REVIEW // Ancestral Places: People of African Descent at Tudor Place

Tudor Place, Washington, DC
6 February 2024 – 13 October 2024

In 1802, Martha Custis Peter, step-granddaughter to US President George Washington, inherited forty-eight enslaved people from the Washingtons’ Mount Vernon plantation. Martha Custis Peter and her husband Thomas Peter allowed some to remain at Mount Vernon but forcibly separated others from their families and community, sending them to work at Tudor Place.¹ Generations of the Peter family have celebrated and preserved Tudor Place’s material and familial ties to George Washington, which has dominated interpretations of the home since it opened to the public as a museum. Ancestral Places: People of African Descent at Tudor Place instead highlights the material culture, artisanry, and legacies of the free and enslaved people who lived and worked at the site, the result of a collaboration between museum curators and members of the Tudor Place Descendant Community.

The exhibition is spread throughout the historic home, presenting descendants’ personal items and oral histories at stops throughout the house, along with objects that highlight their enslaved ancestors’ lived experiences. At one tour stop an audio recording plays, where Hanna Nash William describes how her ancestors slept in the attic, communicating with relatives at Arlington House across the Potomac River by waving a red flannel petticoat from the second-storey windows. Photographs of descendants and their families are hung in the Drawing Room, temporarily replacing the Peter family’s portraits. In the kitchen, a griddle used by enslaved cooks at Mount Vernon is displayed as an example of what Patty Allen, an enslaved cook at Tudor Place, may have used in her work. Left-handed gardening tools, possibly belonging to John Luckett, are installed in a hallway. Self-emancipated, Luckett lived off-site and would walk three miles to the residence daily to maintain its gardens. Altogether, the curatorial collaboration emphasises the site-specific legacies and experiences of enslavement and domestic labour.

This exhibition presents a narrative recognisable within historic homes. Its focus remains on family history, the lives of people who lived in the home, and their connections to the local community, in this case, Georgetown. Like many English country homes, Tudor Place has been interpreted through the lens of national history, focusing on the decorative arts and architectural design. Country homes in the UK are often presented as an opportunity to spend a ‘nice day out’ visiting an expansive British home, a rare invitation into the world of the aristocratic owners, some of whom still reside there. In contrast, American historic homes tend to be presented as museums, as educational sites where the public can learn about US architecture, culture, and history. However, the narratives presented are often sanitised, relaying mythical white-centric histories which deliberately ignore site-specific legacies of slavery.² Recent years have seen a shift in such interpretations, with a broadening curatorial focus that includes the various ways enslaved labour funded and maintained historic homes. Ancestral Places demonstrates this cultural shift, as the curators of Tudor Place address slavery whilst not entirely removing the traditional narratives promoting the design and beauty of the home and its surrounding gardens. This combined approach allows visitors to more easily understand that the enslaved labourers who lived and maintained the home are inseparable from our contemporary experience and understanding of the historic home itself.

Ancestral Places also explores the enslaved home space that was located on the property but was demolished shortly after the US Civil War. The exhibition notes that the Peter family’s records do not provide information regarding the structure. During the guided tour, a docent points out where the home space, which had recently been excavated, would have been. Items which belonged to the enslaved residents, including fragments of ceramic plates decorated with blue-and-white prints, were uncovered, some of which were displayed on the dining room table. By placing items from the destroyed enslaved home space directly within the still-standing historic home, the exhibition rejects any notion that unrecorded narratives are wholly inaccessible. The ceramic fragments resemble Chinese export porcelain soup plates from Tudor Place’s Washington Collection. Displayed alongside a fork and spoon, their physicality and social function are evoked, signalling a communal meal within a home of people we cannot fully know, but whose labour surrounds us. The Peter family’s monogrammed ceramicware, which usually adorns the table, is relegated to nearby cabinets. The enslaved domestic servants’ material culture acts as a salve when running against the limits of the home’s textual archive.

While William Thornton is the recorded architect of Tudor Place, Samuel Collins, an enslaved plasterer living and working in Washington, DC, is responsible for the decorative plaster prominently featured on the ceiling and in the cornices of the home’s three central rooms (Fig. 1). The house’s plasterwork serves as visual evidence of Collins’ forced labour, creativity, and family legacy, as the exhibition notes that he had taught his trade to his son and grandson, who worked as free men after the American Civil War. In effect, Ancestral Places recontextualises the decorative arts’ close ties to historic homes to present a narrative of enslaved persons’ craft and labour. While the highly popular and twice-extended exhibition may be temporary, Collins’ plaster will remain firmly in place.

When visiting Tudor Place as a historic site, or attending private celebratory events hosted there, guests are encouraged to admire the house’s decorative architecture and ornamental gardens. Ancestral Places details how much of these treasured features are derived from the forced labour of specific named individuals. The exhibition prompts wider questions around the creative and aesthetic contributions of enslaved craftspeople, in effect asking audiences to consider the relationships between enslaved labourers, the objects they created, cherished, and used in their own living quarters and the houses they were forced to maintain. By reintegrating the descendants’ narratives and voices back into the interpretation of the historic home, this exhibit provides a model for other historic sites with explicit ties to slavery.