Excavation in 1984-85 of the 1192 square foot Building t site
exposed features associated with two phases of slave quarter
construction on Mulberry Row. As expected, mechanical removal of
early 20th-century roadwork revealed evidence (F05), albeit
scant, of the easternmost of three log dwellings built in the
mid-1790s and recorded by Jefferson on his 1796 Mutual Assurance
Declaration as Building t. The unanticipated discovery of a
cluster of four sub-floor pits (F01-04) representing an earlier
barracks-style quarter, named the Negro Quarter, offers a rare
insight into the conditions of enslaved laborers living on
Mulberry Row between the 1770s and 1790. In January of 1773,
Jefferson purchased three slaves, Ursula and her sons, Bagwell
and George. He probably also bought her husband Great George
about this same time, but no record of the transaction survives
(Bear and Stanton 1995:334). Their third son Isaac Jefferson,
born at Monticello in 1775, recalled in 1847 that “the feedin’
place [for Jefferson’s deer p