. and won't be done on this trip. that's for sure. >> as a scholar in the field, how could you characterize the importance of jobie's project, saving slave houses?

>> i think it's a really outstanding project in the sense that it's bringing together a lot of the data. and i think -- and she's taking a multi-state approach. so, a lot of times we tend to work on a state-by-state basis. but she's really trying to extend throughout the south. right now of course she's focusing on virginia. but the other thing that's really cool that's sort of behind the scenes is bringing all the people that are interested in this subject together. and not only the scholarly people, but also preservation people. and also the families. and so it gets everybody talking and it sort of generates this energy. and she's sort of at the center this right now. so it's really -- for me to have been one of her professors to come and see this happening, it's really a cool thing.

>> pretty sure this is the -- the front. the l-shape was the addition. could have that backwards. that's not my area of specialty. but what is interesting the shave auction block and auctioneer's stand. the auction block is the taller one and the auction near stand is the lower one. just the proximity to the main house. it is closer to the main house than it is to any of the enslaved buildings. but it definitely is within direct sight of the enslaved buildings. and if you could see where the kitchen would have been, which is really this -- you can kind of see the chimney back in the trees, you know, it's almost in line with the kitchen. but what i'm guessing is that it's not in line with the kitchen and, like, the slave

house but slightly off so you can actually see the auction block. >> every day. >> yeah, you know what i mean? like if you come out of any one of those buildings, you can see the auction block. >> a reminder of what could happen to you. >> exactly. >> my name is justin reid, i'm the director of african-american programs at virginia university. we've actually worked quite a bit with jobie in her work documenting slave dwellings across the state of virginia. we recently received a grant from the national endowment for humanities to expand one of our projects called encyclopedia of virginia. we are increasing the slave content within the online encyclopedia. and we are traveling across the state with google 360 and historical data. jobie has been a big part of the project. they can find it on google maps if they go to encyclopedia of virginia's page and click on

our virtual tours, they can see several of the sites that the virginia foundation for the humanities has already captured. search it online and you can find it anywhere. >> so what's your background? how did you get involved in doing this kind of work? >> my background is in public history and museums. work? >> my background is public history and spent most of my career working with museums, williamsburg, the historic landmark in farmville, and about a year ago, i joined the virginia foundation for the humanities, to help other historic sites build their capacity, so one of the things we do, we provide grants to historical and cultural institutions and libraries and universities for programming for research, for capacity building projects, and we do our own programming, and produce our own radio shows, back story, and with good reason, and my particular responsibility now is actually working with the general assembly. they recently commissioned the virginia foundation for the humanities to document as many existing african-american historic sites as possible. and so all of this work feeds together from what jobie's

doing, on slave dwelling to what the encyclopedia virginia is doing, documenting historic sites dealing with slavery and dealing with this project, really traying to marry all of this together, into something that is really accessible and user friendly to teachers, for families, for visitors, and in the state of virginia to actually explore some of these underknown and underpromoted historic sites that still have such a huge significance to them. >> i think it's a status symbol, so if you're slave trader, it shows one how good he was at his job, that he's so good at moving slave, the property, the product, that he needed, he needed to have something right at his home, you know what i mean, and so you know, people were coming to him to buy slaves, and they didn't need to, he didn't need to travel to do this, he could, he was getting so many, that he also had enough that he could just do it out of

his home. if the river, the river is about a mile away and that they would be delivered is at the river and bring them right up here and sell them. >> so it is a walk from the river just to get up here to be sold. i mean that must have been a horrific experience. >> the area by the house, the group of villages is called other town, and the area, a group of buildings down by the river was called lower town, and lower town was primarily enslaved buildings. and that's where a lot of slaves lived and worked. i'm guessing oversears kind of control and manage that area, but up here, this was, this was upper town. >> and you know what exists today at lower town? >> yes. not a lot. so we're going to kind of walk this way and i'll point out the buildings that exist up here. but more buildings exist in upper town than lower town. so what this is, one of the things that's interesting about this site or that you'll notice

is that there's a ton of stone, a ton of stone, again, a lot of it is hidden but i'll point it out from where you can see it, but so there's, so like there's a stone wall around, oh, it's, call it a garden, but it's not like a formal garden like we kind of think of acc as like flowers and shrubs and stuff but that's all made of stone, and another way that, so originally, the site had like, you know, over 30 outbuildings, and that's a lot of outbuildings. but you know, that also showed off his wealth, so like the first building that's just over here, is a duckhouse. you build a house for ducks? you know what i mean? like i would not call that a necessary building, you know what i mean, but he, you know, he could do it, he had the material to do it, so he did it. i know. yup. animals have a --

>> they had better housing. >> than the housing for the enslaved workers here. >> at any given time, approximately how many slaves did he have here on the property living and working? >> so that, i don't know. and so i think that is also kind of tricky because he was a slave trader so he would be moving slaves probably, i mean hundreds, maybe even thousand, coming through here and i don't know enough about how many kind of like what is, what the shipments were, you know what i mean, and how many he kept on hand permanently, but so i do know for here, so there would have been, so there's, so up here, the buildings, there was a kitchen so it would have been, there would have been slaves living in the kitchen, there's a wash house, there would have been slaves living in the wash house, there are at least three known slave houses, and there is

a, with a space downstairs and a loft space, and then a weeding house with a loft space where slaves would have been living. so quite a few slaves were living up here, living and working up here, and then there would have been slaves living and working in the main house probably. >> yes. >> so quite a few just up here, and then like i said, lowerer town, i think it literally was like a town, you know what i mean, like it was a whole group of enslaved people down there living and working. there's a mill down there. i haven't found that, any documentation of like a list of slaves yet, but i do know, i have found a narrative from one of his slaves actually. >> oh, really?

>> yes. with research. and boy it doesn't describe even the living conditions or something, but talking about something else, but it's one of his slaves. >> first, this wash house, we know people were living upstair, because if you go inside, there's a stair that used to be right here, here, where there's the header, the horizontal board, it tells you that there was a stair, that this is an opening, and that's where the stair would have been. so if you want to look, the fireplace is pretty cool in there, if you want to look in that one. so the back of the washhouse, and how we kind of know it is a washhouse and what makes it interesting, is you don't find it very often, are the drains in

the wall. that's what those stone basins are that are coming out of the wall so when they are washing, you know, you have water, dirty water, and this way, you can just dump it into the basin and it goes right out the, right out into the outside of the building, and you don't have to take the time to carry the big pot of, pot boiling water all the way outside, you just dump it into the watering. and i've seen this at one of the buildings, these are pretty cool, just because i don't think a lot of them maybe survived. and it often depends on what the washhouse was made out of. >> so that would have been the laundry of the whole plantation? >> well, so that's the question, is so there's, there's questions that always come up that people are always interested in, and have to do with the laundry, and the cooking, so the kitchen, who did the kitchen feed?

did it feed just the main house? or did it feed the main house and the enslaved people? and same with the laundry, like, you know, was the laundry for, you know, the main house, or was it for everybody? or was it just for the enslaved? so those are questions that usually can only be answered through documentation that's describing that function. for this, i don't know. i mean yeah, i haven't seen any documentation about what it serviced, but cooking-wise, when we go look at the kitchen, i'm guessing just the shear size of the kitchen fireplace, it was feeding everybody that was at uppertown. washhouse, i don't know, i would kind of think it would be kind of servicing everybody, maybe in

upper town, too, but i just don't know. but as for cooking, slaves were always going to do some type of cooking in their houses, because it's just, it's well documented, well known that slaves were not provided enough rations, so they were always supplementing their diet, so they were doing cooking in their fireplaces because they were needing to supplement their diet, so those fireplaces, although they're not considered kitchens, fireplaces, they were used for cooking and heat sources. so now, on to the slave house. the slave house, this is the surviving slave house, so this

was one of three for sure. that pile of stone back there was the chimney of another one that used to be right next to it, and then we would walk around, we can see the one on the other side. but this one has a loft space upstairs which is typical. we can go inside and look and you can see that. is that working? nope. >> so we thought it was three, three early interims then, because you can see the stair was there, it was a dove-tail there. >> yes. >> and there is some evidence that the fireplace, it was a little smaller, but it seems they enlarged the chimney and moved the stair over there, but i think what we saw in the one

was siding, it was replaced once, and then it's been replaced again. so they started with a pretty big one room house with access to an unfinished at tick, and then they just kind of, the accommodations, they added the rear shed. >> how many buildings were lost since the last time we were here? >> i don't know, i just got here. two or three. the kitchen was a huge loss. the kitchen had three fireplaces side by side with iron graphics or equipment above it. the stone wall washhouse was set up for drying clothes inside. so you could do it in the attic. and there was a partition, and rather than the partition being covered with sheeting as you see here, there were smaller boards and they were spaced apart, so air would circulate through.

so this was really kind of specialized. you know, cultivation of his money, his farming, and his manufacturing, so in other words, this doesn't seem so complete and yet i don't think this represents an ever day plantation by any means in virginia. >> even among elite virginiians in the early 19th centuries. >> it seems like, doing these esoteric things. >> there's nothing really special about the stairs. the ladder is there. >> right. >> ladder stairs. >> you can get a much better sense up here in the attic that the conditions that most enslaved people lived in, one of the things is it is hot, because

it is an at tick, it's unfinished, it's pretty well built, out of hewn and sawn timber joined together, so it's built by a professional builder, but it's left unfinished, so there's no sheathing on the rafters or on the towers or on the gable ends. and it is kind of an interesting point perhaps is that it looks like it never had a railing until this railing was put in after 1900, with wire nails. so you had to be a little careful up here as well, because kids could fall through the stairwell pretty easily. but this, the first floor is specialized, better finished, more esoteric than most of the houses that enslaved virginiianians occupied. this gives you a much better

sense of relatively unfinished and frankly uncomfortable accommodations. >> the hooks above the door over there, so those are, you see those a lot, in smokehouses and things, they really are hooks, those are the hooks that they made and used and you see them a lot in smoke houses and those are the types of hooks that they would make out of branches and stuff. see that brick or stone? that was the, that's the tobacco barn. that's still part of upper town. but what makes this one special is that in the four corners of it, there are four small rooms

in each corner, so the history of it is that those four corners were used to breed slaves, like i said the original owner of this property was big into the slave trade and so part of, you know, trading slaves is to also breed them, so you could, you know, have more property or product to trade, and so in the report about this property, they said that those rooms were used to breed slaves, and so there are four just window-less rooms. >> here is a massive kitchen chimney. look at that. how cool is that? with the little grid ovens above. look how big that is. >> what are your impressions of this place? >> this is my first time, i actually grew up in this part of

virginia, i visited other plantations, but to me, it was really striking of course is the fact that there is an auction block right here in the center of the property, and earlier, standing on that, it was very, i don't know, it felt like i'm tensing up as i was standing on the auction block and just imagining, you know, what previous generations may have felt standing in that spot and not knowing what was to happen. you can definitely feel the power of this place, and i think that auction block standing where it is right now is a huge part of why this site is so powerful. i mean this would have been really the last place men, women, children, would have been with their families, and you know, after this place, they would have been scattered all across the united states, and so this is really kind of ground zero for that experience here, in the united states, for so many people. that to me was probably the most, the most i guess impactful

aspect of this plantation. >> i think it's so important for americans to know the history, you know, look at what's going on right now in today's society, and we're still working through the legacy of enslavement and disenfranchisement, so before we can correct any of today's problem, we do need to understand the root causes. we can't really eradicate what we're experiencing now until we actually understand all the factors that contribute to society today, and obviously, slavery is the root of so many of the social ills we're experiencing, so i think if we're interested in improving our schools, if we're interested in eradicating poverty, you know, if we want to ensure that more young americans can actually achieve, the quote-unquote american dream, we need to take a step back and actually look at the things that caused so many of the inequities that we see now. before we fix anything, we have

to have a fuller and more accurate true form understanding of the history. >> this one was what they call the, it's been called, the well, brick dependency for obvious reason, the loom house, the weaving house, factory, but i think it was primarily like a weaving house and i think there is weaving equipment inside which supports that but this too has a loft space and it also has a cellar space, and people were also living in this space. and you can go inside and look, if you want to, i think, be careful for some of the floorboards. so you can see, they're saying like a slave house, when they call spaces servants house, they weren't servants, they were slaves, they were enslaved people, they weren't servant, service implies choice, a profession, like a job, something you chose to do, slaves didn't choose to be

slaves, so like so, so it is like a slave house, that the only function i think to try to cover it but sometimes they don't know what the function was, the dependency. we actually did some research about when, when people started to use the word dependency, and it was, i want to say, it was mid 1800s, but it was cotton, it depends what time period you said, but it was kind of a later term that was picked up, the function of the building was, and the kitchen washup, they wouldn't need to use a generic term, because like you know, with the kitchen, go to the kitchen, they needed to know what the function was and they would have talked about it, and not tried to just reach for kind of a generic something, but i think it's more of a modern generic term that we have started to use. >> that little apron building is

the ice house. the other one next to it is a dairy, with a workshop above it. and again, so the ice house, dairy, you know, very common you find them next to the kitchen. the reason i study these buildings is because i'm interested in the people that were in these buildings. it's always, you know, in the back of mind, i can often just talk about the structure itself and the architecture of it, because that's what i'm trained to do, that's what my background is, but it's the people i'm interested in, and it is the research that i've done of the slave narrative that, you know, are in the back of mind, and those are the, those are the things that i'm looking for, like, you know, how were they using this space, and how many people were in this space, how would they have used the space, how would they have divided the space to, especially like multiple families were in one space, how did they claim their

own space, and can we see any of that evidence on the walls, or on the floor, or anything like that, and you know, where were they sleeping, where were they working, and things like that. and when i'm with others, they too are also, those are the kind of questions they have, and they're noticing things about the space, about what it would be like to live there, that i've experienced enough of, like i know, i kind of know what questions they're going to ask, when there's loft spaces, you know, out there in the summer, oh, it's hot here. yes, it is. it gets very hot in loft spaces. especially if there aren't windows or it's just like one small window. so it's interesting to kind of listen or watch the people when they're visiting the spaces for the first time, because they're realizing the conditions of these spaces that again you don't get just from a photograph

or something, but the actual, from actually being there, like yes, the loft space is hot. the ceilings are low. the doors are small. just things like that. >> one of the things, that are some of the biggest misconceptions that you think the general public has about slavery based on your work? >> that enslaved spaces were not just like a single function spaces. so like i say like slave houses, there are, there are definitely buildings that were dedicated to housing, and that was their primary function, but like workspaces were oftentimes living spaces also. so like kitchens and washrooms were also, they were living spaces and workspaces. like slaves didn't have a separate living space and a separate workspace, so many enslaved buildings are multi-use

buildings. and they changed use over time, but also during historical time, you know what i mean, so it's just kind of what was needed at the time, they could easily be, you know, swapped out for whatever was needed at the time, so just kind of the idea that you know, slaves worked during the day in this space and then went home to another building, at night, it is not the way it was, and that's not true. they lived and worked in the same space, and part of that, one of the spaces was the main house, so when you find fireplaces in the basement of cellars, of like main houses, those were living spaces for enslaved people. that's why they're a fireplace down there, because every space was usable space, and working space, and so that's, i mean like slavery was everywhere, it

wasn't limited to, you know, certain places, it was everywhere. >> your next survey season, what do you hope to do next? where are you going next? >> so i hope to do the next site, or state that has a lot of sites in it that i know of already, it's alabama, and so i'd like to do survey work down there, and i'd like to see how alabama compares with virginia. because virginia is very rich in history and people, a lot of historians, and outreach historians have v-done a lot of work in virginia because it's tied to a lot of history and presidents and things like that and there is always research going on in virginia and it's well documented in many ways so i'd like to see how other sites compare to virginia, if they have a lot of research going on there, like virginia, or if they are in more need of the site of

documentation and research there. >> you can learn more about jobie hill saving slave houses project by visiting c-span.org/history and viewing american art factors saving slave houses which documented a visit to brandon plantation in virginia. weeknights this month, we're featuring american history tv programs, as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span 3. march is women's history month, tonight, house of representatives historian matthew wisnessski and curator faira elliot take a look at women in congress. they present artifacts and photographs beginning with the 1917 election of jeanette rankin, and ending with representatives in the 1970s and '80s. they tell stories about margaret chase smith, claire booth loose, shirley chisholm and lindy bog, watch tonight beginning at 8:00

eastern and enjoy american history tv every weekend, on c-span 3. you're watching american history tv. every weekend on c-span 3. explore our nation's past. american history tv on c-span 3. created by america's cable television companies and today we're brought to you by these television companies who provide american history tv to viewers as a public service. located about 100 miles from washington, d.c., on the eastern shore of the chesapeake bay, the harriet tubman underground railroad visitor center, opened in the spring of 2017. up next, on american artifacts, a half hour tour of the grounds and exhibits to learn about the life of escaped slave, abolitionist, civil war spy, and suffragist harriet tubman. welcome to harriet t