Today we started the three projects we will be working on for the rest of the trip. I ended up deciding to work on the restoration project. That involved restoring a small building on the property of the overseer's house. The overseer's house is where John Tharp's illegitimate son lived and watched over the slave workers. The main house has since been restored. However, Good Hope had just started to restore this building when we arrived at the plantation. It is important to restore historic building such as these so that we preserve our history and architecture for those who come after us. It also helps us visualize the architecture being used at the time.
We believe that this building was used as a kitchen or a laundry room. We think this because a channel had been carved into the exterior limestone to allow for water to flow through. This would function similar to a water faucet. Because the buildings foundation was so deteriorated, it had actually caused the whole building to shift. This meant that our first objective was to fix the foundation. However, before we could do this we needed to take down the walls. This involved taking each limestone brick down one by one and placing them in the yard in the same order they came from the wall. This is to ensure that the exterior wall remains the same before and after the restoration. Because the limestone bricks were very heavy, but also very brittle, we would push each brick off one by one onto a bed of tires so that they would not chip. The weight of the limestone also caused us to have to roll each piece into place. This process naturally was very time consuming, and took us the whole day to finish. After completing my first day on the restoration, I got a really good look into what historical restoration entails. Hopefully when the restoration is finished, it will help future visitors visualize what Good Hope plantation actually looked like in the 18th century.
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