Back behind the former psychiatry annex, where the Maryland Horse Breeders Association currently has its offices, just a few yards off Loop Road, an old stone structure is emerging from the clay.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t look like much now\u2014a tall stone wall, curved in a semicircle, with another complete circle buried in the hillside behind it\u2014but at one time it was an economic engine for the farm that occupied what would become Goucher\u2019s campus.<\/p>\n
The kiln was used to heat limestone, turning it into quicklime for use as fertilizer and mortar. It was worked by enslaved people on the Ridgely farm, and white and freed black workers later.<\/p>\n
David Hernandez \u201918<\/b><\/span> is one of two students\u2014the other is Sarah Shepherd \u201918<\/b><\/span>\u2014digging it out, as part of a historic preservation class with Assistant Professor of History and Historic Preservation Tina Sheller \u201974<\/b><\/span>.<\/p>\n Hernandez has been researching the farm, owned by the Ridgely family, through receipts and documents kept in the college archives. This year, though, with Shepherd and Sheller, that research has moved off the page and into the woods.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you take a history class,\u201d he says, leading the way down a muddy path to a clearing, \u201cyou\u2019re only hearing about stuff other people have studied and analyzed. Here, you just walk off Loop Road into history.\u201d<\/p>\n After a group effort, and with the help of the college\u2019s Facilities Management Services and Tom Kelliher, associate professor of mathematics and computer science\u00a0(and avid outdoorsman), a path was cleared to the site, and they\u2019ve begun excavating the area in front of the kiln, which has been filled in in the intervening years. Hernandez knows he won\u2019t see the end of the project before his graduation, but he\u2019s excited to see what future students discover.<\/p>\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t an educational tool before,\u201d he says. \u201cAfter I graduate, this will still be a project students can use.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cAfter I graduate, this will still be a project students can use.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":312,"featured_media":1709,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7935],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[87492],"class_list":["post-1708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-goucher-today"],"yoast_head":"\n