There it was, in the cellar of Mount Vernon, a relic of the last decades of colonial America: the top of a glass bottle, standing vertically and holding some kind of liquid. The contents suggested the bottle was intact, unlike the fragments commonly found on the estate.
Archaeologists working delicately under the glow of bright lights below George Washington’s Virginia mansion last fall had discovered the first of 35 glass bottles in the cellar’s storage pits. Most were intact and contained perfectly preserved fruits, including cherries and berries. Experts say the bottles are likely a link to the enslaved people who worked there.
“That was a pretty big deal for us,” said Jason Boroughs, the principal archaeologist at Mount Vernon. “That’s incredibly rare to find a whole bottle, but much less one that’s still holding something.”
The archaeologists began digging up the cellar last year as part of a $40 million revitalization project to preserve the estate, Dr. Boroughs said.
After the archaeologists unearthed the first bottle, they placed a bucket on top of it for protection, Dr. Boroughs said. It wasn’t until March that archaeologists returned their attention to the bottle and quickly found a second.
The two bottles contained whole cherries, including cherry parts, pits and stems, Dr. Boroughs said. The bottle count swelled with the discovery of more storage areas, totaling 35 glass bottles in all, 29 of them whole and preserving fruit. Some bottles smelled faintly of cherry blossoms. Others had a nondescript fruity scent, possibly containing gooseberries or currants.
“The fact that they still have an aroma is one of the things that’s astonishing,” he said.
The cherries and berries were most likely headed for the Washingtons’ table, but they could have also been eaten straight out of the bottle, Dr. Boroughs said. (Archaeologists did not taste-test the centuries-old fruits, he said.)
Researchers removed and refrigerated the bottles’ contents until they could undergo scientific analysis. The bottles, which Dr. Boroughs said were handmade and probably European, are drying out in the estate’s archaeology lab and will be sent out for conservation, Mount Vernon said in a news release.
Mount Vernon is working with the Agricultural Research Service, part of the U.S. Agriculture Department, to process the contents. Experts are examining the pits to determine if any are viable for germination.
The discovery could reveal more about the network of enslaved people that kept the estate running.
Washington inherited Mount Vernon in 1761. Hundreds of men, women and children in bondage belonging to him and his wife, Martha Washington, lived there over the years.
Initial findings show that the fruit was neatly cut using shears, allowing the trees to remain productive while protecting the cherries, Dr. Boroughs said. The fruit is also extremely clean, demonstrating the highly skilled process that went into picking, packing and storing it.
The storage pits were probably used between the 1750s and 1770s, until they were paved over by brick flooring during the home’s expansion. At the time, an enslaved woman named Doll, who was brought to Mount Vernon by Martha Washington in 1759, was the family’s main cook, Dr. Boroughs said. Based on letters from Mrs. Washington to her niece in the late 1790s, it’s likely that Doll either prepared the bottles herself or had another enslaved person do it, Dr. Boroughs said.
“From tree to table, that’s all done by the enslaved” people at Mount Vernon, Dr. Boroughs said.
Dennis Pogue, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland who was vice president for preservation at Mount Vernon, said that the discovery illuminated the kind of daily household activity that historians know happened but went unrecorded. It also raises questions about Doll and why the bottles were left behind.
“How much more of that we are going to be able to figure out from where we sit is a big challenge,” he said.
Cheyney McKnight, a historian and interpreter who owns Not Your Momma’s History and has depicted enslaved and free cooks in popular videos, said the bottles were a lasting reminder of the unending daily labor of enslaved people and their ingenuity.
“I hope this is showing the lives of the people who made it possible for our first president to actually have the time to go forth and be the first president, to be General George Washington,” Ms. McKnight said.