A tree that dates back to the 1850s and stood on James Madison’s Montpelier estate in Virginia during slavery, the Civil War and Jim Crow is now a handcrafted table. And it’s up for auction.
The money from the sale will help pay for the archaeological investigation at a large burial ground that is the final resting place of more than 250 enslaved people at the Montpelier plantation, said Rev. Larry Walker, president of the Montpelier Descendants Committee (MDC), which represents relatives of former enslaved people at the estate.
“We’re going to do some excavations there,” he said. “We want to clear the site as much as possible and get down to the very top of the grave shafts and that will give us a clearer idea of exactly where the bodies are.”
The Descendants Committee is teaming up with the estate’s management board, The Montpelier Foundation (TMF), to locate the graves.
The starting auction bid for the table is set at $5,000. Auctioning is currently underway and ends on Dec. 3. The group said it hopes to fetch at least $10,000 for the table.
MDC said it asked an area artisan to hand-craft the table from a nearly 175-year-old Cedar of Lebanon that fell on the estate back in 2019.
This type of cedar is commonly called a “witness tree,” Walker said.
“It has witness decades of history that have taken place on James Madison’s historic land,” he said.
The group said it selected a table for auction because formerly enslaved people at the plantation were not recognized for their contributions at the estate.
“This is not just a table. It is a table that is open to all,” Walker said. “This could be a great conference or a Thanksgiving table. A table that as people sit around it, they remember the lives of people who made contributions to America. It’s very special.”
Earlier this year, MDC agreed to a multiyear memorialization project with TMF to honor Montpelier’s enslaved community.
“The two groups received a $5.8 million grant from the Mellon Foundation for the memorialization project, and kicked off the endeavor during a celebration late this summer, which included panel discussions, a libation ceremony and an archaeological tour of artifacts uncovered at the enslaved community’s burial site.”
MDC is also planning to build a memorial near the gravesite but determining the boundaries of the gravesite is key.
“We don’t want to build a memorial structure on top of the graves of our ancestors,” Walker said. “So, the work that the archaeologists are doing is important.”
To place a bid for the table auction, visit the auction page.
