Lives from the archives (part 1)

The ultimate goal of any archaeological project is not to find artifacts, but to figure out what we can learn about people and their cultures from those artifacts. When archaeologists investigate the recent past, this means exploring through historical records in addition to excavated objects to piece together fragments of people’s lives—a draft card, a census record, a city directory—so that we may reach a more complete story of life in West Philadelphia. Here we focus on what the historical records can tell us about the people who lived near the intersection of 35th St. and Warren St. This is the first post in a short series on some of the insights from the archives we have learned so far. Stay tuned for more!

Henry Johnson’s 1917 WW1 draft card (Ancestry: World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration)

Henry Johnson was born in Abbeville County, South Carolina in 1895 to William and Lela Johnson. At some point between 1910 and 1917, Henry went north, eventually finding work as a waiter and living at the corner of Warren and 35th St. when he filled out this draft card in 1917. Rosey T. Jones was also from the South, born in Virginia in 1880. By 1910, she was a widow living in Philadelphia, and rented a home at 26 N. 35th St. She then rented rooms in this home to three other Black women from Virginia who census records indicate worked as servants, the most common profession for recent Black female migrants in Philadelphia at a time where racism severely limited job opportunities for Black men and women.

Rosey Jones and boarders (1910 Census)

Likewise, Stonewall and Mary Jones, Stonewall’s mother Sarah, and their two lodgers were also from Virginia. Their children, however, were born in PA, as Stonewall and Mary had lived in Philly since the 1890s.

Mary and Stonewall Jones, and family (1910 Census)

These stories reflect some of the dramatic changes West Philly has seen since its emergence as an urban expansion of Philadelphia west across the Schuylkill in the 1800s, and hint at some of the difficulties archaeologists and historians face when trying to reconstruct community histories. As this post from the West Philadelphia Collaborative History Center outlines, West Philly was 83% U.S. born White in 1900, and would not become majority Black until 1960. While Black communities had existed in West Philly since the early 1800s, the most dramatic transformation in their size occurred through the Great Migration, which involved the movement of 6 million Black Americans out of the Jim Crow South between 1910–1970 to northern and western cities. The pull of the Great Migration was economic opportunity, especially during World War I as labor demands skyrocketed. In 1916 for example, the Pennsylvania railroad company offered free transport north to any Black southerner who was willing to ride the train to work the Philly railroad yards. However, there was also the push of Jim Crow and White terrorism in the South. For example, we cannot not know why exactly Henry Johnson migrated from Abbeville, South Carolina to West Philly prior to 1917, but we do know that in 1916 the largest Black landowner in Abbeville, Anthony Crawford, was lynched by a white mob that never faced punishment.

We’ve been compiling census data to get a better sense of when and how the neighborhood where we have been excavating changed, but it has proven difficult. The Black Bottom was never a designation used in the census, and the neighborhoods that census workers did identify changed regularly. For that reason, putting together a record of how the population of the Black Bottom changed through time is very complicated. However, we were able to reconstruct the demographics for all of the households that lived on Warren St. between 34th St. and 36th St., as well as those that lived on 35th St. from Warren to Lancaster from 1880–1950. In other words, this table gives you an idea of how the immediate neighborhood would have changed for the residents of the houses we excavated.

Bromley’s 1895 Atlas of the City of Philadelphia

Neighborhood population change from US Census Data

The complications of home ownership, renters, and subletters creates real challenges to connecting the artifacts that we excavated to the migration narratives mentioned earlier. From 1850–1910, the homes at the corner of 35th and Warren had relatively little turnover, and often the owners lived in the home. However, beginning in 1910, these wooden twin structures that we excavated, entered a period of rapid turnover. The homes were split into multiple formal and informal housing units, with some people only staying for a year or two. To understand how this can make archaeological interpretation complicated, consider this 1909 penny recovered in the basement of 32 N. 35th Street... who did it belong to? We know Stonewall, Mary, and their children lived there in 1909 and 1910, but in 1912 when Mary gives birth to her 7th child Emily, the birth certificate records a home birth down the street at 3429 Warren St. By 1920, Joshua and Mary Burnett are living at 32 N. 35th Street with their 6 children. Considering that coins tend to circulate for years if not decades, we have no way of conclusively answering: who lost their penny?

1909 penny recovered in excavations.

            Instead, what this post has hopefully communicated and what future archival insights from the project will explore, is that combining artifacts and archives is messy and complicated, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn new things, it just requires asking different types of questions. Rather than ask who owned a specific artifact, we can ask what role that artifact played for the type of people living in the neighborhood? When we find discarded oyster shells in the privy, we can’t know who had oysters for dinner. But with community involvement and oral histories, we can discuss oyster recipes, memories of New Years Eve meals, and even debate where the best seafood vendors were located. As the archives indicate, the people who moved to West Philly and formed what would eventually be called the Black Bottom came from a wide range of places, mostly in the South, bringing with them their own cultural and culinary traditions that they then adapted to living in West Philadelphia.

The connections between artifacts, archives, and memories can be difficult to untangle, and sometimes require some speculation. For example, Mary Norman, who along with her husband Stonewall were the first Black residents of 32 N. 35th street, was born and raised in West Point, King William County, Virginia, a coastal town on the York River that in the late 1800s had a thriving industry based on…oysters.

Oyster Pie recipe from What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking (1881) by Abby Fisher. This is one of the earliest known written oyster recipes authored by a Black chef.