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Seeing as this was the 1840s, his status as slaveholder was a given. But the more the UNCG anthropology students dug up his backyard, the more Gov. John Motley Morehead came off as something of a poseur as well.

For a field study in connection with the city's bicentennial, the students had been at Blandwood Mansion, Greensboro's showcase antebellum home, all through June. They were digging deep geometric holes every few paces, slicing through stratified levels of history, neat as a layer cake.

In one pit Ari Lukas lay face-down Thursday, carefully chipping dirt from around a newly excavated brick wall. It will then take months in the lab to sort, clean and date each fragment. But already, the bones of a story were beginning to emerge.

Judging by the oyster shells, someone who lived here liked shellfish, an extravagance to haul on ice from the coast before trucks or trains, not just for any weekend guest.

And though there appeared to be plenty of remnants of cheap, shell-edged ceramics - probably from the colonial Bland family era in the hillbilly days of the 1790s - the later stuff definitely didn't come from The Dollar Tree.

No, it's expensive transfer prints, the kind a fellow named Wedgewood learned to make and mass-market, whetting the insatiable appetite of the new mercantile class for showing off. And spending money.

In fact, when you consider how Morehead had the Blands' existing frame farmhouse expanded into a grand home with three parts and a Tuscan-style facade - this by a prestigious New York City designer - Morehead may have been responsible for the first example of Greensboro's signature architectural style.

You read it here. Blandwood was the original McMansion.

Forget about Sunset Hills, Irving Park and New Irving Park. This was 150 years before Lake Jeanette. Before Brassfield. Before the Tower Homes, those brand-new, three-story Southside townhouses inspired by... you guessed it. Blandwood.

Which only goes to show that there is nothing new under the sun. Not even monster mansions. Not even monster mansions downtown.

"I think he said to himself, 'I'm governor. I'm not gonna live in a little farmhouse,'" said Linda Stine, the UNCG archeologist overseeing the dig.

"It wasn't so much keeping up with the Joneses. It was more, 'I'm going to set the stage for the Joneses - and everyone else.'"

Maybe, at least on our side of the lake, this was the beginning of the march toward bigger and better and more, more, more. The layer that made everything before it look pathetically simple and quaint - the little clay marbles children played with in the dirt, the single bedstead, if you were fortunate enough to have a bed.

It was the beginning of rooms that have specific purposes. Sitting rooms. Sun rooms. Mud rooms. Breakfast nooks. And of course, foyers, with no specific purpose but to impress.

And John Motley Morehead may have been a show-off, but then again, he was our show-off, and I was starting to feel sorry for him.

Not only had his once-sprawling estate been reduced to a tiny oasis of green, overrun by armies of fourth-graders on field trips. Now, his yard had become an excavation, and archeologists were digging through his midden (that's the clinical term for garbage) and making judgments.

If they can do it to him, they can one day do it to us. They will uncover vast ribbons of highway stranger than Stonehenge, littered with SUV carcasses. They'll ponder how and why we put lime wedges in perfectly good bottles of imported beer.

Finally, they'll unearth the stucco walls of great mansions, all crowded together. But little will they know. It all started here.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com