Family Schooling Adventures: Oakley Cabin

We attended a history lesson at Oakley cabin and learned a lot about what medical care in Montgomery County would have been like right after the Civil War.

 This gentleman was re-enacting a day in the life of the county doctor, Dr. Stonestreet, and told stories based on historical records. He talked about his work treating farm injuries and what medical supplies would have looked like back then.  I did not know that sterile pre-packaged bandages started being sold around the end of the civil war.  He had some real antique ones to show us. 

 He talked about the herbs that the doctor would have used to make salves and poultices.

    He showed the kids how "pills" would have been made by the doctor back then.

 Mrs. Margruder continued the re-enactment with a lesson on the types of home remedies that most people would have used back then. They only called the doctor for serious cases of illness and injury. 

 The kids made sachets of herbs with her.

 Inside the cabin we heard stories about the recently emancipated slaves that would have lived there. 

 

  They had games from that time period for the kids to play afterward.

 

Here is a blurb on the cabin from the county's website: 

Oakley Cabin was originally part of the Oakley Farm, which occupied a portion of Colonel Richard Brooke’s large land tract known as “Addition to Brooke Grove.” Brooke was a Revolutionary War hero known as “the Fighting Quaker.” He built the “big house” called Oakley in 1764, which was destroyed in the 1970s.

Brooke died in 1788 and willed all of his property to his only child, Ann, who later married William Hammond Dorsey. They had five children. Like her father, Ann and William never lived on the Oakley Farm. Instead, William built their home, Dumbarton Oaks, in Georgetown. When Ann died in 1802, William sold all of his Georgetown property and moved to Oakley, where he died in 1818. The Dorseys’ son, Richard B. Dorsey, transformed Oakley into a farm, on which his 23 slaves worked.

Dr. William Bowie Margruder bought Oakley farm in 1836. A local doctor to both white and black families, Margruder owned 19 slaves to help farm the land. Prior to 1879, two more cabins were built on the property, though neither remain. After Dr. Margruder died in 1873, Josiah J. Hutton purchased the farm.

According to census records from 1880 to 1920, between 22 and 37 people lived in the three cabins. The residents were both black and white, and worked as farm laborers, carpenters, blacksmiths, and laundresses. They likely shared household tasks and sold produce and hand-made articles to travelers on the Brookeville Road. The cross-section of cultures found here is representative of the unique African-American folk experience.