Mount Pleasant c. 1750s

After 1723, Ambrose Madison had enslaved laborers build Mount Pleasant, and in 1732 he moved his family there from Virginia's Tidewater before dying unexpectedly within months; court records show that three enslaved people were tried and convicted for poisoning him. His widow, Francis Madison, remained to raise their children and managed the plantation and the labor of its 30 to 40 enslaved workers. The first Madison home at Mount Pleasant, among the earliest in this part of Virginia, was a small 26 by 24 foot structure with a stone-lined cellar dug by enslaved workers for storage. James Madison, Sr. was nine when the family arrived, married Nelly Conway in 1749, and brought her to Mount Pleasant, where they had children and the plantation prospered. By 1765 the family had moved to the new Montpelier house and demolished the old home, and by 1800 all the original buildings were gone except the Madison Family Cemetery. Archaeological remains, including fragments of wine bottles bearing the initials of James Madison, Sr. from the kitchen cellar and ceramics from the separate kitchen building later occupied by an enslaved family, illuminate the household, the plantation's refined status, and the lives of the enslaved people whose quarters and possessions were consumed when the kitchen burned around 1800.

Virginia · United States