...Last week, in the midst of a summer-long archaeological dig, experts using surface-penetrating radar found what are believed to be remnants of two cabins that once made up the small slave village that served L'Hermitage.

And the National Park Service says the find adds another page to the story of the mysterious plantation, whose tropical-influenced main house still stands, an unlikely witness near the banks of the Monocacy, more than 200 years after it was built.

L'Hermitage, 748 acres at its height, was established about 1793 by the far-flung Vincendiere family. They were planters who probably fled from the revolution in France, whence they had gone before the slave revolts in what is today Haiti, where they had large plantations.

They were an unusual family: foreign aristocrats with many children, an absentee father, and a need for an inordinate number of bondservants whom they treated with singular brutality.

And they stood out amid the slave-holding farmers of German descent in central Maryland, where the land and climate called for smaller tracts and populations of 10 to 20 slaves....