refusing to censure Patrick Henry for his verbal 

 retaliation following the Governor's removal of the 

 powder from Williamsburg's magazine. He sub- 

 sequently became a member of the Committee of 

 Safetv, and a member of the First Council in 1776. 

 During the Revolutionary W'ar he saw active duty 

 in the campaign against Benedict Arnold. In 1789 

 Page became a Member of Congress, retaining the 

 seat until 1797, and in 1802 he became Gov-ernor of 

 Virginia. He died in 1808 leaving a widow, Mar- 

 garet (Lowther), whom he had married in 1789 and 

 who had borne him eight children in addition to the 

 twelve born to his first wife, Frances (Burwell), who 

 had died in 1784 at the age of 37. 



John Page was not only a plantation owner and a 

 politician but a man of science. He was president of 

 the Society for the Advancement of Useful Knowl- 

 edge, an organization formed in VV'illiamsliurg in 

 1773 which, in the course of its life, had such illus- 

 trious members as George Wythe, Bishop Madison. 

 Benjamin Franklin, and Dr. Benjamin Rush of 

 Philadelphia. Page gained some fame as an astron- 

 omer after successfully calculating an eclipse of the 

 sun. We know that he spent much time on the flat 

 roof of Rosewell studying the heavens through a 

 telescope. It would appear, by and large, that the 

 roof of the great house made greater contributions to 

 history than did the fine rooms beneath it. It was 

 there that Page made the first American experiments 

 in the recording of annual rainfall. In a letter to 

 John Norton penned July 21, 1773, at Rosewell, Page 

 gives a long account of his experiments and ot an 

 instrument he had devised that would measure 

 1/300 of an inch of rain." He ends the letter by 

 explaining his reasons for writing it, saying he be- 

 lie\ed the experiments were: 



... the first that ever were made of this Kind in .America, 

 & I may say, with such an Instt in the World; & ... I 

 must beg the Favour of you to endeavour to procure me 

 another, as I have unfortunately broke mine. 



It was hoped that some evidence of John Page's 

 scientific interests might be unearthed during the 

 course of the excavations, but unfortunately all that 

 was found was a single fragment of glass tubing (fig. 

 14, no. 9). 



Rosewell's, and perhaps John Page's, principal 

 claim to historic immortality lies in the fact that one 

 dav in June 1776 Page's close friend Thomas Jefferson 



visited him and, in a cupola on the roof, read over and 

 discussed the first draft of the Declaration of Inde- 

 pendence. 



After the death of John Page his widow continued 

 to live at Rosewell until she too died, whereupon the 

 mansion was .sold in 1838 to one Thomas Booth, 

 whose name, it has been said, "should rank high 

 in the annals of vandalism." '- No sooner had 

 Booth bought Rosewell for the sum of $12,000 than 

 he began to tear it apart, ripping off the famous 

 leaden roof, stripping the paneling from the walls, 

 and removing the marisle mantels as well as the 

 marble that paved the magnificent entrance hall. 

 Not content with this he went on to tear down and re- 

 move the bricks from the family graveyard walls and 

 to cut down the stately avenue of cedars, all of which 

 he sold as scrap for the princely sum of S35,000. In 

 1855, having sold everything except the shell of the 

 mansion he disposed of that to the Deans family of 

 Gloucester for $22,000, thus making a profit of $45,000 

 for having destroyed one of the finest examples of 

 American colonial craftsmanship then surviving. 



The new owners did all they could to salvage what 

 was left of the great house and to make it into a pleas- 

 ant home. But some who still remember staying in 

 it recall that it resembled a gigantic mausoleum, cold, 

 bleak and forbidding.'^ In March 1916, nearly 200 

 years after the first Page home had been destroyed by 

 fire, Rosewell burst into flames and was gutted before 

 help could l)e summoned. The four walls, which sur- 

 vived more or less intact until the 1930's, have since 

 fallen pre%- to hurricanes and vandalism. The south 

 wall has collapsed, and the west wall is (in 1961) in dan- 

 ger of following it, an e\ent that will inevitably herald 

 Rosewell's final eclipse. The lawns and floral gardens 

 ha\-e long since been lost beneath the jungle of fast- 

 growing vegetation that now surrounds and climbs 

 over the walls of the house like a shroud. It was amid 

 this wilderness that the recent excavations were 

 conducted. 



"John Page to John Norton, Jnly 21, 1773, .\'orlon Pap.rs, 

 p. 339. 



12 Kocher and Dearstync, op. cit. (footnote 1), p. 68. 



" Miss Greaves remarked that this opinion is not shared by all 

 of those who remember the mansion as it was in the early years 

 of the present century. However, Thomas .\llen Glenn {Some 

 Colonial Mamions, Philadelphia, 1899, p. 171) gives the follow- 

 ing description: "Dismantled now and scarcely habitable, with 

 a dismal 'Havor of mild decay" pervading its halls and pa-ssage- 

 ways, as if the sickly malarial damp creeping up from the river 

 had bored to the very marrow of its wooden bones, this relic of 

 Colonial Virginia, once the pride of its fair lords, shivers out 

 the last years of the span of life allotted it, neglected and 

 forgotten." 



PAPER 18: EXCAVATIONS AT ROSEWELL 



159 



