Undoubtedly as the buildings disintegrated, their sites were leveled. There remained only level acres of grass, clover, and grain where once a poor village had been erected and where John Mercer's splendid estate had risen with its Palladian mansion, its gardens, warehouses, and tobacco fields. Even in the early 19th century the tobacco plantation, especially in northern Virginia, had become largely a thing of the past. Within the memory of men still alive, the one structure still standing from Mercer's time was the windmill. Except for the present-day fringe of modern houses, Marlborough must look today much as it did after its abandonment and disintegration.
[147] Policy no. 1134. On microfilm, Virginia State Library.
[148] _Virginia Herald_, December 15, 1819.
[Illustration: Figure 18.--AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH OF MARLBOROUGH. The outlines of the excavated wall system and Structure B foundation can be seen where Highway 621 curves to the east.]
_The Site, its Problem, and Preliminary Tests_
The preceding chapters have presented written evidence of Marlborough's history and of the human elements that gave it life and motivation. Assembled mostly during the years following the excavations, this information was not, for the most part, available in 1956 to guide the archeological survey recounted here. Neither was there immediate evidence on the surface of the planted fields to indicate the importance and splendor of Marlborough as it existed in the 18th century.
In 1954, when Dr. Darter proposed that the Smithsonian Institution participate in making excavations, he presented a general picture of colonial events at Marlborough. He also provided photostats of the two colonial survey plats so frequently mentioned in Part I (fig. 2). From information inscribed on the 1691 plat, it was clear that a town had been laid out in that year, that it had consisted of 52 acres divided into half-acre lots, and that two undesignated acres had been set aside for a courthouse near its western boundary. It was known also that John Mercer had occupied the town in the 18th century, that he had built a mansion there, that a circular ruin of dressed lime-sandstone was the base of his windmill, and that erosion along the Potomac River bank had radically changed the shoreline since the town's founding 263 years earlier. But nobody in 1954 could point out with any certainty the foundation of Mercer's mansion, nor was anyone aware of the brick and the stone wall system, the two-room kitchen foundation, or the trash pits and other structures that lay beneath the surface, along with many 18th-century household artifacts. It remained for the archeologist to recover such nonperishable data from the ground.