Furnishing a Bedroom

To have the bare furnishings for a nineteenth century bedroom, a peorson would have to spend about $40. That would be a little over a month's worth of pay to furnish a one-person bedroom.

Assessing the Sweet Briar Slave Cabin

Assessing the Sweet Briar Slave Cabin

            Before attending Sweet Briar College, I was not aware of the slave cabin. Since then, it had been pointed out to me via learning on the land and other excursions like that. I had been told that it used to be the farm museum and that it, at one time, had been a slave cabin. So before doing the reading for this class, I didn’t know much. After reading about the history of the cabin, I was surprised at all the ways it had been used over time, especially that it was used as the alumnae office and even as a coffee shop at one time, and our discussion in class made the history of the cabin and all of its changes even more clear. For example, I had no idea that anyone had actually lived there after Sweet Briar became a college until we discussed Sterling Jones Sr.

            Now that I know more about the slave cabin, I can think of it in much less abstract terms. It seems much more real to me now that I have read about it and heard some of the history of it. I believe that the slave cabin is an historic landmark on our campus, just as much as the Sweet Briar House is. The people that once lived in the slave cabin played a huge role in keeping the plantation running way back then, and the man that lived there when the college was being built even made some of the bricks for the buildings himself. I believe that the cabin plays a very important role of giving us all some perspective, and keeping history alive here on campus.

            There are many questions to ask about the history of the cabin. I am personally curious to know how a whole family could fit in one to sleep well at night, and how they didn’t all freeze to death in the winter without any heat in the cabin. I would also love to know what the cabin looked like, on both the inside and the outside, before any of the renovations and restorations were made, especially what kinds of home furnishings like beds, tables and stoves that we take for granted that they may or may not have had.

            To encourage visitors to the cabin, I think that restoring the cabin to a semblance of what it would have looked like back when slaves lived there would be a promising idea. I, personally, would be extremely interested in visiting it to see the conditions that they lived in for myself. I also believe that preserving the cabin in as close to original conditions as possible would make the cabin more valuable from a historical perspective that it would be as something like the farm equipment museum. I think it would also be valuable to perhaps place a plaque outside of the cabin explaining some of its history and the history of the people that have lived there. The plaque could include information about then the cabin was first erected, how many cabins like it were built at the same time, how many people generally lived in one cabin at one time, information about the overseer Logan Anderson, and information about Sterling Jones and his contribution to Sweet Briar College.

            The Sweet Briar Slave Cabin is a historic building that needs to be preserved and remembered. It’s history is part of an important piece of history in our country, especially in the south and that history cannot be forgotten. Recreating the cabin to its original conditions would be the most purposeful future for the cabin, and the best way to show students, visitors, and general history buffs what the original conditions were like.