Amanda Strickland ’09 at the U.S. Army Women’s Museum, where she is an archivist.

It’s only been four years since Amanda Strickland graduated from Sweet Briar — thanks in part to scholarships made possible by alumnae donations. Now, the Class of 2009 grad is doing her part to ensure future Sweet Briar women can enjoy the same opportunities.

“I give to SBC because if an alumna hadn’t given when she could, my experiences and degrees would not be possible,” says Strickland, who double-majored in archaeology and history with a minor in anthropology.

“My mother — being a single mom at the time — and I were so very thankful for the donations of alumnae, and I wanted to be able to give another deserving applicant a chance to learn at Sweet Briar.”

Born in Louisiana, Strickland grew up as a Navy “brat” in Virginia, Missouri, California and Italy, but lately, Virginia has become her home base. The Chester resident now works as an archivist at the U.S. Army Women’s Museum at Fort Lee, where she is in charge of 1.5 million primary documents pertaining to women in the military from World War I to the present.

“I complete research requests, accession new collections into the archives, participate in women’s history events, conserve documentation, and collect historical documentation as it is happening,” she says.

Amanda Strickland shows a visitor the museum’s archives during Black History Month.

“It is a great time to be in [this] field with the rescinding of the combat exclusion policy and all fields now being open to women in the Army.”

Museums have always fascinated Strickland, who worked at the Sweet Briar Museum for four years and completed an archaeology internship at Poplar Forest while at Sweet Briar.

“I graduated and immediately began volunteering at multiple historic homes and museums,” she remembers.

To gain experience, Strickland even took a job as a security guard in a museum and eventually became an Army contractor at the Casemate Museum at Fort Monroe, where she worked as an assistant collections manager.

“When the museum’s holdings moved because the Army left, I found a new home at the U.S. Army Women’s Museum.”

Living in Virginia allows Strickland to keep in touch with alumnae in the region, and she returns to campus often.

“Whenever I am anywhere near the area I at least do a drive-by; my boyfriend even jokes about it,” she says. “My next planned drive-by is this spring when my friends and I do the brew trail.”

Strickland treasures many things about her time at Sweet Briar — from lunch picnics in the dell to all-nighters in Benedict lab to the joy she shares with fellow alumnae when they come back to campus. She also has fond memories of professors — especially of John Ashbrook and Kate Chavigny, who teach history at Sweet Briar.

“Professor Ashbrook taught me that I cannot write a paper,” she jokes. “But he always pushed his students to become better historians.”

Chavigny, she adds, “was a joy to learn from and the topics she taught fascinated me.”

While at Sweet Briar, Strickland was a member of Chung Mungs, Taps ‘n’ Toes and Sweet Tones and served as InterClub Council tap club chair. She also worked in the alumnae office all four years, a job that attuned her to the special ties many alumnae develop with their alma mater. Giving back is one way to strengthen that bond, says Strickland, who was a Bell Tower Society donor in 2011 and continues to give what she can.

“I try to tell [other alumnae] how important it is for the future of Sweet Briar,” she explains. “Also, it is reassuring at times like these to know that you can designate where you want your money to go and know that it is going to a good place.”

Still a young professional in her field, Strickland has big career plans.

“I would like to get into the government system at an Army museum, complete my master’s, and eventually become a director of a museum,” she says. “My dream since I was a little girl was to work for the Smithsonian.”

In the meantime, Strickland is taking baby steps: She continues to volunteer at the Casemate Museum and tries to visit every museum in the area.

“There are so many in Richmond, but I am slowly ticking them off my list,” she says. “I love learning new things about women’s history, too. Few know the history, so I am full of ‘fun facts’ for anyone who wants to listen.”

— Janika Carey

Sarah O’Brien ’13 catalogs old farm tools from the plantation and dairy.

Sweet Briar College’s agrarian past is the focus of the upcoming exhibition “ ‘I have lately bought me a Plantation’: A Brief Survey of Farming and Land Use at Sweet Briar,” which opens at 1 p.m. Thursday, March 21, in Whitley Gallery at Sweet Briar Museum. It will be on view through March 2014.

The result of a practicum project undertaken by senior Sarah O’Brien, the exhibition provides a brief overview of Sweet Briar’s farming history, from the days of the Fletchers, who founded the College, to the later 20th century, when the dairy was still in operation. O’Brien, a history major, says her interest in the subject was not just academic.

A milk bottle from the old dairy farm at Sweet Briar.

“I was born and raised on a farm, so I wanted to know the history of farming at Sweet Briar before it became a college,” she said, adding that it was her intention to create a narrative through which visitors can access the College’s past. The hardest part, she said, was deciding which items to include.

The final selection features an eclectic mix of artifacts, such as early 19th-century letters in which Elijah Fletcher wrote to his brother about farming; ceramic drainage tiles from the old tilled fields (courtesy of the archaeology lab); old farm tools; documents and photos related to the College’s early days farming for profit; and milk bottles, milk cans and signage from the era of the dairy.

Museum hours during the academic year are 1 to 4 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. For more information, contact Karol Lawson at klawson@sbc.edu or (434) 381-6248.

Current research suggests that the cabin was built during the antebellum period to house enslaved laborers, who lived in dozens of similar dwellings on the Sweet Briar Plantation. This cabin, located behind Sweet Briar House, is the only one that survives.

Sweet Briar’s 19th-century cabin in 1927

Indiana Fletcher Williams’ overseer, Logan Anderson, likely lived in it during the 1880s. When the College was founded in 1901, Sterling Jones Sr. and his family resided in the cabin until the mid-1920s. Following that period, the cabin was used to house the alumnae office, a theater classroom, a coffee shop, a chapel and a farm tool equipment museum. It has been in continuous use for about 170 years.

In 2012, the College was awarded a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities grant to re-interpret the complex history of this building and to create an exhibition that highlights the history of African Americans at Sweet Briar. For now, the historic structure is open to the public on the following days:

November:
Friday, Nov. 9: 1-5 p.m.
Tuesday, Nov. 13: 10:30 a.m.-1:15 p.m.
Thursday, Nov. 15: 10 a.m.-noon
Tuesday, Nov. 27: 10:30 a.m.-1:15 p.m.
Thursday, Nov. 29: 10 a.m.-noon
Friday, Nov. 30: 1-5 p.m.

December:
Tuesday, Dec. 4: 10:30 a.m.-1:15 p.m.
Friday, Dec. 7: 1-5 p.m.

Hours are weather-dependent. In case of freezing conditions, please check the cabin tours website at tusculum.sbc.edu/africanamericans.

For more information about the cabin’s history, contact Lynn Rainville, director of the Tusculum Institute, at (434) 381-6432 or lrainville@sbc.edu, or visit the institute’s website at tusculum.sbc.edu.

When Tusculum’s owner sold the property in 2006, Sweet Briar obtained funding to deconstruct and inventory the timber-frame house to preserve the materials. The house is seen here circa 1960s.

Cynthia Wilson Ottaway ’57 has committed $500,000, to be apportioned over the next decade, to establish the Ottaway Endowed Fund in support of the Tusculum Institute. Annual contributions will be split between programming costs and building an endowment to fund Tusculum’s core mission of environmentally sustainable historic preservation and education over the long term.

Ottaway, who has previously made donations to the College for historical preservation, says she is motivated by her love for history and the heritage that old buildings represent.

The Tusculum Institute is named for the childhood home of Maria Crawford Fletcher, mother of Sweet Briar founder Indiana Fletcher Williams. The institute’s mission — and the fact that many of the 18th-century home’s architectural elements are being preserved — is deeply appealing to Ottaway. If she could rebuild the house to its original form, she would, she says.

The house stood on the site of the former Tusculum Plantation, just north of Sweet Briar. When the owner sold the property in 2006, Sweet Briar obtained funding to deconstruct and inventory the timber-frame house to preserve the materials. Although plans for the institute originally included reconstruction of the building, its focus has shifted to academic and educational programming; reconstruction has been indefinitely postponed.

Ottaway’s father was from Virginia and growing up, she spent a lot of time in the state. She remembers visiting Williamsburg and watching the archaeologists dig. Later, she took her own children there and to the homes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and others.

“If I can find a project that replicates that, I’m all for it,” she says. “I have an imagination. I can go through those houses in Williamsburg and just feel like I’m back in the seventeen hundreds.”

Ottaway recognizes the College has many needs, but she’s long appreciated its efforts to preserve its heritage by maintaining Sweet Briar House, the slave cabin and other structures, or reusing buildings such as the train station.

“I think alumnae tend to want to support, and rightfully so, professors and classes. But somebody has to support the history of the College and that’s where I come in.”

Ottaway views the Tusculum Institute as an “excellent instrument” to pass on to younger generations the value of preserving historical buildings and places in an environmentally sustainable way. The institute is committed to the idea that old can be made new again, saving resources and honoring the rich historical legacy of the region.

“I have great confidence in the fact that the institute is in good hands,” Ottaway said.

Two of those hands belong to Lynn Rainville, the founding director of the institute. Rainville, who has a doctorate in anthropology and archaeology, has done extensive research on the history of Sweet Briar Plantation, especially its enslaved families and their descendents.

As director, she works closely with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, architectural historians, preservationists and other professionals on community outreach to those interested in saving historical structures, as well as teacher development and school programs.

“The Tusculum Institute is very fortunate to receive Ms. Ottaway’s support,” Rainville said. “Her generous gift will enable us to host years of programming to support the College’s mission while researching and preserving historic places on the Sweet Briar campus and beyond.”

Contact: Jennifer McManamay

The laboratory is expected to be fully operational by the end of January, although work has already begun to process materials from an ongoing Hurt & Proffitt project.

Archaeologist Randy Lichtenberger is H&P’s director of cultural resources. He said the new lab complements the cultural resource management, or CRM, services the company already offers for clients, whether they are meeting regulatory requirements to investigate their project’s impact on historic properties or conducting an investigation solely for research purposes.

“The Sweet Briar lab is an essential component of our archaeological services. It allows us to offer a complete range of those services to our clients,” Lichtenberger said, noting that with archaeologists Keith Adams and Perry Tourtellotte directing its operation, it will be led by highly qualified and experienced professionals.

In addition to cleaning, labeling and cataloging artifacts, the lab will coordinate with consultants in specialized subfields such as conservation and faunal or macro-botanical analysis when required.

Two rooms in Gray Hall, home to the College’s archaeology program, are being renovated and equipped to accommodate the new lab. Adams and Tourtellotte, both adjunct instructors at Sweet Briar, will supervise paid student employees who will do much of the work.

“Perry and I will direct the lab and train students in cultural resource management, artifact processing, curation and analysis — all hands-on skills training for students in archaeology or arts management,” Adams said. “Depending on students’ background and interest, we could employ anthropology, art history, history and classics majors.”

Adams also is hoping a new one-credit course on archaeology lab management will be approved to be taught with SBC’s archaeology field course beginning next fall. “In that case the lab will be used as a full-fledged classroom teaching environment,” he said.

H&P’s staff archaeologists and architectural historians are experienced in helping public and private clients meet complex regulatory requirements in projects ranging from small developments to interstate transmission lines. Lichtenberger said each one meets or exceeds Department of the Interior requirements for professional qualifications. And they’re experts in developing CRM plans as the most cost-effective way to balance development with the preservation of significant cultural resources.

They also have worked with private preservationists and museums, including the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest.

“In fact, all of our cultural resources personnel are actively involved in historical societies, professional associations and personal research projects,” Lichtenberger said, noting that among his colleagues, history is as much a passion as a job.

Hurt & Proffitt’s complete company portfolio includes environmental engineering, geotechnical services, land development, and construction testing and inspection. Employee-owned since 1996, it is one of the largest civil engineering firms in Central Virginia and has offices in Norfolk and Wytheville.

Beyond the new lab, the collaboration between Hurt & Proffitt and the College offers great potential for Sweet Briar students. Those with appropriate excavation experience will be given priority for paid summer internships or employment as archaeological field technicians for the company. But as the relationship matures, both parties envision opportunities extending to students in the engineering, business, environmental studies and other programs.

“The opportunities created by this collaboration have been terrific” said Bif Johnson, Hurt & Proffitt’s chief executive officer and president. “Sweet Briar students get exposure to real-world projects, the College gets a well-equipped lab, Hurt & Proffitt is able to offer an entirely new service, and our clients get high-quality services offered locally.”

Sweet Briar President Jo Ellen Parker agrees the new lab is a plus all the way around. “It is good for education, good for business and good for our community,” she said. “Sweet Briar is very proud to be partnering with local business to create value. While providing a valuable service to Hurt & Proffitt, our students will gain hands-on experience — and show why archaeology matters outside the academy.”

It’s not every day a college professor gets an e-mail from the author of one of his assigned texts offering to speak to his class. But that’s what happened to Sweet Briar archaeologist Keith Adams.

Ethnographer Sylvia Wing Önder wanted to know if he was the one who ordered 15 copies of her book, “We Have No Microbes Here: Healing Practices in a Turkish Black Sea Village.” He had indeed made it required reading for his 200-level anthropology course, “Peoples and Cultures of the Mediterranean,” and he was delighted for the opportunity to bring the author into the classroom.

Thanks to technology, there were no obstacles to doing just that — and at no cost to the College. The informal question and answer session took place via teleconference using Skype. Students gathered around a camera in the Benedict computer lab while Önder joined them on screen from her Georgetown University office. Technology can’t fix everything, though, and she apologized for logging on a minute or two late — she was tied up in D.C. traffic.

Önder described for the class some of her experiences as a woman researcher — a status that gave her an advantage in the study of rural Turkish women’s lives beginning with the family and extending to the social networks in the village and beyond.

Because Önder’s husband is from the village she studied, she lived among them and enjoyed unusual access for her research to both the women and men. The students were able to ask how being related by marriage to her subjects helped or hindered her work. Such exchanges were among the reasons Adams so appreciated the videoconferencing opportunity.

“There was a personal sense of what it’s like to do field work,” he said, adding the students were curious about what problems she’d anticipated facing and wanted to know how they’d panned out.

This medal was presented to Chang and Tourtellotte by the L.N. Gumilyou Eurasian National University.

The first medal was awarded by the Republic of Kazakhstan’s ministry of higher education and science at a scientific conference celebrating the 10th anniversary of the nation’s capital, Astana.

The second, a large silver medallion depicting a mounted warrior, was presented by the L.N. Gumiyou Eurasian National University in recognition of their contributions to historical science in the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Others who received the awards were from Russia, Uzbekistan and other independent republics of the former Soviet Union.

Chang and Tourtellotte have studied the Talgar Region of southeastern Kazakhstan since 1994, focusing on the late Iron Age through the medieval periods (600 BC to 1350 AD). Although the era is often called the “Early Nomadic Period,” Chang and Tourtellotte have discovered the nomads were not as nomadic as previously thought.

“Previously, local archaeologists believed that ancient people of the Iron Age were primarily nomads who kept sheep, goats, cattle and horses,” Chang wrote in a statement. “Through the use of Western archaeological methods, such as botanical analysis of soil deposits, specialists working with [us, we] discovered the presence of wheat, barley, millet and rice at settlement sites dating from 800 B.C. to A.D. 100.

“The recovery of animals bone and subsequent analyses demonstrate that the ancient Iron Age inhabitants of southeastern Kazakhstan participated in livestock production of sheep, goats, cattle and horses, as well as the farming of fertile valleys, probably using both rainfall and irrigation agriculture.”

Jodi Barnes is excavating a former African-American community along Brown Mountain Creek in Amherst County. Lynchburg News and Advance photo by Jill Nance.

Barnes, a doctoral student in anthropology at American University, has been excavating sites in a former African-American community along Brown Mountain Creek. Freed slaves and descendants of slaves lived in the area on Long Mountain, off present-day U.S. 60, from about 1860 to 1920.

Barnes’ research combines material culture, documents and oral history. It also builds on an oral history produced by Dave Benavitch from his conversations with Elie Taft Hughes, who lived in a home on the creek as a child. Benevitch, who is retired from the U.S. Forest Service, worked in the George Washington and Thomas Jefferson national forests and had developed an interest in the community.

Today a section of the Appalachian Trail runs parallel to the creek, and the surrounding woods offer clues to the past. Chimney remains and house foundations mark where homes stood, including that of Mose Richeson. Richeson began buying land on Long Mountain in the late 1860s and eventually he and his sons acquired some 700 acres.

Richeson’s acquisition of so much property likely was “historically significant since the majority of African-American former slaves were not landowners before 1870,” Barnes said.

She hopes to learn more about the impact of emancipation in the mountains and blacks’ transition from slavery to land ownership. She also is interested in the displacement of the families living along Brown Mountain Creek. Barnes said they were forced to leave when the Richeson land was purchased by the national forest service and the city of Lynchburg, which wanted it to build a reservoir.

Admission to the lecture is free and the public is welcome. Contact Lynn Rainville at 381-6432 or lrainville@sbc.edu for more information.