Diamonds or Dungeons: Interpretations of Luxury and Slavery at the Chief Vann House Historic Site

This talk explores material artifacts that open discrete interpretive windows into the lived realities of a Cherokee plantation once known as Diamond Hill.  Cherokee trader and political leader, James Vann, established Diamond Hill at the turn of the nineteenth century in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His son, Joseph Vann replaced his father’s wood home with a formal, elaborate structure fashioned of handsome red bricks made by enslaved blacks who were considered part of the estate, is now a house museum in Georgia surrounded by award-winning gardens.

The Vann House and grounds have been the site of several limited (and sometimes aborted) archaeological investigations that have revealed facets of the cultural lives of Cherokee and white residents and, together with an examination of extant missionary records, have spurred interpretive framings of the home’s importance for public audiences. European dishware discovered on the site in the 1950s helped to establish the notion, held for decades since, that the mixed-race Cherokee-Scottish Vann family lived like wealthy white southern planters.  “Diamonds,” large quartz crystals uncovered beneath the soil in recent decades, have lent material and symbolic meaning to the mysterious name for the estate favored by James Vann.  The cellar of the home may have been used as a dungeon to imprison recalcitrant slaves. But while blacks in bondage made up the largest population on the grounds, slave quarters remain an elusive physical feature there. None of these structures still exist, and even their foundations have escaped detection by archaeologists, leaving site staff and historians with vague documentary references and only a conjectural map of the buildings. This presentation explores how found artifacts can both color and occlude historical interpretations for public audiences, as well as how scholars, teachers and students of history can imagine into being that which remains submerged.