The Captain John Hicks House Site and the Eighteenth-Century Townlands Community

Abstract

In 1969–1971, archaeologists and a historian collaborated to interpret the ca.1720–1745 dwelling site of a prominent St. Mary’s County tobacco planter, Captain John Hicks. Hicks was a ship captain from Whitehaven, England, who married a local woman and settled on the St. Mary’s Townlands. Shortly before 1749, Hicks constructed a new dwelling and his old dwelling was moved to become an outbuilding. In the process of clearing the old site for agriculture, Hicks’s slaves buried thousands of artifacts in the old cellar and in pits. Archaeologists Glenn Little and Stephen Israel sorted the artifacts by function. Minimal vessel estimates were made for ceramics and glass. Historian Lois Carr used land records and probate inventories to model the social structure of the St. Mary’s City Townlands and St. Mary’s County. While Captain Hicks ranked among the top ten-percent of the County’s tobacco producers and lived quite comfortably, his standard of living was modest compared to William Deacon, Esquire, Customs Collector for the North Potomac, the Townlands’ grandee. While Dr. Carr was able to reconstruct much of Captain Hicks’s career, she could learn little about his 19 slaves other than their names and ages.