Keywords

Capitalism produces commodities and commoditizes people. The value of a commodity is dependent on its value in exchange. Valueless commodities are disposable and expendable. The workers and residents of the small town of Texas, Maryland, were key to the success of an industrial quarry operation and were just such commodities, interchangeable and consumable. Although the stone they quarried still marks the towering white monuments symbolizing American power, democracy, and freedom including the Washington Monument and the US Capitol in Washington, DC, the town and its people have largely been destroyed by a capitalist process antithetical to these principles.

Recognizing the contradiction of permanence and the fetishistic nature of the products of this labor provides an opening to understand regimes of value and the ideologies that shaped and affected the lives of workers and their families. The hazardous industry and environment not only resulted in injuries and death for many workers and residents, the pattern of exploitation saw the destruction of their town and with it, much of this history. While many of the homes, businesses, and quarries have been leveled or filled in, a material record exists in Texas from which to draw out this history of the town and industry.

Historical archaeology as a study of capitalism (Handsman 1983; Johnson 1996; Leone 1995; Leone and Potter 1999; Orser 1996; Paynter 1988) is privileged and charged with the responsibility of examining the remaining material record of towns like Texas. However, how material culture is contextualized greatly affects the ability to understand the scope and pervasiveness of capitalism in everyday life (Beaudry et al. 1991; McCracken 1988; Matthews 2010; Orser 1996, 1998; Patterson 2009). To understand the process of commoditization, this chapter views the artifacts of daily life through the Marxist geographer David Harvey’s metatheory on the urbanization of capitalism which details the capitalist process and how the logic of accumulation governing this process comes to influence all aspects of life. Employing such a perspective affords a framework to understand the segregation and stratification of workers and residents and the ideologies necessary to perpetuate them. By examining the history of Texas through the remaining material and spatial record using the context provided by Harvey’s theoretization of capitalism, the extent to which people were commoditized, valued, and used in a capitalism system over time can be illustrated, a process that continues unabated in the present.

Industry and Texas

Throughout its history, Texas has been intimately tied to the needs of the limestone quarry industry and capitalism in general. Shallow limestone deposits and the arrival of the railroad led to the formation of the quarry industry and the small unincorporated town of Texas, Maryland, in the 1840s. The American Farmer (1851 , p. 422), an agricultural magazine, writes in 1851 after visiting Texas that the nine acres surrounding the railroad tracks were of more value “by its power of creating wealth, than any similar extent of territory of the gold regions of California.” By 1852, there were 51 lime kilns in operation in or near Texas (Brooks and Rockel 1978, p. 133).

The town was built around this growing industry in an agricultural area of Baltimore County about 12 miles north of Baltimore City (Figure 6.1). Entrepreneurs and industry owners built workers’ homes adjacent to the quarries and lime kilns, prioritizing the necessary industry and its infrastructure, such as railroad sidings and drainage pathways. For instance, right-of-ways for quarry and railroad drainage were guaranteed in property deeds. The infrastructure needed for residents was afforded less concern, with the lack of sanitation greatly affecting the quality of life of residents, such as a dysentery outbreak that claimed the lives of several children in 1853 (The Baltimore Sun July 23, 1853).

Fig. 6.1
figure 1

Location of the town of Texas in Baltimore County, Maryland. Baltimore County is highlighted in red, and Baltimore City is denoted in pink

Full size image

Even with a landscape designed for industry, converting this natural resource into usable commodities took vast amounts of human labor, and thus, a large workforce (Cronon 1991). To keep costs down, the most marginalized social groups were employed. Initially, workers, primarily Irish immigrants and their families, were brought in and housed amid this industry, toiling in the quarries and kilns for much of the second half of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the century and with the gradual acceptance of Irish and Irish-American identity, more and more African Americans and some Italians were increasingly being employed in the industry. This shift and the poverty that followed it were accepted as a necessary condition of business and the maximization of profit, and this acceptance is seen in official documents. According to the Bureau of Industrial Statistics and Information of Maryland for 1884 to 1885, African Americans and Italians were being introduced as they were a cheaper class of labor, but on a whole the quarry “hands live for the most part in the neighborhood of their work and are poor” (Weeks 1886, p. 38).

A large labor force was needed during a majority of the industry’s history because much of the work in the quarry industry was labor intensive. Workers quarried blocks by hand using groups of men with hand drills and later steam drills to cut holes in the limestone. Hand drills consisted of V-shaped pointed drills that were rotated slightly after every blow from a hammer to drill a hole gradually through the stone (Garvin 2001, p. 45). By this method, a two-foot deep, one-inch wide hole could be bored by three men in 2 to 3 hours (The Baltimore Sun August 14, 1872). Steel plugs and feathers were used along a line of these holes to split off blocks of stone. The feathers consisted of half-round steel shims inserted into the holes with a plug inserted between them to act as a wedge and exert an outward pressure to split the stone (Garvin 2001, p. 45). This process was repeated countless times to extract usable blocks, some of which weighed several tons.

Stone was hauled out of the quarries by cart or derrick to be finished or placed on the rail line to be shipped out of town. The stone from the Texas area was used in several major cities in buildings such as the US Capitol, US Post Office building, and Washington Monument in Washington, DC; the Peabody Institute and City Hall in Baltimore; the Metropolitan Club of New York and the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York; and the Drexel and Penn Mutual Insurance buildings in Philadelphia (Williams 1893, p. 136). Large amounts of the marble also were used for doorstops, lintels, facings, rubble, and ballast, and had many other applications (Williams 1893, p. 137).

The bulk of the stone around the town of Texas was less suitable for construction and was primarily burned to make lime to fertilize agricultural fields supplying food for the swelling urban populations and also used as a raw material in industrial applications (Figure 6.2). To produce this lime, gunpowder was placed in the drilled holes and blocks blasted apart. Collected in carts, the limestone was further broken down into smaller pieces by hand by workers with hammers and then fed into the kilns. The earliest type of lime kiln in Texas, the intermittent kiln or set kiln, was loaded with alternating loads of fuel, wood or coal, and limestone. The charge was burned then allowed to cool before it could be unloaded and loaded again, a process taking 9 to 13 days (Abe 2004 p. 6; Smith 1976, pp. 6–7). By 1852, the more efficient perpetual kiln was operating in Texas and running continuously day and night, being constantly fed with limestone and fuel and with the lime raked out at the bottom (Baltimore County Advocate December 25, 1852; Smith 1976, p. 7). Lime was loaded onto carts or directly onto waiting rail cars, where it could be shipped to major cities or out through the port of Baltimore.

Fig. 6.2
figure 2

Workers in a Texas quarry and adjacent limekilns in 1892. (Harry T. Campbell Sons’ Corporation 1967:1). The photo shows the precarious nature of the industry’s extractive infrastructure. The chimney stacks of seven lime kilns are visible in the top of the photograph along with a series of lean-to shelters and sheds. Perched on the edge of the quarry is a pump house to keep the quarries from filling with water

Full size image

Although this work was inherently labor intensive, the nature and scale of this work was dangerous for everyone, workers and residents of the town. Workers were debilitated by repetitive stress injuries and constantly being injured or killed while performing this grueling work. For instance, in 1881 the Baltimore County Union (March 26, 1881) mentions that an Irish-born laborer, Thomas Conway, after the loading of a car with lime, tried to warm himself by the kiln and fell to his death. The industry did not expend capital to improve work conditions, because unlike slaves, the Irish immigrants employed in the quarry industry were not valued as investments, but instead, were considered expendable and replaceable commodities.

The position of the town adjacent to the quarries and kilns and railroad negatively affected the lives of everyone in the town. Homes reverberated from the quarry blasts and freight trains, and the town was blanketed with smoke, dust, and ash. The available internment records from St. Joseph Church in Texas from 1896 to 1924 detail the number of industrial accidents as well as effects of the hazardous environment that enveloped the town. Of the 229 internments with causes of death listed, 142 (62 %) were due to respiratory ailments such as tuberculosis and pneumonia. The contaminants in the air in Texas likely led to silicosis, a disease resulting from the inhalation of silica particles that scar the lungs making individuals more susceptible to respiratory infection (Foster 1985, pp. 273–274).

The labor-intensive and hazardous nature of this work changed very little in Texas during much of its history. Although the population of Texas during the latter half of the nineteenth century was increasingly marked by widowhood according to the US Federal Census, the industry and population of the town continued to expand until the early 1870s. At this time, increasing competition, a failure to reinvest capital, and an economic downturn led to a shrinking of the industry and subsequently, the town. The Beaver Dam quarry, a little more than a mile to the north, saw reinvestment and the use of new technology; however, the quarry and limeburning business in Texas did not (Purdum 1940). To supplement income, especially after the loss of wage-earning family members, families housed boarders and single women in the household increasingly worked inside the home in occupations such as dressmaker or outside the home as schoolteachers or storekeepers.

While the quarries continued to expand in the twentieth century, the value of the surrounding landscape had shifted leading to the gradual destruction of portions of the town. Through the first half of the twentieth century, companies and corporations took advantage of the devalued industry in Texas and started to purchase and consolidate individual lots into larger holdings eventually expanding and mechanizing quarry operations and returning profitability. Other industries also sprang up near Texas to take advantage of the supply of cheap labor. During the First World War, a munitions plant was constructed nearby and later a furniture factory and veneer plant (Jeffersonian January 29, 1916; Smith 1927, p. 18). Still, large numbers of workers were no longer needed. The pattern of wage labor thus shifted from the quarries to employment outside Texas. By the end of the 1930s, the nonquarry industries were also gone from Texas, and Texans were increasingly moving out of town or working outside the town. Men were employed in nearby farms and factories while both men and women worked in skilled and unskilled jobs in the nearby county seat of Towson and even Baltimore city. The exodus and shift in employment further dissolved the community and family relations.

Texas and the Logic of Accumulation

During the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, the same pattern of industrial hardship and exploitation experienced by Texas also characterized other industries and towns. The United States was experiencing a period of rapid growth and spatial expansion of industry and transitioning from a largely agrarian nation to one where the majority of people worked for someone else (Dubofsky 1996, pp. 2–3; Kuczynski 1973, pp. 40–41). Texas fed this expansion with commodities necessary for industry, its workers, and its infrastructure. Even through the twentieth century, as industry became more and more corporatized and consolidated, Texas met the needs of industry.

Although the history of Texas does illustrate shifts in industry and capitalism over time, a study of the local operation and impact of capitalism demonstrates that this history is not a natural or universal phenomenon, but instead a destructive and largely debilitating process that structures all elements of life. David Harvey’s (1989) metatheory on capitalism details capitalism as a process and provides a theoretical framework in which to understand its local operation. Harvey’s theory draws directly from Marx, expanding on Marx’s core ideas with a prioritization of space. For this analysis, two points from Harvey’s (1989) theoretization are useful for illustrating how capitalism works and how life becomes realigned to serve the capitalist process, especially as this process is both materialized and spatialized and, thus, potentially visible archaeologically.

First, the maximization of capital is contingent on specific spatial configurations. Capitalism needs growth to ensure and sustain profit and the accumulation of capital (Harvey 2000, p. 263). The most basic element in this process and necessary for its growth is the fundamental relationship within capitalism whereby profit or surplus value is generated through an unequal exchange and is traded to the capitalist from the laborer for a living wage (Harvey 1985, p. 1). The production of capital and labor surpluses become generated by processes internal to the circulation of capital rather than processes external to it; thus the logic of accumulation produces, or has a hand in shaping, the physical and social landscape (Harvey 1989, p. 27). Stated another way, the circulation of capital becomes grounded geographically, creating a physical landscape of accumulation and surplus production. To continue to maximize and expand accumulation and manage the innate tendency towards overaccumulation or the inability to employ all the available capital, spatial configurations have to be realigned continually or destroyed and rebuilt (Harvey 2000, p. 264).

Space then is a critical component in the capitalist process and has to be viewed as a social product and practice. If space is conceived of as fixed and absolute, then capitalism can be understood as a natural and inherent progression. Instead, spatialization needs to be studied as a fundamental component of capitalism and, thus, spatial practice deconstructed as a complex construct within a specific sociohistorical formation (Lefebvre 1991, pp. 39–40; Harvey 1996, p. 324). Opening up the conceptualization of space as more than a fixed category highlights the unequal dimensions of space and the spatial practices within them that serve capitalism, and ultimately allows archaeologists to see space not as a neutral setting but as explaining the process of capitalism and its effects on people at different points of time.

Secondly, capitalism needs not only specific spatial configurations but also specific social relations. For the capitalist system to function, the exploitative labor relationship and its hierarchy have to be maintained with all elements of life reconditioned to a logic of accumulation and applicable social structures (Harvey 1985). This realignment was accomplished spatially and materially. Through objects, the ideology of individualism and the necessary stratification and privatization of individuals, families, and communities served to naturalize these conducive social relations. While appearing to engender freedom and autonomy, individualism and privatization instead tied people more and more to the logic of accumulation, severing bonds not based on this logic or contradictory to it (Harvey 1989). Through daily practices and routines, the use of objects entrained and reinforced these ideologies.

Spatially, a landscape of power and inequity, not only contextualizes the material culture, it can show how compliant workers were made, stratified, and commoditized. Configurations of the built landscape led to patterns of social differentiation in space whereby people were both marginalized and conditioned. Neighborhoods and communities entailed differential access to resources and provided distinctive settings for social interaction from which individuals largely derived their values, expectations, consumption habits, market capacities, and states of consciousness (Harvey 1989, p. 118). This residential differentiation allowed for and reproduced the stratification needed for industry. Viewing the material and spatial evidence outside this context and either as static or solely as the result of autonomous action or creative consumers would mask the impact of capitalism and the source of the town’s marginalization (Lodziak 2002, p. vii).

Local Operation of Capitalism

For much of its history, human labor was essential for the success of the quarry industry in Texas and the industry was based on an exploitative profit-driven relationship between the owners and their workers. This structure dictated a recurring pattern and reassertion of hierarchy and differentiation through a specialization of function and a division of labor sustained and perpetuated through residential differentiation. The pattern was adjusted based on the logic of accumulation, whereby space and people were continually reconfigured or destroyed to support and maximize profit and capital. Social divisions were continually masked in ideology and replaced by a status hierarchy expressed and replicated materially and spatially that facilitated the formation of distinct consumption classes and the absorption of surplus production. The history of Texas shows these ideologies and elements of the capitalist process at work at specific points in time, and how Harvey’s theoretization can be used to detail the logic underpinning them and their interrelationship.

The local operation of capitalism is evident in a critical reading of the built landscape and material culture of Texas. Much of the data on built landscape were drawn from historical records, and the material assemblages include artifacts that were recovered during a 3-year field school operated through the Archaeology of Irish Diaspora and Labor Project directed by Dr. Stephen A. Brighton from the University of Maryland from 2009 to 2011 and earlier cultural resource management work. Artifacts spanning much of the history of the town came from four residential sites of skilled and unskilled workers. The Worker’s Barracks site was occupied from 1854 to 1897 by unskilled laborers. The McDermott’s Tavern/Concannon House (18BA324) was operated as a tavern, hotel, and home for skilled and unskilled labor from circa 1850 to the 1990s. The Poe-Burns Duplex was home to skilled and unskilled workers from circa 1854 to the 1990s and the site, 18BA313, was home to skilled and unskilled workers from circa 1854 to 1904. These sites allow for an examination of the effects and interaction of the industry, town, and workers from the very beginning of the industry through to the town’s decline and industry’s corporatization. The context of both skilled and unskilled workers also provides a unique opportunity for comparison of the hierarchy of labor across sites.

Residential Differentiation

The segregation and separation needed by industry is seen in residential differentiation based on class and value in relation to the logic of accumulation. For much of the nineteenth century, the community of workers was isolated from the outside. Texas was one of many industrial towns scattered in the primarily agricultural Baltimore County in the middle of the nineteenth century (Anderson 1981; Chidester 2004) and although Catholicism linked the town to a wider Catholic community, this same identity, coupled with that of being largely Irish, was used to marginalize and attack the town from the outside. Newspapers often played on the stereotypes of the drunk, unproductive, and feisty, papal-loving Irish. For example, a local paper, the Baltimore County Advocate (January 1, 1853), records the Irishmen in Texas fighting with one leg broken by a club with the culprit likely being alcohol. The article continues to state that “It is astonishing what an amount of hard-earned money is daily spent in the rum-shops that disgrace this village, and what an amount of whiskey is consumed there … Father Matthew should have visited Texas before he left the country.” Father Theobold Matthew was a Capuchin friar who led a well-known Catholic temperance movement in Ireland and then the United States around the middle of the nineteenth century (Moloney 1998). This same rhetoric is seen in other immigrants’ working-class neighborhoods (Reckner and Brighton 1999) and supported the alienation of the community and helped fuel physical attacks in town by the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic Know Nothings (Catholic Editing Company 1914, p. 109). Such marginalization would have confined Texans and made it more difficult for workers in different communities to organize together.

Internally, the town was divided based on the needs of industry. In the town’s early history, the industry owners were native-born entrepreneurs and large landholders. They created a landscape that separated them as well as stratified the Irish, imposing multiple levels of residential differentiation based on one’s position in the industry. The native-born entrepreneurs occupied the fringes of the community, the skilled workers tended to live closer to the center of town and Catholic Church, and the laborers were farther away from town and closer to the hazardous quarry and kilns and railroad tracks.

The social stratification based on industry was physically inscribed in stone. The class-based segregation between workers and owners was evidenced spatially by architecture and private property ownership. Differences based on class are visible in a hierarchy of size, location, ornamentation, and space of the residences. Many of the laborers lived along the railroad tracks in row homes with little space inside and out and a uniformity of design, but the homes of skilled workers and homeowners were an improvement. For example, the Poe-Burns Duplex, which was home to skilled workers, had more space inside and out, and a slightly safer location set back a few more feet from the railroad (Figure 6.3). This home contrasts with the Fortune House which was the home of a quarry operator and later quarry owners (Fig. 6.4). This home has a completely different design than the standard two-bay configuration that characterized much of the early worker’s housing. The Fortune House had more space throughout as well as ornamentation and was set back farther from the railroad and elevated.

Fig. 6.3
figure 3

Poe-Burns Duplex. (Photographed by Herbert Harwood, Jr. 1987, photo courtesy of the Baltimore County Public Library photograph collection). The duplex shows the common housing form for quarry workers. Workers’ houses consisted of uncoarsed stone construction and two-bay configurations that varied by size, height, and location based on the occupant’s position in the industry

Full size image
Fig. 6.4
figure 4

Thomas Fortune House. (Photographed by John McGrain, photo courtesy of the Baltimore County Department of Planning). Home to a quarry owner and operator, the Fortune House is built with coarsed and finished stone. In addition to not following the standard two-bay configuration, the larger size, safer location, and ornamentation of the stonework contrasts with that of the workers’ housing

Full size image

These architectural differences would have been visible to everyone. Stone was a grammar that everyone in town likely understood as stone pervaded life and death. Stone dust would have been everywhere, filling the air and coating every surface with a gauze-like consistency (Baltimore Sun March 16, 1913) and the noise and vibrations of the quarry could not be shut out or dampened (The Baltimore Sun August 14, 1872). The buildings, stores, and church were made of stone, trains full of stone and lime passed by the windows of homes, and at the edge of the yards stood the quarries and towering kilns. For the workers, whose bodies bore the brunt of the quarry and/or finishing labor, the differing amounts of sweat and blood embodied in the construction of these homes would have been even measurable. The absence of limbs or worse, fathers and sons, resulted from this same stone, as did both poverty and wages. Finally, when death came, so often as a product of the quarry, a limestone headstone served to cap and mark lives that were essentially immersed in stone.

Residential differentiation also ensured less access to resources and opportunities and the replication of these unequal positions. The built landscape ensured that workers were divided based on their positions. Skilled workers were tied to the success of the industry and town based on their position and ownership of private property. Unskilled workers were primarily renters and less invested in the town with a degree of freedom to leave the industry, but limited to similar hazardous and grueling jobs. This pattern reflected the majority of Irish immigrants in middle of the nineteenth century, most of whom could be classified as blue-collar with little chance of occupational mobility based on poor education and discrimination (Dolan 2008, p. 87). The disparity in quality of life based on the location of homes affected people’s lives differently, feeding back to and reinforcing the appearance of social differentiation.

Individualism and Privatization

When coupled with the spatial evidence of residential differentiation, the material culture dating primarily from the second half of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century shows marginalization based on class and the increasing realignment of people to the logic of accumulation through individualism and privatization. The artifacts recovered from four residential sites also show stratification based on the industry, but masked as status, and the everyday practices that supported this realignment. The comparison of these assemblages and spaces in relation to each other highlights the material and spatial differences between the various segments of the working class in Texas and ultimately the fragmentation of class consciousness and community bonds.

To understand the relation of everyday objects to capitalism, the artifacts have to be understood within the social context of their use. Everyday practices were contextualized within the norms of the Victorian and Progressive eras. Victorian notions of status relied on prescribed manners and practices that perpetuated ­ideologies of capitalism. Through practice, these standards were a means to form the social relations needed for industry. These notions derived from the need for elites to differentiate themselves from new Americans as well as provided the means for others not only to distinguish themselves but also appear to move up the social ladder (Kasson 1987, p. 131; Williams 1985, p. 6). Thus, codes of behaviors served to limit a completely democratic order and support the current structure instead (Kasson 1990, p. 3). These codes also provided standards from which to assess and classify others aiding the stratification of different groups for industry. Internalizing rules in the household through daily practices would have imported and replicated the outside order into the home and privatized the family and individual, promoting individualism and minimizing community ties. Material culture was part of this order in communicating it and essential in reinforcing it through practice.

Attention to notions of respectability in society through consumption is seen in the ceramics and glassware used in dining practices from all the sites. These dining practices represent aspirations and attempts to gain inclusion in society and move away from the social stigmas and categories leveled against them (Brighton 2011). Meals and the act of dining were one of the core social rituals, and the table manners learned at home were necessary for people to take their place in the wider society (Jameson 1987, p. 65; Kasson 1990, p. 194). Through the dining ritual, ideas of segmentation, separation, and individualism were naturalized enabling the shift from a relationship of community to a relationship based on individualism and the logic of accumulation. With repetition, manners could become habit and internalized, making one’s class position and prestige appear by extension as natural (Kasson 1990, p. 198).

A basic analysis of the ceramics shows attention to Victorian notions of respectability in dining practices across sites. The presence of similar servingware vessel forms and different sized tableware vessels indicate all the residents of the different sites were trying to follow period dining etiquette (Table 6.1). Differences are visible between the skilled and unskilled workers in a comparison of the assemblages based on decoration and ware type. The ceramic assemblages recovered from the Worker’s Barracks had few matched ceramics based on decoration and ware types, but much older, possibly secondhand ceramics whereas the skilled worker sites yielded more matched ceramics and ceramics that were more contemporary with the time period.

Table 6.1 Minimum number of vessels (MNV) of dining ceramics by site and function
Full size table

Table 6.1 provides the MNV for the functional categories associated with dining. Although the data show a wide distribution in the amount of vessels recovered, a qualitative assessment of form, decoration, and ware type shows variation between the dining ceramics of the skilled and unskilled workers. Homes of unskilled workers (Workers’ Barracks) had far fewer matched and contemporary ceramics than did the homes of the skilled workers (Poe-Burns House, 18BA313, and McDermott’s Tavern/Concannon House). The presence of similar vessel forms, especially of servingware and tableware, indicates that the residents of all the sites were following period dining norms. Similar dining practices inculcated the ideology of the individual dissolving social ties, such as of kin and community, that could disrupt or limit industry and its class-based segmentation. The ceramics from between the houses of the Workers’ Barracks are included, but are not assignable to a specific house.

Even with differences in quality, the ceramics from all the sites illustrate attempts to adhere to period dining practices. These practices promoted the increasing segmentation of the family from other families through competition as well as the privatization of the family away from the community. Within the family, these dining practices fostered segmentation and dissolution of the family through individualism and the reification of the idea of the autonomous family and individual. At the same time, the practices led to more consumption, serving the needs of industry by absorbing surplus production.

Other common daily practices show division across the worker population. Class fragmentation fomented through residential differentiation is evident in an examination of smoking pipe symbolism. White clay smoking pipes are found across the different workers’ sites, demonstrating the popularity of smoking tobacco, but variation is seen in the symbolism on the pipes. The homes of unskilled laborers contained pipes with Irish symbols and slogans, such as “Home Rule,” whereas the homes of skilled laborers and homeowners contained pipes with American patriotic imagery, such as the federal eagle (Figure 6.5).

Fig. 6.5
figure 5

White clay smoking pipes with a federal eagle motif (left) and a harp and the words “Home Rule” (right). Clay smoking pipe bowls with Irish and American symbols were recovered from contexts dating from the second half of the nineteenth century. Pipes with the American symbol of the eagle with the federal shield were found at sites closer to the center of town including the North Yard Privy (n=1) and Rear Yard of the Poe-Burns House (n=1) and the Icehouse Fill of 18BA313 (n=1). Pipes with the Irish symbols of “Home Rule” (n=2) and a harp and shamrocks (n=1) were located in the yard area of the Worker’s Barracks farther away from town. The difference in symbols reflects patterns of residential differentiation and the class fragmentation of quarry workers

Full size image

The contrast between statements of American and Irish nationalism details the class and status differentiation between the residents of the sites. The American imagery suggests an investment in identity and a desire for full membership in American society whereas the Home Rule pipes and Irish symbolism denote a different identity. Towards the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Home Rule campaign advocated political and economic freedom along with Irish self-government (Brighton 2009, p. 109). In the United States, the Home Rule movement also was linked to labor struggles (Foner 1978; Reckner 2004). Laborers at the Worker’s Barracks may have adopted such symbols as an expression of Irish heritage and/or in support of the labor movement. Unlike other sites with late nineteenth-century working-class Irish and Irish-Americans such as Paterson, New Jersey, and the Five Points neighborhood in New York City (Brighton 2008; Reckner 2004), the sites in Texas do not show a mixing of these two different types of symbols. This division shows that class consciousness was fragmented in Texas and the depth of residential differentiation.

The medicine bottles recovered archaeologically also imply residential differentiation existed between the unskilled workers at the Worker’s Barracks site and the skilled laborers at the other sites. The ratio of proprietary to ethical medicine bottles can indicate access to doctors and medical providers (Brighton 2008). Proprietary drugs are protected by secrecy, copyright, or patent against competition, whereas ethical drugs were sold by a doctor’s prescription (Fike 1987, p. 3). Texans should have had access to doctors throughout the town’s history. Doctors were present just outside town and saw patients in town, and the nearby county almshouse was staffed with a doctor who likely served the local population.

While proprietary medicines were found at all the sites including a wide range of remedies from treatments for constipation to remedies for genital diseases and worms, ethical medications were only found in deposits of the skilled workers dating from the 1870s up until the 1930s (Figure 6.6). No ethical medicines were recovered from the residences of the unskilled laborers at the Worker’s Barracks. This difference likely reflects a disparity in access or the ability to see doctors and receive medication, and fits with the general pattern of residential differentiation in Texas and across these sites. Without access to doctors even though doctors were just outside town, the health of the workers and the families at the Worker’s Barracks would have been affected, strengthening residential differentiation. At the bottom of the industry’s hierarchy and supported by residential differentiation and racial and ethnic categorizations, unskilled workers and their families were deemed less worthy of medical treatment (Brighton 2008).

Fig. 6.6
figure 6

Proprietary and ethical medicinal bottles recovered from all the sites. Figure 6.6 details the disparity in access to doctors across the sites in Texas that contained medicinal bottles. Ethical or prescription bottles were not recovered from any of the eight houses of the Worker’s Barracks, but were found in the Poe-Burns North Yard Privy and the 18BA313 Icehouse Fill and Foundation Fill. These later sites were closer to the center of town and home to mainly skilled labor. The distribution of medicinal bottles shows the pattern of residential differentiation needed by the exploitative industry. The inability to access doctors indicated by this distribution illustrates the lack of value afforded to unskilled workers as compared to other workers, a disparity that reinforced residential differentiation and further aided their disposability. While the pit feature in 18BA324 or the McDermott’s Tavern/Concannon House was close to the center of town and is included in this table, the pit feature was very small and not a representative sample

Full size image

Although the town was stratified by class and thus, spatially and materially, the complexity of this hierarchy is evident in the different materials analyzed. The symbolism on pipes indicates different levels of investment in American identity and labor identity based on class and class fragmentation, whereas the ceramics suggest similar consumption patterns with a universal concern for notions of respectability but differences based on quality and ability. The lack of any ethical bottles in the eight homes of unskilled workers of the Worker’s Barracks shows an unequal access to healthcare and reinforcement of the existing pattern of residential differentiation.

The artifacts and landscape illustrate both the privatization of Texans and creation of good workers as well as the stratification and hierarchy imposed on these workers. Workers strived to gain respectability and inclusion, but through everyday practices they were increasingly made into individuals and discrete privatized families reoriented to the values espoused by the logic of accumulation and the market. At the same time, spatial and material differences show the stratification of workers. Although they believed in a wider market identity, their common work identity was fractured with stratification reinforced based on class lines. The fact that the unskilled workers had no access to professional healthcare shows how they were essentially seen as disposable and replaceable commodities at the bottom of this hierarchy.

Capitalism and Texas in the Twentieth Century

The quarry industry’s need for a cheap expendable workforce in the twentieth century shifted the demographics of the town and illustrates the continued operation of the process of capitalism. The landscape and historical record document the exploitation necessary for the maximization of capital. African Americans, and to a lesser degree, other ethnicities came to occupy the position of unskilled laborer and saw similar patterns of marginalization and residential differentiation that the Irish experienced for much of the second half of the twentieth century.

Spatially, African Americans became confined to the west side of the railroad tracks next to the growing quarry in the worst housing conditions. This residential differentiation was legitimized by the state through segregation laws and at least one housing covenant placed on a property sold by the Catholic Church that excluded people of “negro extraction” from living on the town’s main road. Even the same rhetoric that had been employed to marginalize the Irish was used to devalue African Americans. In newspaper articles of the early twentieth century, the Irish descendants are presented as the honorable members of the town and African Americans are portrayed as rowdy, unindustrious, and often drunk.

The demands of industry saw an expansion of this pattern of devaluation to encompass the entire town after the 1940s. With new technology, having a ready reserve of workers living next to the quarries, no matter who they were, was not necessary. Instead, the land in and around town became more valuable for its mineral resources and increasingly sought after for new spatial configurations––the ­growing population of suburban Baltimore County and its commercial needs.

As a result, homes in Texas were devalued and destroyed. African American residences on the west side of the tracks in Texas were labeled as a slum (The Baltimore Sun June 3, 1943). The contradiction in value dictated by the logic of accumulation can be seen in the homes of these workers being labeled as such even though they stood only a few hundred yards away from the large productive quarry that used them. This same quarry was praised for its productivity by local and state officials. The devaluing of the area as a slum provided validation for its destruction and removal, and the expansion of the quarry. By the 1960s and likely earlier, the small workforce needed by the quarry industry was being bused in from other locations.

Because the existing built environment literally sat in the way of new spatial forms of capital accumulation, the remaining sense of community and bonds had to be disrupted by speculative activity and growth (Harvey 1989, p. 123) or a reassertion of the logic of accumulation. To aid this disruption, the town experienced further disinvestment including few updates to infrastructure, being taken off the list for community development funds, and a lack of means to maintain the town. This neglect explains why an observer commented in the 1950s that the main street looked like it just had been shelled by heavy artillery (Bertram 1954).

The current destruction of the town has followed the same logic of accumulation and has pitted the remaining portions of the town and its history against this logic. The land that was home to the devalued Irish and then devalued African Americans was and is now more valuable for the growing quarry and its infrastructure, new suburban housing, and commercial enterprises. This question of value has led to the destruction of the town even in the face of the law. Homes protected by the limited preservation ordinances of Baltimore County have been illegally demolished, because they stood in the way of development. Other preservation efforts were also weighed against the value of development and failed. For example, in the 1990s, the occupants of the Thomas Fortune House (Figure 6.4) attempted to sell the property to a car dealership who in turn applied for a demolition permit for the house. When demolition authorization was in doubt because of a historic ordinance, unknown individuals bulldozed the home to the ground in the middle of the night (Dang 1999a, b). Near the center of the town, new forms of capital accumulation doomed other protected homes with illegal destruction for the construction of an adjacent Home Depot claiming two more buildings.

The local and state government also have prioritized and supported the logic of accumulation, using legal means such as eminent domain to seize and destroy parts of the town in the name of progress. In the 1990s, the remaining historic homes and a tavern along the railroad were demolished for a road to alleviate new traffic congestion and the creation of a Light Rail line. According to the Department of Transportation Act Section 4(f) report for this work, the homes had to be demolished as the quarry operations could not be impeded, and it would be too costly to move the homes a few feet to preserve them (EA Associates 1986, pp. 3–8).

The history of Texas in the twentieth century shows the continuum of capitalism’s operation whereby the logic of accumulation seeps into all elements of life, working through them and disposing of them when they do not serve the maximization of capital. First, the Irish, then African Americans were stratified, devalued, and replaced. The town and its history have undergone the same sequence. This destruction and removal was not inevitable, but has to be seen as part of the capitalist process that continues into the twenty-first century.

Conclusion

Over the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the United States became increasingly industrialized. This transition entailed huge amounts of human labor and saw the spread of wage labor and work conditions deteriorate. Texas was one such location where a town was built to serve the dangerous limestone industry. While much of Texas has been devalued and destroyed, the remaining material and spatial record of Texas provides evidence of the local process of capitalism over two centuries.

Historical archaeology as a study of capitalism is charged with studying this record, which exists archaeologically, to understand this inherently spatial process. Such an examination entails employing a complex and totalizing theory that allows for an explanation of the abstract process on the ground day after day. Harvey’s theory on capitalism provides historical archaeology with a conceptualization of the entire capitalist process and the apparatus in which to contextualize the workings of capitalism at the site level. Using this context, sites and their occupants can be situated and studied relationally and within the fields of power and ideology.

In Texas, the material culture and spatial record can be understood through this lens. Through spatial relationships and differences in the architecture and the size of buildings, a landscape was constructed to segment an exploitable and expendable population, mainly Irish immigrants and later African Americans, for the quarry industry. The materials consumed by the workers and residents show efforts to adhere to notions of respectability and gain acceptance in wider society, but their everyday practices aided social division and the fragmentation of class consciousness reinforcing residential differentiation inside and outside the town. The material practices and rituals of the Victorian then later the Progressive eras, such as dining practices, cultivated individualism and a privatization of the family based on the logic of accumulation while creating consumption classes to absorb surplus production. This value structure worked against family, class, and community bonds by presenting the individual and/or family as autonomous and eventually beholden to the market. The material evidence of this social division and fragmentation of class consciousness is apparent in the ratio of proprietary to ethical medicinal bottles and the difference in symbolism on smoking pipes between unskilled and skilled workers.

The ultimate success of the capitalist process is seen in the perpetuation of the industry going from a labor-intensive operation that killed or injured workers and townspeople to a heavily mechanized and large-scale operation with the need for large amounts of capital and space but few workers. During this slow 170-year transition, social relations and an entire town were realigned to maximize production and deal with the crises of overaccumulation through consumption. The logic of accumulation defined the value of relations and even justified the destruction of the town and people. The material and spatial record has provided evidence of this pattern.

The logic of accumulation continues to lead to the creation and destruction of spatial configurations conducive to capitalism and pushes for individualism and the privatization of every element of life. The horrible consequences of such a process and its commodification of people are detailed in the microcosm of Texas and its quarry industry. In the midst of what can be considered a new Gilded Age of unequal and disproportionate wealth and income concentration (Picketty 2014), the sheer scale and accelerating pace of this process stress the urgency in understanding the process of capitalism and counteracting its logic. Only through understanding the unequal segmentation of labor can current social divisions be understood (Gordon et al. 1982, p. 2). To do so, the process of capitalism has to be studied in the past to comprehend the present and find the contradictions that offer space for change.