A couple of weeks after our visit to the Atlanta History Center, we drove to Raleigh to enjoy time with our friend Susie. On one of the nice days, she took us to the Historic Stagville State Historic Site about 30 minutes north of Raleigh. After seeing the plantation owners’ town houses in our recent trip to Mississippi, we thought we’d be in store to see a real plantation home; instead we walked around some of the land where enslaved people lived and worked for over 100 years. We were glad to be sobered by what we saw and learned.
The information in this post comes from the North Carolina Historic Sites and the brochure from the information center.
In 1860, Stagville was part of a vast plantation where the Bennehan and Cameron families lived and enslaved people. It was once one of the largest plantations in North Carolina with 30,000 acres of land and over over 1000 enslaved workers in 1864. The historic site preserves a Bennehan family house (c. 1799), the Horton Grove slave quarters (c. 1851), a barn (1860), and 165 acres of land. The site has been preserved as state property since 1976.
On this land, enslaved people built a sprawling plantation complex of farms, workshops, mansions, and mills for the family. During the same time, enslaved families themselves suffered separation, violence, hard labor, and disease. But they also continually resisted, claiming some measure of freedom through sabotage, direct action, cultural traditions, and running away to freedom.
An 1804 marriage united the Bennehan and Cameron families, and they jointly invested in slavery at Stagville. In 1847, the Camerons inherited complete control of the plantations since no more male children were born to the Bennehans.
It was a busy household in the middle of the early plantation complex. For the family, it was a place of safety, comfort, luxury and authority. The design, furnishings, and enslaved servants working in the house were a display of their growing wealth and power.
But for the workers,, the beauty of this house was only a veneer. They knew the reality of the luxury was built on violence, forced labor, and the sale of human beings. The women were exposed to harassment and sexual violence by the white men.
The kitchen building was a halfway space between the Bennehan House and the slave quarters physically and emotionally. Enslaved servants and cooks used their skills at they crossed between these two spaces to survive. They memorized the etiquette, expectations and personalities of the owner families. They held onto their African and African-American identities, while simultaneously become experts in the white European-American culture of enslavers. Although they often didn’t receive any credit, enslaved cooks shaped American culture. Their knowledge of Scots-Irish, German, African, and Indigenous foods forged new Southern food traditions like gumbo and peanut stews. When the owner’s wife was asked for a recipe, she’d have to go to her cook for it.
The house remained the headquarters of the Bennehan family until 1847, when they built a grander mansion nearby for their daughter who married into the Cameron family.
work done by the slaves
I saw a picture from years ago of one of these houses, and it looked really sad.
In the midst of the horrors that they had to live with, the enslaved families could also find community in captivity. In the rooms of these houses, friends and families weighed their risks and choices. Here are some of their stories:
- A grandmother named Rosezetta sabotaged her sewing work.
- Silla and her daughter Mary Walker snuck out to attend secret church meetings where they prayed for liberation.
- An enslaved field worker named Toney was accused of burning his own foot so he would be unable to pick cotton.
- Jim left his quarters, night after night, despite harsh lashings: perhaps he went to visit family, trade for supplies, or be his own person if only for a few house.
At times family members would be sold to other plantations, especially as the war was coming and the family needed more money to support their lifestyle. Morgan Latta, an enslaved boy, remembered “For some, the sale of family was as painful as a death. Some of the children would grieve themselves to death when they were put upon the block and sold from their fathers and mothers and would drop upon the floor as if they had been shot.”
The Harts were a formerly enslaved family who sharecropped here until 1954. Sharecropping was a post-Civil War agricultural system in the U.S. South where landowners allowed tenants, primarily freedmen and poor whites, to farm land in exchange for a large share of the crop (usually half or more). It functioned through a cycle of debt, with landlords providing supplies on credit (crop liens) for crops like cotton, keeping workers in perpetual poverty.
“The system was heavily used after 1877 to maintain a subservient labor force, and although some families saw it as a path to autonomy, it largely trapped generations in poverty. The system began to decline during the Great Depression and finally ended with industrial expansion during World War II (1940s), as mechanization made hand-labor unnecessary and laborers left for better jobs in the North.” [Sharecropping information is from AI.]
After emancipation, freed people here advocated for land ownership and plantation resources and refused to work for the Cameron family. Yet by 1866, the Camerons used overseers, discriminatory laws, and Federal troops to regain control over the land. [Remember what we read in the previous post from the Atlanta History Center?]
As the Camerons reclaimed their old power and position, freed people began a long struggle to fulfill the promises of emancipation. Many left the area, while many stayed. Those who stayed, like the Harts, lived through long decades of sharecropping and Jim Crow discrimination. They and their descendants struggled for civil rights, fair work, equality, and land. This house is a reminder of Stagville descendants’ quest for justice, freedom, and safety from 1865 to today.
history of Horton Grove
While most slave dwellings were one-story structures with dirt floors and crude fireplaces, the Horton Grove houses had heavy timber framing, stone foundations with raised wooden floors, and sturdy brick chimneys. The history of the design is uncertain, but it might have prevented frequent diseases and so protected the Camerons’ economic investment in slave labor.
Most of the people living in this row labored in surrounding fields, while others worked in trade shops or nearby mills along the river.
faith, food, and clothing
The plantation’s massive population created a community of extended families that persevered through slavery. Families cooperated to gather firewood, tend gardens, cook meals, and care for children. Enslaved children learned skills for work, survival, and resistance. Many of Stagville’s enslaved people practiced Christianity, while preserving elements of African spirituality.
Although the Camerons hired a white Episcopal minister to preach on the plantation, enslaved people created their own version of the faith. An enslaved woman remembered her mother stealing away to “some lone hut” where enslaved people could pray together at midnight, at “risk of stripes & imprisonment.” They sang hymns of when “our bondage it shall end bye and by.”
Overseers issued enslaved families a weekly ration from the plantation’s stocks of preserved meat and corn. Gardening, wild foraging, fishing, and trapping local game (rabbit and opossum) provided additional nutrition.
In December 1806, Duncan Cameron issued each man 1 coat, cotton overalls for the winter, 2 shirts, 1 pair of shoes, a coarse wool hat, a blanket, and a pair of summer overalls. The women got jackets, petticoats, 2 shifts, a summer petticoat, a pair of shoes, and a blanket.
building skills
The living quarters incorporated mortise and tenon joints with brick nogging (see definition in next paragraph).
Enslaved men hewed large timber for the skeletal frames of the houses, while carpenters crafted wooden pegs to join the timbers. Enslaved brick makers molded and fired 100,000 bricks for the chimneys and to line the interior walls of each house. This brick “nogging” was a practical insulation method. The mass of brick retained heat from the fireplace during the winter and kept the structures cool in the summer.
the great barn
From Horton Grove, we walked a short ways through the trees to the Great Barn. Per AI, “The Great Barn at Historic Stagville in in Durham, N.C., is a massive three-story timber-framed structure built in 1860 [in just 1 year] by enslaved carpenters. Measuring 133 ft by 33 ft, it was the largest in the area at the time [before the Civil War], showcasing advanced craftsmanship with queen trusses and scarf joints. It served as a stable and storage facility.”
To prepare for the summer construction, enslaved people began cutting, hauling, and hard-hewing the lumber from tall trees in the local forest. The barn sits on a stone foundation built by enslaved stonemasons. The exterior is board and batten siding that was cut on the plantation at a water-powered timber mill at the river. This siding, along with the high hip roof, the large central portion, and flanking wings, gives the immense barn an architecturally striking exterior.
This barn was the last major structure built at Stagville by enslaved people and represents the height of the plantation’s expansion on the eve of the Civil War. It is also a testament to the land’s agricultural potential, the Camerons’ prosperity, and the skills of the enslaved craftsmen.
One of the takeaways we learned from the woman leading us around the property is that the enslaved people had brought with them and learned amazing skills. Some men were so skilled that they were hired out to other plantations to design buildings.
This is the end of our look at the Civil War time period before we drive south to visit our family in Florida. A visit to the Gone With the Wind Museum with my Tri Delta friends in a month or so may add more to the story we’ve been building.
Leave a Reply
Your email is safe with us.