 Like many of these inventories, it begins with the wearing apparel of the deceased. The basic thing is coats, jackets, shirts, trousers, hats, boots, drawers. Those are valuable items. You can see that clothing are valuable. They're valued here in 1804 at $30. You can look at the list of how things are valued and get a sense of what were expensive things and what were cheap things. Many inventories are like this. They're simply a straight list. If you go room by room, they list different rooms. They say in the parlor, there was this. Those are usually the inventories of the most well-to-do people because they have a lot of rooms. This man lives in a one-room house, perhaps with a loft upstairs. So you have to picture the inventory men coming through. And as you read their list, you can get a sense, to some degree, not just of what Thomas Springer may have owned, but of how it may have been arranged or organized. As you go through, you begin to see a place where they tell us certain things about particular belongings. I'd ask the question, what's really surprising? Well, one thing is this man owned one thing worth $40. It is a piece of furniture, which is a really expensive item, and that's an eight-day clock. One looking glass worth $1 and an eight-day clock, $40. So that's kind of interesting. That's a luxury item. And it's certainly a luxury for a farmer to own a clock. You don't need the clock to know when to melt your cast. And that's a sign that this man doesn't live too far from Wilmington, where he's very likely to purchase this clock. And he's interested in what is a scientific piece of equipment and an expensive one. There's a point, as you go down through the list, you can learn about... Unfortunately, you get to read something like this in many inventories. A lot of books, 50 cents. And I'd love to know what the books were. My guess is the Bible. What else? I'd love to know what he was reading. But it does suggest people in this household were literate. It doesn't simply say a family Bible, which might be there whether people read or not. This suggests some people are reading. You certainly get a picture of a few of their behaviors. They have tea cups and a tea table. So they're probably partakers in the afternoon or evening ceremony of tea. There's a point where it seems they've gone from the house outside. After a lot of queen's wear, which is ceramic wear, you start finding saddles, saddlebag, blanket and bridle, axes, mall and wedges, sledges and a crowbar. Here maybe we've moved to the barn. Maybe we've moved to an outside building of some sort. Two spinning wheels. There we're getting a sense, possibly, of what women in the Springer household may have done. Maybe that tells us a little something about Elizabeth. The most shocking thing in the list that takes you up short is, we find listed right among the artifacts people. One Negro man named a something-something ace. Nine years to serve, valued at $180. Below that, one old Negro man, a slave 66 years old, named Will, valued at zero. One's first response, I think, is, as I say, just a shock. We've been listing horses and bridles and now we've got people. And it reminds us about this time period that that's a routine. This is a possession. But there's also something else in this list that's interesting. One of these people is a slave. This is in Delaware in 1804, where slavery is really dying out. It's not as profitable as it is to the south. But here's the Negro man named Ace, nine years to serve. And that suggests to us that what Ace did was what a lot of African-Americans did, which was that they negotiated for their freedom in the years after the American Revolution, and that he had some form of agreement with the springers, that he would work for a certain amount of time for his freedom, or he would work for a certain amount of time for a set amount of money at the end of it.