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Infrastructure and the Conduct of Government: Annexation of the Eastport Community into the City of Annapolis During the Twentieth Century

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The Archaeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts

Part of the book series: Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology ((CGHA))

Abstract

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the city government of Annapolis extended its authority over urban infrastructure in new ways. The installation and management of sewer and water infrastructure became a new governmental function. Through these technologies, the city government regulated the conduct of its citizens more intensively, and the regulation of conduct, exemplified here in the promotion of public health, connects the historical modernization of government of Annapolis with the modernization of its infrastructure. Additionally, the extension of public services to Annapolis’ suburbs during the early twentieth century can be read as the extension of government through these specific material culture forms. In 1951, the City of Annapolis annexed several neighboring communities that had grown up around it over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I consider the legal annexation of one such community – a village called Eastport – as the culmination of this long-term process and I locate its foundations in the provision of utilities and infrastructural improvements. Eastport was colonized before it was annexed not only by the services that Annapolis provided, but also by the administrative apparatus that accompanied services. I propose a frame in which disparate services are taken together as the materiality of this annexation and ultimately suggest that governmentality has its own materiality, which is available archaeologically and is legible in public utilities and the sociality that surrounds them during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This assessment of African American land acquisition in Eastport before 1900 comes from ­examination of grantor records available in the land records office of Anne Arundel County, in Annapolis, Maryland. Data was compiled from deed instruments filed with the county between 1868 and 1900 to produce a list of grantees acquiring land from the Mutual Building Association. Grantees were then identified by race using relevant censuses and city directories for Annapolis and its vicinity. From a total of 90 deed instruments, only two appeared to document the transfer of land to African American ownership.

  2. 2.

    The fit between these two records is a theoretically challenging issue. Street addresses were not recorded for households on a number of residential streets in Eastport during the 1930 census. House numbers do not appear consistently in Sanborn fire insurance maps made for Eastport in 1930 either, and it is possible that house numbers were not assigned universally at that time. What is at stake here, however, is the historical visibility of a proportion of Eastport’s residents. Transparency to the historical record implies transparency to the apparatuses of governing that depended on these same records. “The finitude of the state’s power to act is an immediate consequence of the limitation of its power to know.” (Dean 1999: 16) How the state knows, its instrumentation for knowing, is also how it governs.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Lindsay Weiss and Sarah Croucher for giving me an opportunity to present these ideas at the meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Albuquerque in 2008, and also for their suggestions toward shaping this piece for publication. Historians Jane McWilliams and Jean Russo allowed me to make use of their primary documentary research on public utilities in Annapolis, which was a crucial supplement to my own limited time in the archives. Paul Lackey in the Annapolis Department of Public Works provided copies of original plans of the sewer and water infrastructure in Eastport. Historic photographs of the 1930s sewer project are held by Thomas and Pamela Dawson of Edgewater, Maryland, and were loaned to me by Ginger Doyel, as she was preparing her own book about the Eastport neighborhood. I am also grateful for encouragement and assistance received from Nan Rothschild, Mark Leone, Christopher Matthews, Lynn Meskell, Paul Mullins, Jenn Babiarz, Martin Hall, and others who have pulled for me. It all helped.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Matthew Palus

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  1. , Department of Anthropology, Wesleyan University, High Street 281, Middletown, 06459, USA

    Sarah K. Croucher

  2. Stanford Archaeology Center, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Amsterdam Avenue 1200, Palo Alto, 94305, California, USA

    Lindsay Weiss

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Palus, M. (2011). Infrastructure and the Conduct of Government: Annexation of the Eastport Community into the City of Annapolis During the Twentieth Century. In: Croucher, S., Weiss, L. (eds) The Archaeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0192-6_12

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