Adam Fracchia

Abstract “Dismantling the Stockade: Detailing the Lives of Black Prisoners at the Stockade Site, Grundy County, Tennessee” The Lone Rock Stockade Project The Stockade Research project was a community archaeology research project aimed at examining the pattern of prisoners’ daily lives and the ways the material, built, and social environment shaped prisoners’ sense of self and how prisoners attempted to negotiate their position at the Lone Rock Stockade, a late-nineteenth century convict labor prison in southern middle Tennessee. Through archaeological fieldwork, historical research, oral interviews, the project found a highly controlled landscape with physical barriers from walls to a gravel floor. Company documents and a general paucity of domestic and personal artifacts support a materially controlled space geared to control and industrial production. Artifacts, such as shell casings, illustrate control by force, while a harmonica would have allowed the convicts a form of personal expression that would have overcome the physical barriers. Overall, the memory of the Lone Rock Stockade was limited with the site being repurposed for recreation. The project used multiple lines of evidence to understand the dynamics of the Stockade’s operation and provided an opportunity to train several students in conducting such research.