Gathering at the Foundation

Saturday, April 6 at 11:00 - 11:45 on W&L's Back Campus

Please join students in W&L's Collective Memory class for a gathering to mark restoration of "The Foundation," the remains of a stone building near "The Ruins" on the Liberty Hall campus.

View the recording of the Gathering at the Foundation event. 

Timeline

  • Ca. 17,000 years ago to the present: This land is "part of the Monascane, the ancestral homeland of the Eastern Siouan (Yesą́) people ... Yesą́ peoples and [their] kin tribes have lived on these lands since time immemorial, and [they] live here now as the Monacan Indian Nation, the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, the Saponi Nation of Ohio; the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe, the Sappony Tribe, and as individuals and families within numerous other tribes and descendant communities." https://my.wlu.edu/provosts-office/curricular-resources/living-lab The spring adjacent to the Foundation has always been an important part of the landscape; as the Monacan say, "Water is life."

  • Ca. 1793-1803: Liberty Hall Academy stone structures. The "Foundation" is the surviving part of the Steward's House, where students took their meals. The "Ruins" are remains of the Liberty Hall Academy House, where students studied and slept. The spring was a key consideration in trustees' siting of the buildings.

  • Ca. 1803-1860s: the plantation era. When the Academy House burned in 1803 and the institution moved to its current location, the former Steward's House became part of a plantation. Enslaved people worked and lived in the building: cooking, laundering, blacksmithing,

Stone foundation being excavated archaeologically.

  • Ca. 1970s: W&L Archaeology excavated sites on the Liberty Hall campus, including the Steward's House

  • Ca. 2014 - present continued archaeological testing of the landscape.

  • Ca. 2023-2024: W&L restored the Steward's House to its appearance in the 1970s.

  • Here forward, "The Foundation" joins "The Ruins" and the spring in representing and interpreting the historic Liberty Hall campus. With its layered history, the site is also a place of broad, varied remembrance, of reflection, and of education as an outdoor classroom for disciplines across the curriculum.

Comments? Please contact a member of the Collective Memory class
or Prof. Alison Bell bella@wlu.edu

The Foundation Restoration Nearly Complete