by Bernard K. Means, Director of the Virtual Curation Laboratory
Today’s animation is a clay smoking pipe with Masonic symbol that was recovered from James Madison’s Montpelier.This object was scanned in the archaeology laboratory at Montpelier on July 8, 2015. As James Madison himself was not a Mason, Dr. Matthew Reeves, director of archaeology at Montpelier, notes there are two possibilities for the origin of this pipe: 1) it may have belonged to one of Madison’s guests, or 2) it may have to a member of the enslaved community at Montpelier, as suggested by descendants of this community that helped recover the smoking pipe.
Virtual Curation Museum 
Could be that it also belonged to a member of the enslaved community–many african americans were masons