Road ruts, broken pieces of pottery and metal fragments long-buried along the north side of the University of Maryland’s campus may offer new clues about the land’s history, and the enslaved people who lived and worked there, through ongoing archeological research led by the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation’s Historic Preservation Program.
The findings were discovered during the program’s new archeological and preservation field school and lab, launched this past academic year, which teaches archaeological survey methods and other skills to students in historic preservation, archeology and heritage-adjacent disciplines. Through the course, students are exploring what is believed to be the former site of a barn tied to the Eversfield Plantation–land purchased by the university in the early 20th century.
“This is such a unique site for the context of the university,” said Clinical Assistant Professor Stefan Woehlke M.A. ’13, Ph.D. ’21. “Especially at a time where it has begun to focus on that history and its connections to slavery through The 1856 Project.”
Woehlke said he developed the “hypothesis” of the barn’s existence based on a “grayish blob” in an aerial image from the 1930s. The site, which is designated as a wetland area on campus, has never been developed, and Woehlke thinks it may hold era-specific artifacts that could provide knowledge about enslaved people connected to agricultural labor, as well as individuals who worked on the land after slavery ended.
The University of Maryland’s history is intrinsically linked to the history of slavery. Charles Benedict Calvert, who founded the university, was a slave owner, along with at least 16 trustees. Woehlke shared that although there are other areas on the campus connected to enslavement—like the Rossborough Inn, which was believed to be a stop on the Underground Railroad, and the Xfinity Center, the location of the Eversfield Plantation’s main house Pre-Civil War–the chances of finding artifacts are slim because of the frequent development around those areas.
“This may be our last opportunity for archaeology on our campus to get a better understanding of what the lives of enslaved people were like working the land at the time that our university was founded [in 1856],” Woehlke said.
Traditionally offered during the summer months through archeology and heritage programs across the country, this is the first time The University of Maryland’s historic preservation program has taught a field school course during the academic year, thanks in part to a 2024 Do Good grant. Woehlke says that providing field school and lab courses year-round gives students who might face financial hardships affording a summer experience the opportunity to fulfill the educational requirements for an archeology degree. It also gives students in related fields, like historic preservation, hands-on experience and training in excavating and recovering material evidence at a site.
Woehlke is a historical archeologist who specializes in community-centered heritage projects, particularly in overlooked histories of Black residents and Black communities, such as Lakeland, a historic Black community in College Park, and North Brentwood, Md., one of Maryland’s oldest Black municipalities. He led his last field school in the summer of 2022 at the former site of the Henry Randall House–the first home built in North Brentwood, just a few miles from campus. An augmented reality project at Oakley Cabin, a Black historic site in Olney, Md., earned the 2025 Award for Excellence in Preservation Partnerships by the Maryland Historic Trust.
Susan Kern, director and associate professor of the historic preservation program, has committed to offering the field school, as well as lab training, during the academic year to ensure underrepresented students have access to important learning opportunities essential to the profession.
“The field is highly aware that it's been historically white and male,” she said. “And how do you change that? By changing it at every level. Not just what sites you work on, but who's doing the work and who's in the pipeline to do that work.”
Last fall, Woehlke and his students began the surveying phase of the site to identify possible leads of where the barn may have been. Historic preservation graduate student Sarah Dunville ’26, who has a background in horticulture and landscape architecture, said that based on the missing bark on nearby trees, the site could have been an agricultural area that likely had livestock.
“I grew up on a farm, I've seen that evidence before,” she said. “It's where the cows were itching themselves.”
This fall, Woehlke will head back to the site with a new group of students to continue the surveying phase with hopes of finding artifacts that can confirm signs of livestock and the enslaved people and workers who occupied the site, as well as proof of the existence of the barn, the period it was built and its boundaries, he said. He and Kern both believe that this work will help tell a more complete story of the land so many students call home.
“We are at this moment where we are trying to physically understand our campus' history and its relationship to slavery and how parts of the campus were sites of slavery,” Kern said. “Most campuses focus on a few little things. “They say, ‘Oh, that building's our oldest one, so we'll talk about that one,’ but they don't talk about the rest of it. So, filling all of this in is actually really important work.”