Tusculum artifacts to go on exhibit at Sweet Briar

Bits and pieces of everyday life during the 1700s and 1800s at Tusculum, a mid-18th-century home that once stood in the present-day Clifford area, will go on display this month at Sweet Briar College.

The buttons, marbles, pottery sherds and other artifacts might once have been used by members of the family from which Sweet Briar College’s founder, Indiana Fletcher Williams, descended. Her mother’s family owned Tusculum.

‘(It’s a) fragmentary record of everyday life.’

— Lynn Rainville, director, Tusculum Institute

The exhibit, “Everyday Life at Tusculum,” will open Aug. 20 in Benedict Gallery and will run through Nov. 15. Admission is free.

An opening reception will be held from 4 to 5 p.m. Sept. 10, followed by a 5 p.m. lecture by exhibit curator Lynn Rainville in Tyson Auditorium. Rainville is director of the Tusculum Institute, a resource center for historic preservation that makes its home at Sweet Briar.

The pieces that made up Tusculum, a circa-1754 Virginia farmhouse, now lie stored in an old dairy barn on campus, awaiting reconstruction.

The home was deconstructed in 2006 to make way for a new building project.

Once funds are raised, plans call for rebuilding Tusculum at Sweet Briar and using it as headquarters for the Institute.

The exhibit’s artifacts, excavated by the William & Mary Center for Archeological Research, include buttons, marbles, pottery sherds and other common household items of the 1700s and 1800s. Stone tools also were found, indicating a possible Native American presence.

The items were found scattered about the yard, and “not nice and neat like a layer cake,” Rainville said, referring to how many people envision archeological digs.

They were likely lost or dropped by their owners; no “midden,” or trash pit, was located.

Some of the artifacts will be exhibited in a glass case in Benedict, while photographed copies of others will hang on the gallery’s walls alongside images of the house and the people who lived there.

Sections are planned on day-to-day life, burial grounds, architectural history, sustainability and the people — both free and enslaved — who lived at Tusculum. A model of Tusculum also will be on display, along with maps, diagrams and old newspaper articles.

“(It’s a) fragmentary record of everyday life,” Rainville said.

Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and when the building is open for lectures, performances or other college-sponsored events. For more information, contact galleries director Karol Lawson at or 381-6248.