Archeologists Tell of Brooklyn Slave Dwelling

Archeologists say they have discovered the first slave dwelling ever found in New York City, a hidden garret in a 300-year-old former farmhouse in Brooklyn.

The space may also have been used years later as a pre-Civil War stopover for slaves escaping via the Underground Railroad.

The results of a three-year search by archeologists H. Arthur Bankoff, Christopher Ricciardi and Alyssa Loorya were published in the May/June issue of Archaeology magazine.

The archeologists say they stumbled on the secret rooms in a wooden house in Brooklyn’s Marine Park section. The house was owned by the Lotts, a family of Dutch settlers who moved in around 1720 and whose descendants lived there until 1989.

The family owned 12 slaves and freed all but one in the early 1800s, before slavery was abolished in New York in 1827. The Lotts rehired their freed slaves as paid workers.

“One day, we looked up and noticed a small trap door in the ceiling of a closet,” the archeologists write. They said they climbed through the trap door and found a windowless garret about 10 feet square.

There, they found artifacts including square-cut nails, a beehive-shaped oven and candle drippings. Beneath the floorboards were corncobs, a cloth pouch, an animal’s pelvic bone and an oyster shell--possibly talismans left over from West African rituals.

“We had finally found the living quarters for at least one of the Lotts’ slaves,” the authors write. According to Lott family lore, the room was used in the 1840s as part of the Underground Railroad, which ran through every one of the city’s boroughs except Manhattan, where the risk of betrayal was considered greater.