19th Century Mail Order Companies: Furnishing A Home

This was how my partner and I decided to furnish out 19th Century bedroom. The total price of this would have been $43.49. This one room would have taken the average worker, earning about $1 for a days labor, a little over a month to buy. 

Assignment #5

           Before attending Sweet Briar College I was entirely unaware that there was a slave cabin located behind the president’s house. I had always been awed by Sweet Briar House and had been fascinated by the history surrounding the school. So it was interesting to discover that there was a slave cabin on campus.

            The more I learn about the cabin the more important it seems to me that the history of the cabin should be preserved. It is important to remember the multiple uses that the cabin has served since the foundation of the plantation and later the college because it reflects the different values of society throughout time. The cabin wasn’t simply used as a slave cabin but at an Alumnae Office, coffee shop, classroom, chapel and a place for students to spend their free time. The repurposing of the cabin is part of its history and part of the history of the College itself and should not simply be pushed under the rug or forgotten. The cabin could teach present and future students more about the history of Sweet Briar College, how it came to be how it is today, and the transitions it went through along the way. It allows us to see how native cultural values changed as well.

It would be interesting to learn more about the families who originally lived in the cabin and what their original position within the plantation may have been. Could the house have served a purpose other than as a residence for slaves and later employees on the plantation? What could the house have been if not a slave cabin?

            To encourage student visitation to the site the school could offer more social events near the site or possibly offer tours of the cabin. Currently there is little known about the cabin among the student population so just getting the information out there could spark more interest in it. Once the student body knew about the existence of the cabin I don’t think there would be any difficulty in finding ways to get it involved in activities surrounding the building. Once word was out about the cabin I feel as though more students would have and interest in visiting it and learning more about the structure.

            I know there have been discussions of taking the cabin back to what may have originally been there when the cabin was used as a residence for the enslaved peoples living on the plantation but I feel that would be detrimental to the history of the structure. Although originally a slave cabin, the building has served as a number of other buildings on campus. Destroying or removing any vestiges of what the building was used for later on would be paramount to destroying local and campus history. The other uses of the cabin are just as important as its use as a slave cabin. It’s important to commemorate these other uses of the cabin because they illustrate how times changed from the antebellum era in the south to the 20^th Century to today. It’s not as though the cabin was used strictly as a slave cabin in the 19^th century then completely forgotten until the 21^st century, it was building that grew and changed with the campus itself. The slave cabin has been a living building on campus and is representative of the unique circumstances to be available to students at Sweet Briar College.