“No Perfect Archive” : Recovering Histories of Enslaved People at Abingdon Plantation

This essay focuses on the author’s attempt to recover a lost history. More accurately, it initiates the telling of a previously unrecorded history, of enslaved life at Abingdon Plantation in Arlington, Virginia. Abingdon is a particularly good site to illustrate the possibilities and limitations of recovering histories of sites that have not been well documented. This essay contextualizes archeological reports of the site in the relevant secondary literature. It also uses shards of evidence in local histories, inventories, and wills, and archival papers examining plantation life along the Potomac River, including at Mount Vernon and Arlington House. It explores what can be known, what can be reasonably inferred, what was likely, and what helps us situate slavery in our understanding of Abingdon Plantation, ultimately filling in this history as a presence, however constructed, rather than a loss or an absence.