Day 8: New Friends and New Foundations - Josey

Today, I went with a group of students to restoration for the second time this week. We were reconstructing an old house, which required quite a bit of work including moving stones, and putting mortar in between the stones to keep them in place. The only thing that was different was we had two students from William Knibb Memorial High School who came to work on the project with us. When they arrived we were all a little nervous to meet them, but it was still exciting to get to know them and work together with people our age living in Jamaica. While going around to introduce ourselves, we noticed that they used different names for the grades they were in which gave us a new perspective on how things that seem so simple to us can be so completely different in international countries. After this, we told them about what we would be doing and the goal for this site over the course of this trip. We gave them a tour of Good Hope Plantation and gave a brief history of the different areas and the work done on the plantation, then we headed back to the site to start construction for the day.

Working on something like this you realize how important the tiniest details are. Every block has to be put in in a perfectly straight line, exactly level, or else you have to lift it back off, fix it, then go back over it again. It is a lot of work. The work we mostly did would be putting the mortar in between the stones to make sure they stayed in place. We did this along with the other students. Once we started to talk to them a little more it was interesting to learn about all the sports and games they play, for example, in school how it is popular to run track and field, play basketball, or play netball. It seems like for a lot of things we were all pretty similar, like how we all listened to similar types of music, or enjoyed playing hide-and-go-seek tag during lunch. Then there were other things that were different like the movies we watched or even the way we dress, which to us often seems like just a minor detail. Looking back, it was such a great experience getting to work with people our age, and getting to learn about the difference in the things we are so used to at home and the way things work here in Falmouth.

Mortar, Mortar, and More Mortar- Gabe

Today, I worked in the restoration group. As I had already spent a day in it, I expected today to be fairly similar. I was wrong. First off, the last time I was there, we were just tearing things down. This time around, we were building up. As you could probably tell from the title, we mainly worked in the mortar department. This included anything from shoveling mortar into a bucket to setting it down as a bed for the next stone to be put on using trowels. However, similarly to last time, it wasn't light work. It wasn't as physically painful as last time, when we had to move and carry large stones, but it still wasn't easy by any means. Shoveling the mortar required strength along with carrying buckets full of it. On the building itself, we mainly used it by setting mortar beds for the stones and then proceeding to adding support to the stones. As you can imagine, it had to be perfect and had to be level so that the next course, or layer, of stones would be even and straight. 

One thing that was different from last time was how much work we had to do. We had a lot to do the first time around, when we helped in just about every aspect of the destruction of the building, but this time, we helped when we could but we also spent a lot of time sitting down and observing. You might think that we were disappointed in a way, but that wasn't really the case because we understood why they wanted to take matters into their own hands. They do this for a living and have for years and maybe even decades, and we're high school students, and the building had to be just about perfect so that it can be restored accurately. This doesn't mean that they just ignored us, because, again, we really did help them throughout the day with the transportation and use of mortar, which as I said before, wasn't easy work. Overall, it was a slightly less active workday than the last time I worked in Restoration, but our work was still very meaningful and important. 

Day 4: A Blast From the Past - Sage

     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.