“For most of the 19th century, it was common practice for people to dispose of refuse in their own backyards,” said Susan Palazzo, project manager and archaeologist at Rivanna Archaeological Services. “The University attempted sanitary policing, but it was often ineffective. There was an 1848 mention in the faculty minutes of a trash removal system where trash was kept in barrels that would then be removed daily and deposited on the outskirts of the University. A 1909 map shows a trash dump behind the old powerhouse, south of New Cabell Hall.”
The trash deposit at Hotel A, encountered in a unit about 42 feet north of Mews Alley, yielded about 500 artifacts, including glass from windows, containers and laboratory bottles; sheet metal; a porcelain electrical insulator; bird and mammal bones; and several personal items, including a ground lens possibly from a pair of spectacles.
“These excavations behind Hotel A only offer a narrow window into the lives of people who lived and worked at the University, so it is difficult to make a general statement about who they were,” Palazzo said. “We find some artifacts that reflect what we read in University documents.”
Items such as the signet ring and heart pendant were probably lost, not discarded.
“We don’t see a lot of items like that in archaeological assemblages because people care for them and usually don’t leave them behind,” Palazzo said. “The signet ring was a kind popular in the 1890s, long before women could be full students at the University, but there were women living with their families in the hotels and pavilions and visiting from town. The University had summer schools and teaching programs for women.”
The archaeologists’ work also confirmed disputes between hoteliers as well as complex water management systems.
“It has confirmed one story, that the hotel keeper at Hotel A got in trouble for slaughtering animals behind the adjacent dorm block, where we found animal bones,” Hogg said. “And provided an interesting insight into how Hotel A was built – into a ravine with the area in front backfilled to make the terrace.”
Hotel A is unique, with a sunken courtyard on the south side and an areaway on the east and north sides. A thick, stone retaining wall surrounded the spaces.
In the early years of the University, the hotels served as dining halls for the students. They were owned by the University, but operated by independent contractors who used the areas around the hotels as work yards.
The original hotels could not always accommodate all the students assigned to them or the families of the hotelkeepers. In Hotel A, hotelier Addison Maupin moved the dining hall to the basement so his family could use the first floor. In 1867, the University built a large addition to the east of the hotel to expand the student dining hall.
In the 1907-08 school year, Hotel A was converted into laboratory space for experimental physiology and physiological chemistry. In 1928, the Virginia Quarterly Review moved in, and the addition was demolished two years later when the University renovated or removed several buildings related to medical laboratories.
