Archaeologists working on historic sites often find fragmented slate pencils once used on writing slates, but it is less typical to recover flat pieces of slate once used as writing surfaces.
As I creep to work this time of year behind bright orange school buses on two-lane county roads, I am inspired to write about the advent of public education in Baltimore. Without a doubt, the perfect artifact to illustrate such an essay is this delightful little writing slate recovered from the site of the Juvenile Justice Center in Baltimore City (18BC139). Found in a privy filled between 1815 and 1830, this slate was incised front and back with a grid and numbers from 1 to 72. The unworn areas along the finished top and side edges of the slate suggest it had originally been set into a wooden frame. Although fragmentary, the slate’s original dimensions were approximately 4 x 6 inches. Stationers sold slates by the second half of the eighteenth century, but no real evidence supports their educational use by children until the nineteenth century. Research suggests that Joseph Lancaster, an English proponent of mass education, was at least partly responsible for the widespread development of slate as an educational tool beginning in the early nineteenth century (Hall n.d.). Continue reading
