WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — The National Park Service, in partnership with other departments, is giving over $170,000 to Virginia in Save America's Treasure grant funds for better conservation of artifacts from the enslaved community in Williamsburg.
The $176,000 grant will be used to conserve artifacts in connection with enslaved people at the Kingsmill Plantation in James City County. The grant is presented to the Commonwealth of Virginia by the National Park Service in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
The Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg has several archeological sites that include plantations from the 17th and 18th centuries which had multiple quarters for enslaved people.
State archaeologists led excavations at Kingsmill starting in 1972, according to a release from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources; "The artifacts recovered from the sites at Kingsmill have provided historians and researchers the opportunity to study the lives of the enslaved individuals who lived and worked on the Kingsmill plantations during Virginia's colonial era."
The Virginia Department of Historic Resources (DHR) gained ownership of the Kingsmill collection in 2018. It will be using the Save America's Treasures grant to catalog and conserve the artifacts, many of which have been deteriorating since they were transferred to a commercial storage facility.
“The collections we will be conserving using our Save America’s Treasures grant contain important pieces of Virginia's past that will be used to expand our understanding of the lives of people who are often missing from the written historical record,” said Dr. Elizabeth Moore, State Archaeologist at DHR. “This work will make these collections accessible to researchers, museums, and community members who wish to learn more about Virginia’s colonial era.”
The grant will also go toward extending and growing the employment of staff who oversee the Kingsmill artifacts, expanding our research and knowledge on Colonial Virginia and its enslaved communities, and increasing public access to the Kingsmill collection through exhibitions nationwide.
The grant requires recipients to provide matching funds for the awards, so the Commonwealth will provide a match totaling $281,871.
The Save America’s Treasures grant program has allocated funding for the preservation and conservation of the nation’s cultural and historic resources since 1998.
According to the NPS, which oversees the program, $25.7 million in Save America’s Treasures grants have been awarded in the current grant cycle to support 58 projects in 26 states, the Virgin Islands, and the District of Columbia.
