In 1897, the plantation house burned. Only ten days before the house caught fire, the county sheriff and his son, Cecil Page, stopped by. As they approached the porch, they noticed a chicken tied to one of the columns. After stepping inside and allowing their eyes to adjust to the dark, they saw a piano on one side of the room with a chicken tied to the piano leg. Sitting beside the fireplace was an old black woman feeding a pile of corn cobs into the stove.

This vignette, related by the son of Cecil Page, provides a brief glimpse into the tough life of a rural tenant farmer. Medicinal bottles, a cast iron stove, burnt corn cobs, animal bone, whiteware dishes, bullets, and tools are some of things she left behind when the house burned. No documents tell us her name, age, occupation, or how she felt about living in an ancient brick house that once protected the people who may have owned her ancestors. However the story of her daily life is rising from the ruins of Fairfield.

Hundreds of men and women lived and worked as slaves at Fairfield from the late 1600s until the Civil War. Some of their descendants remained nearby and formed neighboring communities that still exist in Gloucester County. We know very little from documents beyond their names and occasionally their occupations, but the excavations and historical research undertaken at Fairfield plantation are beginning to fill in the story of these individuals who did so much to shape the world we live in now.