RiverArts Salon: Olivia Wood, The Poplar Grove Project
On a peninsula in Queen Anne's County lies Poplar Grove, a 400 year old former plantation on a remote site outside of Centreville. The property is still in the hands of a family whose ancestors were granted the site by Lord Baltimore in 1669.
In 2008, a professor from Washington College and his students discovered a trove of papers in a 400 year old former plantation house on a remote site outside of Centreville, Maryland: documents from the mundane to the extraordinary, dating back to the 17th century. Papers that had lain unread for generations were stashed in attics and outbuildings in a crumbling, mouse-eaten jumble.
Olivia Wood is one of the 11th generation of her family to live on that land. As an intern at the Maryland State Archives, she was part of the team that excavated, organized, interpreted, and archived the Poplar Grove papers.
Today, she lives in Washington, DC where she has worked in the art museum world since 2011, most recently in the Exhibition Office of the National Gallery of Art. She studied art history at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. She joins the RiverArts Salon to tell the story of the Poplar Grove Project and lead a discussion on questions of legacy, history, and how future historians will perform their work.
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