Introduction
The problem of academic engagement with contemporary society is not a new one, but it is particularly urgent for those of us who work with the past. Social and cultural historians of the past half-century have been influenced by and taken an active interest in contemporary politics, particularly as it impacts the interpretation of the past. There has been much disagreement and even acrimony over the appropriate form and focus of politically engaged history, but many historians are beginning to agree to disagree about the specifics while maintaining a collective emphasis on the social value of the study of the past.Footnote 1 One way in which this value has been developed has been through the emergence of various forms of public history, culminating most explicitly in what James Green has labeled “movement history.”Footnote 2
For more than thirty years, a parallel development has been occurring in anthropology. Archaeologists in particular have sought ways to make their work, which is often publicly funded, more accessible and relevant to the various publics around them. While this movement has had some bright spots, it has largely resulted in middle-class archaeologists communicating with or at middle-class publics through museums, displays, pamphlets, and popular books. Of greater interest to us is a corresponding emergence (also dating to the 1970s and 1980s) of archaeological and, more broadly, anthropological activism. Early practitioners within this movement sought to point out the roles that subordinated groups have played in the past in order to contravene dominant histories that seemed only to be populated by rich or politically powerful white men.Footnote 3 More recently that movement has incorporated not only feminist thought and African-American studies, but also indigenous rights and post-colonial theory, queer theory, critical theory, and class and labor studies.Footnote 4
A recent synthesis of public archaeology and the postmodern anthropological critiques of dominant histories exists in the form of what many archaeologists term “community archaeology.” Community archaeology is a domain of archaeological practice that combines the communicative orientation of public archaeology with the activist, critical praxis of postmodern archaeological theory and ethnographic practice. This practice produces archaeological interpretations that are generated in cooperation with various public constituencies and which are accessible to those communities. In this article, we will discuss one such community archaeology program located in Hampden-Woodberry, a traditionally working-class community in Baltimore, Maryland.
The Radical Potential of Community Archaeology
While the older public archaeology has generally taken place in public, community archaeology does archaeology with the public.Footnote 5 Archaeological excavations in Alexandria, Virginia, and Annapolis, Maryland, began in the 1970s and early 1980s as projects explicitly designed to engage the public, mostly by incorporating volunteers, performing public site tours, and constructing public interpretive programs. They have since transformed into archaeological projects that respond to community needs within the context of their archaeological practice. For instance, many public archaeologies of African-American history have focused on the lifeways of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century enslaved persons. However, when researchers in Annapolis discovered that members of the African-American community were much more interested in histories of African-American freedom, they shifted their research focus to post-bellum sites.Footnote 6
Only in the last ten to fifteen years have American archaeologists on a broader scale begun to have serious conversations with and about their effect on the descendant communities of the groups that they study. These discussions have sought to involve constituent communities actively in the whole process of archaeology, including research design and interpretation, and have grown more activist in their orientation over time.Footnote 7 But how can archaeology, of all things, be activist? Wherein lies its potential to change the world? What methods can archaeologists employ in activist practice, and, perhaps most importantly, why is archaeology an appropriate discipline for doing emancipatory community research? The late, pioneering historical archaeologist James Deetz pointed to the democratizing potential of archaeological evidence.Footnote 8 Artifacts, he noted, have been deposited in patterned ways as the result of human cultural behavior and have the ability to illuminate the lives of history's mutes—the illiterate, those who worked so hard they never wrote about themselves, those whose written records are lost or hidden—who nonetheless left behind some material remains of their lives. The activist potential for archaeology, then, lies in the first instance in its ability to illuminate dark corners of the past. Related to this, however, is its ability to link that past with, on one hand, the material world and, on the other hand, with contemporary communities.Footnote 9
Archaeology is never simply about the past. Archaeological issues are abundant but often invisible in contemporary politics, only occasionally receiving news coverage. The looting of artifacts in war zones, disputes over the disposition of traditional cultural properties and human remains, and raging debates over human origins and the antiquity of the earth are merely a few of the ways that archaeology influences and is influenced by politics. In fact, archaeology is always engaged in creating stories about the past, and those stories are constantly referenced, sometimes without acknowledgement, in public and political speech. The recent recognition that archaeological practice, like all practice, is always already political, paired with the realization that, in most cases, archaeology has served entrenched political interests, has led a number of archaeologists to become more cognizant of the real-world impact of their work and to attempt to use it as a tool for social justice by producing an emancipatory heritage.Footnote 10
This revelation has resulted in major adjustments to archaeology's scientific ontology, and archaeologists have worked to incorporate the stories, interests, and even beliefs of constituent communities into the research process. Our research project, the Hampden Community Archaeology Project, begins and ends as a public, community-based project. Hampden-Woodberry is a working-class enclave consisting of two sister neighborhoods in Baltimore, Maryland, that have been undergoing gentrification for the past fifteen years. From its inception in 2004, our research has rested upon a foundation of community input from a variety of sources and the activity of community volunteers and students. Similarly, any future interpretive work will also depend on community participation. This participatory research design was intended not only to interpret archaeological findings to members of Hampden-Woodberry's various publics but also to include as much public participation as possible in all phases of the research endeavor.
We have located our work simultaneously in the traditions of community archaeology and community-based research (CBR).Footnote 11 Such work adheres to several tenets, including two- (or more) way communication with descendant communities; the de-centering of the researcher as sole authority; and the negotiation of access to and ownership of material remains. This type of work promises to expand the interpretive abilities of archaeologists not only by incorporating community knowledge, but also by posing archaeologists and community members as equal participants in a recursive knowledge-producing effort.Footnote 12 The problem of engaging and involving communities in this type of research is, or should be, of great concern to those who wish to practice community archaeology. This is particularly true in places such as Hampden-Woodberry where history and heritage are contested and significant numbers of community members are skeptical of public sphere interventions. Community archaeologists have begun to work out a variety of strategies for community engagement, often finding that they must act as facilitators to actively involve community members.
Through the Hampden Community Archaeology Project we have attempted to do this in a number of ways, including public history workshops; volunteer opportunities for adults and internship opportunities for teenagers; ethnography and oral history; and a website and a blog. Following a brief history of the neighborhood and a discussion of the contemporary community, we will describe the Hampden Community Archaeology Project and reflect on both our accomplishments and the obstacles that we continue to face in achieving the goals of a truly democratic, emancipatory community archaeology.
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Hampden-Woodberry: Industrialization, Deindustrialization, and Class
Our research is set in a place called Hampden-Woodberry, now a large urban neighborhood located almost directly in the center of the post-industrial city of Baltimore. The community began, however, like any number of similar nineteenth-century industrial villages,Footnote 13 as a relatively remote, small-scale affair dependent upon its topography, and particularly the ready supply of hydrologic energy available from the Jones Falls River. The “suburban factory village” of Hampden-Woodberry originated in the 1820s as a series of water-driven grist mills in the valley of the Jones Falls, about three miles upstream from the port of Baltimore. In the early years of the nineteenth century, while Baltimore's waterborne commerce was booming, farmers interested in bringing their goods to market in the city suffered the perils of poor roads. As described by one newspaper, local transportation routes were “the miery sloughs, the dreadful precipices, the often-times impassible streams, which would everywhere freeze [the traveler] with horror-chills.”Footnote 14
To aid inland trade, Maryland's government began the construction of a series of turnpike roads. Included among these was the Falls Turnpike Road, which, after 1809, connected the mills along the Jones Falls to the hub of international trade a few miles to the south. By the 1830s the construction of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad not only improved this link, but also fueled real estate speculation throughout the region and spurred construction along the Falls Turnpike. In 1833, Lloyd Norris and William Tyson advertised the sale of a 238-acre parcel on the Jones Falls. The parcel contained a mansion house, a farmhouse, a tavern, and a brick and stone gristmill capable of producing 120 barrels of wheat per day. Ten years later that Woodberry Mill was one of eighteen in the Baltimore area and one of at least three in the immediate locality. Another, White Hall Cotton Factory, was still water-driven. However, by 1850 Gambrill, Carroll and Co., White Hall's owner, had begun the conversion to steam drive. By this time, there were also twenty-seven dwelling houses for mill workers erected on mill property. The paternalist system that would flourish in Hampden-Woodberry after 1870 was already putting down roots.Footnote 15
By 1860 Hampden-Woodberry was home to a large foundry, and the area was sufficiently populated to warrant the construction of a library by mill workers. In the early 1870s the village had blossomed into a full-fledged mill town, albeit a rustic one. Simultaneously an apex of industrial development and a backward suburb lacking even paved streets, Hampden-Woodberry played host to no less than five steam-powered cotton duck (canvas) mills and supported as many as eight thousand residents.Footnote 16 It was in this condition that Maryland's cotton mill labor delegates found the town on the night of their meeting in April 1874:
Saturday night, while everything was activity in Woodberry, the people on their several errands were walking up steep and unpaved streets and groping in the dark, the only light in the place being that coming down from the windows of the cottages. With 8,000 inhabitants, large churches of various denominations, a daily newspaper, public halls, numerous large cotton factories and engine works and stores of all descriptions, Woodberry, situated three miles from the heart of Baltimore City has no gas, little or no supply of water, and the most meager kind of communication with the city, to which of necessity one half of the population have business every day.Footnote 17
That meeting, the topic of which was a pending bill in the state legislature to mandate a ten-hour workday for minors, signaled the beginning of real labor consciousness in Hampden-Woodberry. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s organized labor gained strength, particularly under the auspices of the Knights of Labor. Beginning possibly as early as 1906, the United Textile Workers of America and the International Association of Machinists established a presence in the community. During the industrial boom years brought about by the First World War these two unions won a series of strikes, culminating in a successful strike in 1918. This era, from the 1870s through 1920, was the period in which organized labor was most successful in Hampden-Woodberry. Despite these victories, however, mill operatives continued to make what seem today like impossibly low wages: In 1885, men working in the picking room of Maryland cotton duck mills made real wages of just over one dollar per day while women and children made substantially less.Footnote 18 The era of labor activism seems to have ended in Hampden-Woodberry in 1923. After winning a lengthy strike in that year, the mill corporations intensified the process of closing their operations and moving them south.Footnote 19
A series of transformations in world capitalism during the twentieth century, including the gradual transformation of the American economy from one centered on production to one centered on consumption,Footnote 20 made their mark on Hampden-Woodberry. The movement of the textile mills to southern states has altered the neighborhood's character over the last half century. While the mid-twentieth century saw the introduction of some light industry to the region, even that began to dissipate by the 1970s. During this period, Hampden-Woodberry lost all but a few of its manufacturing jobs and much of its service sector. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the mills' decline forced many of Hampden-Woodberry's blue-collar residents to take jobs outside of the neighborhood. Others set up businesses in the community—pharmacies, beauty parlors, grocery stores, and so forth—to provide services for the neighborhood's residents. This constituted a first phase in the transformation of Hampden-Woodberry's economy into one driven by consumption.
Working-class culture as “kitsch”: Women competing for title of “Best Hon” during HonFest 2004. Photo by David A. Gadsby.
Contemporary Hampden-Woodberry
Since the deindustrialization of Hampden-Woodberry, area developers have begun to renovate the old mill buildings as artists' studios and offices. Housing prices rose over the course of the 1990s, as artists and, later, affluent families began to buy homes in the area. A merchants' association, with the aid of a large federal Main Streets grant, has altered the look and character of the main shopping street in Hampden, installing expensive boutiques, restaurants, and bars meant to attract visiting consumers from elsewhere. Meanwhile, more traditional retail establishments such as groceries have been squeezed out of the commercial core and into less accessible areas. A recent issue of National Geographic Traveler showcasing Hampden as an “up and coming neighborhood” attests to the increasing draw of places like this as tourist destinations. Recently the Hampden Village Merchants Association paid to have the neighborhood nominated for the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district.Footnote 21
Hampden in particular has become a site of struggle between class interests over public space. Working-class community members see the public frontage as part of their neighborhood, while merchants and middle-class, pro-development reformers see the space as a place where money is to be made and find the neighborhood's more traditional community an impediment to this goal. In an intriguing contradiction, as developers and merchants push gentrification forward, a new symbolic economy based around the neighborhood's traditional working-class image has begun to evolve. Restaurants and shops on Hampden's main street and events such as “HonFest,” an annual street festival and beauty contest that draws thousands of visitors from around the Baltimore metropolitan region, lampoon an imaginary blue-collar experience by disseminating inaccurate and cartoon-like images of working-class men and women. They capitalize on the “kitsch” of working-class lives and homes and parody the styles of working-class people in public performance. The new Hampden's thriving retail economy is dependent on this use of quasi-working-class images even as it strives to force the community's actual working-class residents off the streets and into the no-man's land of Hampden-Woodberry's working past. This commodification of Hampden-Woodberry's working-class heritage is not a passive process; rather, it is actively pursued by relatively wealthier middle-class gentrifiers and negatively impacts the ability of working people to control their own destinies and to participate fully in the political and social life of the neighborhood.
We use Sharon Zukin's analysis of urban gentrification, based on the symbolic economy, to connect Hampden-Woodberry's heritage with its present. For Zukin, agents of gentrification and commerce in American cities rely on “culture” and “style,” including art, heritage, and history, to create urban spaces where citizens can consume commodities and businesspeople can conduct their business. This has meant the transformation of public spaces such as parks and streets into public-private places. In turn, the democratic processes that formerly governed the management of such places has been co-opted by private interests, and the voices of developers, businesspeople, and other elites are privileged over those of most regular citizens. Additionally, elites, under the auspices of the historic preservation movement, have taken control of the histories of those transformed places and used those histories as tools to further gentrification.Footnote 22
History and heritage, then, are no small problem for people in Hampden-Woodberry. Historic designations, of which there are several in Hampden-Woodberry and surrounding areas, can raise the cost of living in a neighborhood dramatically. University of Texas anthropologist John Hartigan has written about the propensity of working-class whites to regard history in terms of people and events in the past, while middle-class whites tend to regard it as being related to material culture, particularly houses. For the middle class, houses are imbued with elevated monetary value because of their possession of (any) history. Thus what was once a particular history—the history of working-class struggle, or alternately of neighborhood unity, for instance—is transformed into a generic kind of history that is assumed to exist in old houses. Places become worth something not because they are associated with a particular person or event, but because they have “something about them,” a “character” or “style” that speaks to the aesthetic sensibilities of middle-class gentrifiers.Footnote 23
Most importantly, history of this kind can be marketed, as in the case of the multi-million dollar Clipper Mill redevelopment in Woodberry. Here, developers have explicitly used the heritage of the nineteenth-century Poole & Hunt foundry as a selling point for their new luxury condominiums:
In 1853, a modest machine plant was born on Woodberry Road, just north of a nameless branch of the Jones Falls at the foot of Tempest Hill. The new plant, coined Union Machine Shops, housed Poole & Hunt's general offices, an iron foundry, erecting and pattern shops, a melting house and stables. Instantly it became the backbone of the Woodberry/Hamden [sic] community, employing thousands of men as it grew to become the country's largest machine manufacturing plant.
Today, Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, Inc. is redeveloping Clipper Mill and the surrounding area, including the beloved Woodberry Forest. Their aim is to create a new urban corporate campus and upscale residential community.Footnote 24
This kind of marketing simultaneously elides the role of working people in the creation of the neighborhood now being gentrified and hijacks their history as a history of place over people. People who live in surrounding neighborhoods—people with a stake in how redevelopment goes—are left out of the process. Thus, Hampden-Woodberry has become split between two distinct communities—one composed of the long-standing working-class population, the other consisting of middle-class gentrifiers, businesspeople, and developers—that, if they engage in dialogue at all, frequently talk past one another when it comes to the present and future state of the neighborhood.
The Hampden Community Archaeology Project
The Hampden Community Archaeology Project (HCAP) is an interdisciplinary, collaborative, community-based heritage research project. HCAP is also an explicitly activist project. It is premised on the idea that the inclusion of descendant communities in all stages of historical and archaeological research can generate critical public discussion of important contemporary social issues, which can then lead to both public and private initiatives for social change. In this case, we believe that the community-based, participatory study of inequality in the past will help to raise consciousness of inequality in the present within Hampden-Woodberry.
HCAP is a collaborative effort by researchers from the Center for Heritage Resource Studies (CHRS) at the University of Maryland and the Hampden Community Council (HCC), a non-profit organization devoted to improving the quality of life in the neighborhood through a number of means, including environmental stewardship, economic revitalization, and initiatives in secondary education. The primary research objective is to uncover information, from both the documentary and archaeological records, about the everyday lives of Hampden-Woodberry's mill operatives from the 1840s to the 1930s. This has been accomplished through controlled archaeological excavations of domestic house lots; archival research into community life and the vibrant labor movement that once existed in Hampden-Woodberry; and oral historical and ethnographic research among the community's contemporary residents. The results of this research have yielded information about the dynamics of race, class, gender, and community in this unique working-class neighborhood. The social objective of HCAP is to revitalize a sense of Hampden-Woodberry's working-class heritage and to leverage an appreciation of this heritage to promote systemic change in the local economic development process that would allow for democratic participation by all sectors of the community.
In order to achieve our social objective, project members strive to produce collaborative histories with Hampden-Woodberry residents as a means of empowerment in the ongoing struggle over the nature and direction of the neighborhood, especially in terms of the economic development process. HCAP researchers seek not only to conduct high-quality archaeology, but also to involve community members in all phases of the archaeological process. Discussions generated by the archaeology about community heritage are a critical part of this process. Thus, the first phase of HCAP was a series of public history workshops organized by Gadsby in the fall of 2004. Scholars knowledgeable about various aspects of Hampden-Woodberry's past gave short talks, followed by periods of open discussion moderated by Gadsby. Residents expressed the most interest in issues of race, class, gender, community, and gentrification in everyday life. In addition, running throughout the comments on all of these topics was a larger issue, namely, the importance of maintaining community cohesiveness against “outsiders.” We then incorporated the issues and insights raised by community members into a research design for public historical archaeology (including archival and archaeological components), which was made available for public comment on the website of the CHRS (http://www.heritage.umd.edu). We revised the research design to stress four broad areas that had featured prominently in the workshops: class and gentrification, labor and industry, gender and family life, and race and racism.Footnote 25
Working within these categories of inquiry, we established more specific research questions. First, we wanted to better understand the fabric of everyday life among Hampden-Woodberry's working-class residents during the neighborhood's industrial heyday through an examination of their domestic lives: the spatial characteristics of the houses they lived in; patterns of landscape use in their yards; and the gendered division of labor both in the workplace and at home. Secondly, we turned to the larger social community of Hampden-Woodberry and how it has changed over time: relationships between mill operatives, mill owners, and small businesspeople; the nature of historical commemorations organized by community leaders and the general topic of historical memory; and the role of churches, fraternal orders, and other community institutions in the social life of the neighborhood. Thirdly, we sought to explore the nature of class consciousness in Hampden-Woodberry: the issues that prompted workers to unionize or protest; the specific actions in which workers engaged as forms of protest, such as strikes, parades, and public meetings; and the ways in which class identity has been constructed upon understandings of race and gender in Hampden-Woodberry, understandings that have led to the virtual exclusion of non-white, non-native peoples from the community up to the present day.
While the bulk of the research design focused on the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s, we also developed a subsidiary research objective—to understand how the issues delineated above are still active in the community today, and how they have been affected by deindustrialization and gentrification. Thus, we outlined the following goals: to understand the reactions of Hampden-Woodberry's working-class population to the (slightly) greater racial and ethnic diversity that has come along with gentrification; to explore working-class adaptations to the economic changes of the past forty years; and to investigate the causes of the transmutation of historical memory in Hampden-Woodberry during this time, which resulted first in the erasure of working-class historical memory by the 1980s and then the resuscitation of working-class culture in a bowdlerized form in the 1990s.
As indicated by our project's title, the main research methodology employed by HCAP is archaeological excavation. While archaeology is generally associated with exotic locales and ancient history, urban house lots in the United States often prove to be treasure troves of information about daily life in the recent past. The domestic yards of Hampden-Woodberry are no different. Beginning in 2005, for three straight summers, project participants conducted controlled, stratigraphic excavations of five domestic sites throughout the neighborhood. Our primary workforce consisted of local youth ranging in age from thirteen to seventeen. As in much of urban Baltimore, educational opportunities in Hampden-Woodberry and surrounding neighborhoods have declined over the past several decades. The high school dropout rate in the neighborhood hovers between 23 percent and 52 percent, depending on the source and the part of Hampden-Woodberry under consideration.Footnote 26 This state of affairs is particularly striking due to the location of Johns Hopkins University literally next door, adjacent to Hampden on the east. Therefore, we have tried to use HCAP to introduce local students to the benefits of higher education and to alternative career opportunities through summer internships in archaeology. We have also tried to instill in student participants a sense of the interconnectedness of education and community prosperity and quality of living. Each high school intern was paid for thirty hours of work per week during the six-week field season. The funding came primarily from the Baltimore City Youthworks Project, a city program to introduce high school students to various career opportunities.
In all, we collected thousands of artifacts (i.e., ceramic containers and tableware, glass bottles, nails, food remains, and even toys) and recorded dozens of features (i.e., latrines, trash dumps, work areas, and flower beds or vegetable gardens) left behind by past occupants of the neighborhood. Historical research on each of the five sites has revealed that their past occupants came from a variety of social classes and occupations, including mill workers and local merchants. In participating in the excavations, our student interns learned about a variety of subjects, including history, math, geography, and soil science. We also welcomed a number of adult residents as volunteers during the excavations.
The archaeological record is sometimes notoriously difficult to interpret, and our excavation focus on domestic sites left out a number of topics that are integral to our research design. Thus, since the spring of 2005 project members have been continuously conducting research in other arenas to complement the knowledge gained from archaeological excavation. We have conducted documentary research in numerous archives in Hampden-Woodberry and the greater Baltimore region on topics such as the early development of the architectural and social landscape; work in the mills; labor history and unions; race and racism; local churches; and deindustrialization and neighborhood decline. We have also utilized oral history to collect information about Hampden-Woodberry's past. A large archive of taped oral histories collected locally in the early 1980s already exists, and we have mined this data set extensively. Additionally, during the summer of 2007 HCAP hired an intern from the Master of Applied Anthropology program at the University of Maryland, Jolene Smith, to conduct new oral histories. Smith instructed our high school interns in oral history methods, and collectively they designed interview outlines for selected older residents. She then led teams of two interns in conducting each interview. These activities have proven to be a good way of including older residents in the project who may not otherwise be able to volunteer for archaeological excavation or lab work, as well as providing connections across generations by having local teenagers interview community elders. Finally, Chidester conducted a series of ethnographic interviews with local residents during the summer of 2007. These interviews, which included both older working-class residents and newer middle-class residents, covered the general topics of community heritage and gentrification. The data from these interviews have helped us to better understand the social changes of the past twenty-five years in Hampden-Woodberry, as well as how we can tailor our project to better reach out to all community stakeholders.
In addition to hiring local youth and conducting oral history and ethnographic interviews, HCAP personnel have engaged in a number of public outreach activities in order to foster continued community participation in the project. One of the best ways to get local residents involved in our project is to get them onto the archaeological sites. People are often surprised and delighted to discover that archaeology is being done in their own neighborhood, and curious about what it is that archaeologists actually do. Therefore, during our excavation seasons in the summer we held periodic “Public Dig Days” on weekends. These events allowed individuals to visit our sites, watch archaeologists at work and ask us questions, and even recover some artifacts themselves if they wished. These events were publicized widely throughout the community. In addition, we frequently solicited volunteers for excavation and lab work at any time.
Flyer advertising one of the project's 2004 community outreach events. Courtesy of the Hampden Community Archaeology Project.
Of course, not everyone has the ability or the inclination to walk around an archaeological site, even one located on an urban lot. For this reason, we have also organized periodic public history workshops and panel talks on the history and archaeology of Hampden-Woodberry. Over the past five years these events have proven to be enormously popular, with as many as one hundred attendees at individual events in retirement homes and the Hampden Family Center. For displaced Hampdenites and other interested parties, we also have two web-based interpretive resources: a website (http://www.heritage.umd.edu/CHRSWeb/AssociatedProjects/Hampden.htm) and a blog (http://hampdenheritage.blogspot.com). On the website, we provide the research design, transcripts of oral histories, and links to articles about HCAP in the popular media. We maintain the blog primarily during the summer, posting periodic research updates (including photos of the excavations and interesting artifacts that we have unearthed) and allowing readers the opportunity to post comments, questions, and suggestions. The blog is particularly popular: Within three years of being launched, it averaged almost 150 unique visitors and over 260 page loads per month, reaching ten thousand total hits by the end of February 2008. We also attempt to maintain a presence in the local media. Gadsby and Chidester periodically submit project updates for publication in Historic Hampden Happenings, the newsletter of the HCC. In addition, articles featuring HCAP have been published in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore Messenger, and Urbanite Magazine.
Just as important as our public outreach efforts, we have consistently made efforts to build and maintain working relationships with a variety of community stakeholders. The HCC has been a steadfast supporter of our work since the beginning, helping us to secure funding and providing a point of contact for numerous community members. The local charter school, currently named Independence Local School 1, has provided us with occasional lab space in addition to several interns. The Hampden Family Center has also provided us with occasional lab space, and Falkenhan's Hardware, a long-time community landmark, has assisted us in obtaining even the most obscure tools for excavation. The public history workshops, however, have been the most important part of this aspect of the project. In addition to allowing us to interact directly with members of the general public, we have invited a number of experts on local history to participate in these events. We hope to eventually establish an autonomous local heritage committee, comprised of representatives of the various stakeholder communities, who will provide guidance and a permanent institutional presence for HCAP in the neighborhood.
While we did not conduct any excavations in 2008 or 2009, we have continued our outreach activities. Gadsby supervised university students during lab work on the recovered artifacts, and together we will use the resulting data to compose a draft technical report. This report will include the revised research design; a detailed analysis of the archaeological data and summaries of archival, oral historical, and ethnographic research; descriptions of our public activities; and an artifact catalog. As with the research design, we will make the draft report available for public comment on the HCAP website before we submit a final version to the Maryland Historical Trust and other local repositories.
In addition to the technical report, we have continued to hold periodic public history workshops on such topics as oral history and material culture in the neighborhood. We will also collaborate with select community participants to create a fifteen-page booklet summarizing our research for a public audience. This booklet will be distributed to local merchants, schools, the Hampden branch of the city library, and the community recreation center. While we are completing these documents, we will also work with local students to construct a portable exhibit highlighting key archaeological discoveries. This exhibit will be displayed in prominent public spaces around the neighborhood, such as the library, the Family Center, and the recreation center. Finally, we are in the initial stages of planning a more permanent local heritage museum in collaboration with the HCC.
Evaluating Three Years of Public Archaeology in Hampden-Woodberry
After five years of doing collaborative archaeology and history in Hampden-Woodberry, it is time to take stock of what we have accomplished. In addition to conducting the only active program of archaeological research in Baltimore since the 1980s (in itself an important accomplishment in this archaeologically rich but rapidly redeveloping city), we have incorporated community stakeholders into the research design process; involved local residents in the conduct of the research; successfully carried out a number of public outreach projects; and generated positive city-wide media coverage for the community. At the same time, we have encountered a number of obstacles to achieving our goals, some of which have proven more intractable than others. We would like to highlight here both what we consider to be our signal successes as well as those areas in which we still have much work to do.
One of our most important accomplishments to date has been getting local teenagers involved in the research. Many youth in Hampden-Woodberry and surrounding neighborhoods come from economically and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds.Footnote 27 With local industry moribund, most teenagers have a working life of low-paying service-sector jobs to look forward to. While we have our reservations about a city agency devoted to introducing teenagers to the world of work by assigning them to temporary minimum-wage jobs, we nevertheless feel that we have been able to provide our interns with a glimpse of a different kind of future, one in which education and the ability to think critically are important assets. Not a single one of our interns over three years knew anything about archaeology or archaeologists before they started working with us, and many had clear educational deficiencies. While we may not have turned any of them into future archaeologists, we do believe that they came to understand archaeology and the importance of local heritage over the course of each six-week field season. Perhaps more importantly, they came to appreciate the fact that different kinds of career options existed beyond fast food and professional sports.
Just as importantly, we are proud of our success in building lasting relationships with various community stakeholder groups. The most productive collaboration we have developed is with the HCC. We have collaborated with the community council in finding youth interns, writing grant proposals, organizing public history workshops, and gaining community support, both material and otherwise. Currently, as previously mentioned, we are in the early stages of planning a local heritage museum in collaboration with the HCC.
Another stakeholder group with which we have built a productive relationship is local landowners. We have now conducted excavations on five domestic lots around Hampden-Woodberry; each time, we depended on the willingness of the owners to let us dig up their property. Several of the sites were offered to us, while for the others we sought out the landowners. In both situations, however, the goodwill of the landowners has been paramount in the success of our research agenda. In addition to landowners and the HCC, we have developed relationships with other community stakeholder groups to a lesser extent. These groups include local merchants and community institutions such as the Hampden Family Center.
While we are proud of our accomplishments, we have learned just as much (if not more) about making academic research relevant to local communities from the obstacles we have faced. These include conveying the idea of collaboration to local communities; developing a relationship with a reluctant working-class community; initiating a dialogue about class in a community riven by class conflict; and overcoming the residues of racism in a predominantly white community.
To begin with, scholars are not the only people who sometimes have difficulty understanding the concept of collaboration. Too often, community members assume that they have nothing to offer a project such as HCAP. We were vividly reminded of this after participating in a panel discussion on local history at a retirement home in June 2005. In letters thanking us for our participation, the program coordinator wrote that we “have a lot to offer the people of Hampden about their past,”Footnote 28 clearly reflecting an expectation of the long-established hierarchical relationship between scholars and the communities they study. Since this wake-up call, we have redoubled our efforts to promote the idea of collaborative research on the HCAP blog and at our public history workshops.
Another major issue we've had to deal with has been the insularity of the working-class community within Hampden-Woodberry. As already discussed, the exclusion of local working-class residents from the discourse of neighborhood revitalization (and subsequently, many of its benefits) has led this portion of the community to withdraw from the public sphere. With a few exceptions, these residents do not generally patronize the shops and restaurants on the main shopping strip, nor do they participate in the HCC and its various activities in large numbers. Even when we have targeted our advertisements for various outreach and collaboration activities, the response has been considerably less than we desired. This may be due in part, of course, to a general perception that archaeology and history are middle-class pursuits, incapable of addressing or irrelevant to the myriad issues confronting the contemporary working class in urban America. It remains for us to convincingly communicate the value of history and its potential to contribute to transformative social action in the present.
Just as we have had difficulty engaging the local working class in our project, we have also run into obstacles with the newer middle class. While generally more interested in the idea of an archaeological research project in their own backyards (both literally and figuratively), middle-class residents of Hampden-Woodberry are often reluctant to think critically about issues of class inequality. There are many possible reasons for this: the enduring myth that the United States is a class-less society; negative reactions to feeling personally implicated in the creation or perpetuation of inequality; and pure naïveté, to name just a few. For instance, during the summer of 2007 Chidester interviewed one young, middle-class recent out-of-state transplant who expressed her disbelief that working-class residents feel that there is nothing to do in Hampden-Woodberry anymore. Another interviewee who has lived in Hampden for over two decades strenuously objected to Chidester's use of the term gentrification, arguing that by labeling mere home improvement as gentrification, he was inviting actual gentrification by corporate developers and upper-class elites.Footnote 29
Unfortunately, these sentiments reflect the fact that the social reality of class is very poorly understood in the contemporary United States. Popular discourse on the subject is usually limited by the widespread misconception that the success of organized labor in the decades immediately following the Second World War lifted virtually all workers into the middle class.Footnote 30 In Hampden-Woodberry, it is easy for newcomers to assume that class inequality is part of the neighborhood's past but not its present. With HonFest publicly “celebrating” a version of working-class culture that never really existed here and the textile mills receding ever further into the past, the everyday realities of working-class existence have become invisible to those who do not share in them. The process of bringing this issue back into the public dialogue has been long and difficult, but it is a goal to which HCAP remains dedicated.
Finally, we have attempted to address the issue of racism through HCAP. Across the United States, local activists and community organizers have recognized that the racial and territorial aspects of community identity can be major obstacles to achieving social justice since the famous Chicago radical Saul Alinsky ran into this problem in the 1950s.Footnote 31 Hampden-Woodberry has long had a citywide reputation for virulent racism. One local historian has claimed that an unspoken agreement existed between mill owners and workers in the late nineteenth century by which the owners would agree not to hire “outsiders” (African-Americans and immigrants) as long as the workers would refrain from joining unions or striking.Footnote 32 Hampden-Woodberry was not affected by the predatory real estate practice of blockbusting in the 1960s and 1970s, by which many white, working-class neighborhoods in Baltimore and other US cities underwent virtually complete racial turnover in a matter of just a few years.Footnote 33 As recently as 1979 the local Ku Klux Klan was still considered a “social club,” and in 1988 local residents wishing to maintain racial homogeneity forced an African-American family out of the neighborhood. Newspaper features focusing on racism in Hampden-Woodberry were common throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even the many changes wrought by gentrification have done little to alter the racial makeup of the community, which was calculated to be over 90 percent Caucasian in the 2000 federal census. This legacy came up as a topic of concern in the initial workshops we held in the fall of 2004, and thus race and racism were incorporated into the archaeological research design.Footnote 34
We were reminded of the fact that race is still very much an issue in contemporary Hampden-Woodberry following the 2006 field season, however, when a representative of an important community stakeholder group expressed concern that we were not employing neighborhood youths as interns. In fact, all of our interns that summer were from Hampden-Woodberry or adjacent neighborhoods—but all of them were African-American. This was dramatic evidence that whiteness remains a vital component of community identity. Our subsequent decision to involve our interns in the collection of oral histories in 2007 was part of a conscious effort to raise awareness of growing local diversity, and we will continue to address issues of race and racism in our workshops, on the blog, and in other outreach activities and products.
Conclusion
When we began HCAP in 2004, we were idealistic young graduate students who believed in the power of academic-community collaboration to produce critical knowledge about both the past and the present and to contribute to positive social change. We still believe in the social value of collaborative scholarship, but over the past few years we have learned some valuable lessons about realizing its potential. The traditional working-class population and the newer middle-class residents of Hampden-Woodberry rarely engage with each other substantively, a state of affairs that provided the original impetus for HCAP. Finding ways to bring together these two distinct communities that inhabit the same neighborhood in a productive dialogue has been much more difficult than we anticipated. In part, this has been because we have had to convince community stakeholders that the past is relevant to the present and future and that archaeology and history are potentially valuable tools for promoting democratic change on the local level. The sensitive nature of racial and class-based inequality in a neighborhood that has long been characterized by both has only made the job harder.
Change does not occur overnight, however, especially when that change runs counter to 150 years of history and tradition. In 1988, at the end of a half-century of economic decline and just before gentrification took hold in Hampden-Woodberry, local historian Bill Harvey mused about the importance of historical memory for communities such as his own:
[W]e can no longer think of memory as a simple personal matter. And this, I think, is one of the most important reasons for us to study history. In doing so, we begin to see that nothing is a simple personal or individual matter. Instead, we are shaped by our circumstances as much as we shape our own lives. Our successes and failures are part of the successes and failures of the human race. That realization may help us to see our lives more clearly, and see the road to democratic change (emphasis in original).Footnote 35
We believe that by working with neighborhood residents and organizations to revive and maintain valuable historical memories, we have made important contributions to the local revitalization discourse. As long as they will have us, we will continue to work with local stakeholders to bridge the two communities in Hampden-Woodberry, trying to make the neighborhood a model of democratic, culturally sensitive, and socially responsible urban regeneration.
