The Jane Dickson and Charles Dickson Sites in Rock Creek Park

The Jane Dickson and Charles Dickson sites lie side by side in an open, grassy clearing in Rock Creek Park, not far from the Sarah Whitby site. Charles Dickson and Jane Dickson moved to Washington, DC, and its outskirts because of the Civil War.

Two households, probably brothers

Charles Dickson first appears in the Broad Branch area in the 1870 census, with his wife Lizzie and their three children — one of 25 Black households in the area that year. None of the families reported owning land or personal property, and all the heads of household and their wives were recorded as unable to read. While nearby African American men were usually listed as "farmhands," Charles Dickson was listed as a "farmer" and may have worked for himself.

Jane and Aaron Dickson appear in the 1880 census with their 13-year-old son, Daniel. How they were related to the family next door is unclear, but Aaron and Charles were probably brothers. Aaron, a blacksmith, also worked in a skilled trade.

The two families' quarter-acre lots were almost identical "house and garden" leases — usually part of a landowner's larger farm, with the tenant paying low rent in return for labour. Some enslavers made such arrangements for formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, but the name Dickson never appears among the people enslaved by the landowning Peirce and Shoemaker families.

Peirce's Mill, sometimes written Pierce's Mill, in 1855. Credit: National Park Service.

Becoming landowners

The chain of title is unclear, but records suggest both families bought their lots from Arianna J. Lyles in 1883. By the early 1890s Aaron Dickson disappears from the park's records, and Jane presumably became owner of the family's four-room frame house, which an 1895 park record rated in "fair" condition. The same record found Charles Dickson's one-room frame house and stable in poorer shape.

Charles and Jane Dickson were the only two African American property owners who sold their land to Rock Creek Park. The families probably left around 1900, when the Park Commission began building new roads designed for recreational access to scenery.

The Jane Dickson site

Archeologists used metal detecting, shovel test pits and surface inspection. The first shovel tests found almost nothing, probably because the ground was graded with heavy machinery when the park was built. But a small depression at the edge of the lawn caught their eye. A test pit at its centre produced brick fragments, cut nails and window glass from the lost house; like the depression at the Whitby site, it marked an old cellar hole. Digging further turned up the family's everyday things — bottle glass, a piece of a whiteware plate, a glass bead and a railroad spike, all from the late 1800s.

The Charles Dickson site and a toy

The Charles Dickson site is humbler but shows up in more detail. Shovel tests, test units and surface inspection located a cellar hole, visible as a depression about 10 feet by 10 feet; rocks in it may come from the house's demolished stone foundation or chimney.

The cellar hole held 195 artifacts, all from the house's occupation in the late 1800s; 31 came from the shovel tests. Most were building materials and household goods common at homes of the later 1800s. Among the family's purchases were a small plain china button, a fragment of a white clay tobacco pipe and two jewelry beads. Pieces of fine ceramics, a glass tumbler and a ribbed glass bowl suggest the Dicksons liked to entertain.

The cart driver figurine after conservation (left) and before (right). Credit: National Park Service.

One find stands out: an iron figurine, about 3.5 inches tall, of a Black cart driver in a hat, hands held in front of him, from a cast-iron horse-drawn farm wagon playset made around 1900. Carting was one of the most common jobs for African American men in Washington then, so such figures were typical of metal toys. Perhaps the Dickson children let the cart drive their imagination.

An antique cart-and-driver toy. Credit: National Park Service.

Everyday life after the war

Work at the Whitby and Dickson sites brings to light parts of Black life that had been hidden: the everyday belongings of African Americans in the Reconstruction era, and differences between Black and non-Black families in the same rural area. It draws attention to a network of related African American enclaves, most of them barely represented in the archeological record, and shows a vibrant community building new lives in an unfamiliar place.

Sources

Based on "The Jane Dickson and Charles Dickson Sites," part of the series "The Sarah Whitby Site and African American History," published by the National Park Service, Rock Creek Park; rewritten in hubnx's own words.

• The article ends its account of the Jane Dickson site by comparing it to farmsteads that lacked a cellar, just after describing the cellar hole found there; the comparison is left out.