Slave Cabin at Whitney Plantation. Image by Elsa Hahne. Courtesy of Whitney Plantation.

The Long Shadow of the Plantation

How a Weighted Past Creates a Complicated Present

09.20.19

There are hundreds of plantations in the U.S. that have been repurposed for a variety of reasons. Many are museums for tourists to visit, while others have been transformed into event spaces. But how does the complicated and nuanced history influence the ways plantations are used today? On this episode of BackStory, Ed, Joanne, and Nathan explore how people are repurposing plantations and engaging with the sites’ nuanced histories.

Civil War and Reconstruction; american history; history; history of plantations; plantations; slavery

Segments

“They Took 6,000 Acres From Us And God Gave Us A Plantation”

For 50 years, Shirley Sherrod has worked to create a sustainable community for African-American farmers in southwest Georgia. At the center of her work is New Communities, an organization that has repurposed 1,600 acres of a former plantation to benefit African-American farmers in the area. Nathan talks with Sherrod about the land and how its history shapes the New Communities’ work.

Music:

Refraction by Podington Bear

Memory Wind by Podington Bear

African American farmers; legacy of slavery; plantations

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Nathan Connolly: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Joanne Freeman: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Nathan Connolly: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Ed Ayers: And I’m Ed Ayers.

Joanne Freeman: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, along with our colleague Brian Balogh, and each week we explore a different topic in American history.

Nathan Connolly: Today, we’ll talk about plantations and how these spaces engage with the past. We’re going to start in Southwest Georgia where Shirley Sherrod has worked for fifty years to create a sustainable community for African-American farmers.

Shirley Sherrod: I’ve been telling farmers for years: you can’t make it out there on your farm by yourself anymore. You’ve got to work with your brothers and sisters in the area.

Nathan Connolly: Sherrod’s the co-founder of an organization called New Communities in Albany, Georgia. She helped assemble the collective of black farmers back in the late 1960s. At the time, she was organizing for the civil rights movement, and she started to notice a pattern.

Shirley Sherrod: What we realized as we were encouraging people to register to vote, many of those individuals who were living on land owned by white people would be asked to leave. There were so many individuals who were at the mercy of the farmers who employed them. We could have a mass meeting and have a family show up saying they’ve been asked to leave the farm, and we would have to work to try to find places for them to go. That’s what prompted the whole idea of trying to create a community.

Nathan Connolly: Once New Communities got rolling, there was some immediate intense pushback from white landowners in the area.

Shirley Sherrod: Those early meetings, sometimes shots would be fired at the building; sometimes with some of us in them.

Nathan Connolly: Despite this hostility, Sherrod and New Communities thrived in the 1970s. They grew peanuts, corn, soy beans, and sold cured meats like ham and sausage.

Shirley Sherrod: We had a major operation there where we could sell product while we were also growing peanuts and other crops, but we experienced droughts in the later part of the ’70s. We tried to apply for an emergency loan like all farmers were doing, and when we went to the local office, the guy said, “You’ll get a loan here over my dead body.”

Nathan Connolly: The group eventually faced foreclosure and lost their land in 1985. Years went by, and Sherrod worked for other agricultural groups in the region, but in the late 1990s, she received word of a class action lawsuit against the USDA. It was called Pigford v. Glickman. The plaintiffs were black farmers who were denied loans from the USDA because of racial discrimination.

Shirley Sherrod: And they used the years 1981 to 1996, and that was because when Reagan became the President, he abolished the Office of Civil Rights at USDA. So when our farmers complained, when we complained about the treatment at New Communities that we were getting, those complaints didn’t have anywhere to go because Reagan had abolished that part of the agency.

Shirley Sherrod: In our case, we had to be compared to plantations in the area, and it was just shocking to find that these plantations around here that were owned by rich people were actually getting the loans we were denied. We tried to apply for irrigation. Actually, had a contract to grow a large acreage of vegetables to be shipped to stores in the Northeast, and we were denied. But those plantations with rich owners were getting irrigation, you know? They were getting all of the services that were denied to us.

Nathan Connolly: Sherrod says they waited ten years for the case to be reviewed, but finally, in 2009, she got a call from her lawyer.

Shirley Sherrod: She asked if we had heard, and I said, “No.” She said, “We won.”

Shirley Sherrod: Now, the way things usually happen, I thought, “Okay, we won. They’re going to give us a dollar.” She asked me, “Do you want to guess how much?” I said, “Rose, is it at least a million dollars?” She said, “No, it’s twelve.”

Shirley Sherrod: It was unbelievable. I think both my husband and I started crying that night.

Nathan Connolly: Two years later, New Communities was reestablished on 1,600 acres of land right outside of Albany. And this time, instead of battling the plantation, they owned it.

Shirley Sherrod: When we purchased the land, we didn’t know it was a former slave plantation. We just knew it was a prime piece of property. We were actually looking at two different tracts of land. I can tell you that the previous owner invented the system for paying for fuel at the pump, so he had lots of money.

Shirley Sherrod: There’s an Antebellum house on there. There are other structures, but he put three million dollars just into restoring that house. There’s an 85 acre lake, there are cabins down by the lake, as well as up near that main house.

Shirley Sherrod: Now, we started looking at the history of that land, and that’s when we found that it had been once owned by the largest slave owner and the wealthiest man in the state, Hartwell Hill Tarver. He owned about nine plantations and kept the largest number of slaves on that property. We also learned that when Jefferson Davis was running from the Union Army, he actually spent some days and nights there on that property.

Nathan Connolly: So you’re on what was the largest plantation in the state of Georgia, a place where Jefferson Davis literally laid his head during the age of the Civil War, and I have to imagine that that history shapes or at least adds a very profound context to the kind of work that you all are doing there now.

Shirley Sherrod: Definitely. We had what we call Blessing of the Land ceremonies. The Lower Creek Indians were the first inhabitants of this property, this area, so we decided to try to bring as much of a mix of people as we could to this property to do the blessings in their cultures. It was so educational for our people because we feel it had a bad beginning in slavery, but we ought to be able to come together to do some healing and promote a better way, let’s say, here in Southwest Georgia on that property.

Shirley Sherrod: You can teach our children black history when you’ve got the slave plantation. We have a copy of an ad where 150 slaves were sold from that plantation on December 29, 1859.

Nathan Connolly: Incredible.

Shirley Sherrod: One of the things we’ve vowed to do is try to find descendants from those slaves. We know who bought them and we just need to be able to do the research to find descendants. When we start teaching our people their history, you couldn’t find a better place to do that I think.

Nathan Connolly: And that relationship between the history and the memory of slavery, and the cotemporary struggle to protect, really, agriculture health for the entire country, but also specifically for the very small number of African-American farmers, why is that so connected in your mind and in your efforts there?

Shirley Sherrod: Well, I grew up on a farm, and I grew up in a family that believed in farmland ownership and education. That was drilled in mean. And then we were surrounded by plantations. There was Ichauway Plantation that had joined some of our property. Ichauway was owned by Robert Woodruff, who’s the Chair of Coca-Cola, a 33,000-acre plantation.

Nathan Connolly: Wow.

Shirley Sherrod: See, these plantations are still intact now. I’m surrounded by big plantations, but then where I lived, my family, I don’t know how they ended up there, but I found them in the 1870’s census. They were there sharecropping to buy land. That’s been drilled in me through the years to work hard, to get an education.

Shirley Sherrod: Now, I didn’t like it. You know? That work was hard. I can tell you I wanted to get as far away from it as I could. In fact, if my father had not been murdered, I wouldn’t be living in the south. I made the commitment to stay on the night of his death and work for change, but it was not my plan because I picked cotton; I picked cucumbers, and all of the other backbreaking work that we had to do, but now I look back, and I got it. I got what my grandparents and great-grandparents were trying to do. They educated my father and my uncles and cousins and so forth from that land. I got what land ownership could do for you.

Shirley Sherrod: And what I normally say is they took 6,000 acres from us, and God gave us a plantation intact.

Searching For Justice In Tourism

Approximately 375 plantation museums exist in the U.S., and each chooses to represent the history of the space in its own way. An interdisciplinary team of researchers known as Tourism RESET studied how plantation museums present and discuss the history of slavery to visitors. Ed talks with Amy Potter, geographer and RESET team member, about the different ways slavery is incorporated into plantation museums today.

Music:

Denouement by Podington Bear

history education; museums; plantations; tourism

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Joanne Freeman: All across the south, there are hundreds of sites that were once plantations. The challenge today is what do we do with those spaces? Today, plantations have been repurposed into things like museums and even private event spaces, but how are these sites grappling with their complicated legacy?

Joanne Freeman: On today’s show, we’ll explore that question and take you to a few plantations that have radically different approaches to the past.

Ed Ayers: Today, there are approximately 375 plantation museums in the US, and each one chooses to represent the history of the space in its own way.

Amy Potter: These are important places of history. This is where culture is contested. We are certainly interested in what these places are putting forth in terms of history.

Ed Ayers: Amy Potter is a geographer with a team of researchers called RESET. They study inequality in the tourism industry and work with places to include the history of people that had been absent or ignored. The RESET team recently looked at plantation museums in the south and how they present and discuss the history of slavery during tours.

Amy Potter: As a geographer, I think these plantations have such a powerful opportunity to put people in place. It’s very powerful to be in place, so there’s the opportunity there.

Amy Potter: Our project sought a more holistic look at the plantations. Often you see more recent studies, it’s just a singular case study. What we sought to do was look at the whole thing. We wanted to talk to management and staff, and we wanted to speak with guides, we took tours, we interviewed visitors before they took their tour of the site and then after to just get this holistic picture in these three different regions in the south.

Ed Ayers: The team researched plantations along the James River in Virginia, in Charleston, South Carolina, and on River Road in Louisiana. Potter says when it comes to discussing slavery, many plantations still have lots of work to do.

Amy Potter: For example, at Charleston, even with our presence on these tours, only 70% of the tours that we participated in, 35 tours, discuss slavery.

Ed Ayers: Wow.

Amy Potter: Even then, you still have some of the problematic representations of slavery happening. So guides using passive voice, or using the word servant, or using the benevolent slavery tropes: the faithful slave and the kind, benevolent master. These things are still occurring even in these discussions of slavery.

Ed Ayers: How much of this is just giving the visitors what they want?

Amy Potter: I don’t think it is. One of the interesting things about our work that makes it different is that we did a pre-tour survey and visitors, in addition to their interest in grounds and gardens, they are also interested in slavery. When we did exit surveys with visitors, particularly in River Road and in Charleston, visitors ranked slavery as one of the highest level of interest, things that they are interested in.

Amy Potter: In some ways, it’s not maybe giving them what they want. You still have the romance, but they are definitely interested in slavery and they’re not afraid to hear about it.

Ed Ayers: You didn’t come to this purely from an academic perspective is my understanding. You have some personal experience on the ground?

Amy Potter: Yeah. In the summer of 2008, I actually worked as a tour guide at a plantation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was interesting because I was able to see firsthand a plantation that was actually engaged in this reparative history work. I could see plantation management actively trying to incorporate stories of slavery throughout the entire plantation experience, but through that experience, I also learned just how much agency guides have in terms of telling these stories.

Amy Potter: I think one of my contributions to the team was really in thinking through how we approached our study of plantation and understanding that guides are not just reciting a script. When you look at these sites, you have to go on multiple tours, maybe with the same guide, also multiple tours with different guides to really get a sense of the types of narratives that are being put forth at these sites.

Ed Ayers: I’m a little surprised that management doesn’t enforce greater uniformity. Where does this agency of the docents come from?

Amy Potter: Well, at many of the sites where we did research, guides create their own tour. Of course, they’re given books and a variety of resources, but many have, again, quite a bit of agency in developing their own tour.

Ed Ayers: You had this idea of the plantation edutainment complex, which I think I’ve been to that, but tell me about the plantation edutainment complex.

Amy Potter: The plantation edutainment complex is essentially a multifunctional site that seeks to both educate and entertain. We’re really seeing this play out at plantations in that they are both educating, but they’re also creating a variety of tours. They could have nature tours, they could have a petting zoo, they are also hosting festivals and weddings, other events that are not at all related to the history that they purport to tell.

Amy Potter: So this becomes really problematic in terms of engaging meaningfully and deeply with slavery in that visitors can go to these sites and not at all hear this history and engage with this history.

Ed Ayers: I know that interest in plantations has ebbed and flowed over the years. When have the plantations been really popular, and when have they faded, and where do you think we are on that cycle now?

Amy Potter: Magnolia Plantation outside of Charleston, South Carolina, it opened in 1870, it opened its gardens.

Ed Ayers: Wow.

Amy Potter: That shortly after the Civil War. People have been visiting these sites for a long time. I think we often think of Gone With the Wind, and certainly, that was a really important impetus for plantation tours, but it was happening long before Gone With the Wind.

Amy Potter: Speaking to Charleston, 1920s tourism in the city, you have white, elite Charlestonians really putting forth this lost cause mythology and really promoting the beauty of the city. You have, in the 1930s, the city promoting the Azalea Festival, a 1930s National Geographic Magazine featuring two plantations, Middleton and Magnolia and their gardens. You have people really engaging in this beauty, the landscape before Gone With the Wind.

Amy Potter: Most of our plantations, you see them really opening to the public in the 1970s, which is interesting, post-civil rights, I don’t know, this reaction to civil rights. You have these moments, but before Gone With the Wind, it was already set in motion.

Amy Potter: I would say more recently, our research shows maybe this is more longterm, but we were thinking that 12 Years a Slave and Django Unchained would maybe start to put a dent in some of maybe the mythology, but interestingly, when we surveyed visitors, when we asked what media comes to mind, it was overwhelmingly still Gone With the Wind. However, the majority of visitors are generally older. It’ll be interesting to see, 10, 15 years, how those different movies and other things maybe will have an impact on the tourism.

Ed Ayers: You saw this on the ground in 2008, so that means you’ve been watching this for over a decade. Are we making progress?

Amy Potter: Well, I think that we are seeing more incorporation of slavery into traditional plantation tours. However, I think where we’re really seeing the progress and just the forward thinking is that sites like Whitney of Louisiana and McCleod in South Carolina, these are new plantation tourism sites. They opened just a few years ago, and they’re not, I think, burdened by this traditional representations that some of these other sites feel that they need to uphold: magnifying the oaks, and the beauty of the site.

Amy Potter: However, at some of the more traditional sites, again, our research shows for Charleston, 70% of tours did discuss slavery, but we have to be very critical and thoughtful and think carefully about how they are talking about slavery.

Amy Potter: At the Charleston sites and why we call them a plantation edutainment complex is they have these additional tours. They essentially are segregating slavery to these alternative tours or presentations. So a visitor, it can be quite possible that they can go to these sites, and if they just do the house tour, they have not meaningfully engaged with slavery if they don’t have time to do the self-guided tours or alternative tours. At one site, you have to pay extra money for the slavery-centric tour.

Ed Ayers: Right, right. So how do we fit the story of slavery into the larger story of African-Americans at these sites?

Amy Potter: Well, again, I look to McCleod and I look at how, at this site, the discussion doesn’t just end with the end of the Civil War, with emancipation; they actually look more longterm. Their slave cabins were lived in until 1990 by black tenants. They really connect slavery to longer term struggles that have their roots in slavery. The conversation doesn’t just end with emancipation. They look more longitudinally at the story of Charleston, civil rights, incarceration, and onward.

Ed Ayers: So the idea, the name of your project being RESET, is there kind of a hopeful purpose behind it?

Amy Potter: Yeah. One of the things that we did with the visitor survey data is that a few months after we did our fieldwork, we went back to the management and owners to discuss visitor interests. Particularly for two out of the three regions, visitors are interested in slavery. They want to hear about it. So our hope was that these plantation managers would really say, “Oh, we don’t have to be afraid to talk about slavery, that it’s going to ruin somebody’s vacation, that they want to hear about it and they want to think about these histories.”

Ed Ayers: Amy Potter is an Associate Professor of Geography at Georgia Southern University. She’s also a member of the Tourism RESET team promoting equity in the tourism industry.

Putting Slavery’s History Front And Center

There are 13 plantation museums along River Road in Louisiana, but only one is devoted entirely to the history of slavery: Whitney Plantation. Producer Charlie Shelton-Ormond travels to Whitney to see how the museum sets itself apart from other plantations in the region.

Music:

Little Dipper by Podington Bear

Respiration by Podington Bear

Lucky Stars by Podington Bear

Whitney plantation; museums; slavery

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Joanne Freeman: As Amy Potter just mentioned, one of the plantations the RESET team studied was the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana. It sits on the state’s historic River Road, which runs along the winding Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Dotting River Road are thirteen restored plantations open to the public. But Whitney is the only one that’s completely dedicated to the history of slavery and enslaved people. Our producer Charlie Shelton-Ormond traveled to Whitney to learn more.

Charlie S. O.: As you walk along the grounds of Whitney Plantation, you’re guaranteed to hear two things: the steady buzz of summer cicadas, and the chime of an old iron bell. Visitors are encouraged to ring the bell once in memory of the people who endured slavery on the plantation.

Ashley Rogers: I think that our memorial focus is even above our focus on enslavement.

Charlie S. O.: Ashley Rogers has been the Executive Director of Whitney since the plantation opened as a museum in late 2014.

Ashley Rogers: The memorial focus is what makes us so unique because we don’t have a lot of spaces in this country where it is acceptable to remember and to mourn the history of enslavement and the people who were enslaved, and that is where we center our visitor, and we really want people to not only learn, but to also reflect.

Charlie S. O.: As the only plantation in Louisiana that’s devoted entirely to slavery, Rogers says Whitney has a duty to educate its visitors without sugarcoating history.

Ashley Rogers: The reason why plantations are here is to enslave people. That’s it, right? If you do a tour, and slavery is optional on the tour, as some of them are, well, isn’t that kind of funny? Because slavery was definitely not optional in a plantation. It is the entire reason the plantation exists.

Ashley Rogers: And also, something that I talk about when I talk to interpreters and things, is that even if we think numerically about who lived on the plantation, plantations are black spaces. The majority of people who experienced life on a plantation were black. So if all we’re talking about are the white people who lived on the plantation, we are really missing the majority of life experience on that plantation.

Charlie S. O.: The plantation sits on 250 acres of land in the small town of Wallace on the West Bank of the Mississippi River. Joy Banner grew up in Wallace and is the descendant of enslaved folks at Whitney. Now she’s the museum’s Director of Communications. She says for descendants like herself, the popular plantation sites on River Road are oftentimes contentious symbols.

Joy Banner: I’m from this area and plantations are in the foreground along this River Road and it’s part of our lives. They’re always there. Because of it, I think that we, as a community, have a complicated relationship with plantations. These are very painful reminders and it’s difficult when you see plantations and they are continuing to get economic benefit, and literally it’s in the middle of descendants, and we’re not receiving an of those economic benefits.

Charlie S. O.: In addition to her job at Whitney, Banner is also active in the community. She regularly attends parish council meetings and is the president of a community focus group.

Joy Banner: We talk about plantations exclusive of the community and exclusive of what is happening in the present. I would hope that all plantations and all these sites would feel an obligation to the descendants. I’m proud to be a descendant here and I know sometimes people have a strange reaction to it, but I certainly, when I’m here, I’m proud to tell the story of Whitney because it is the story of my family, it is the story of my community. But I think that Whitney is one of the plantations, maybe the only plantation, that the community feels is at least paying acknowledgement to this system in a way that they feel should be acknowledged.

Charlie S. O.: Today, Whitney is well-known along River Road, but that wasn’t the case the day it opened five years ago.

John Cummings: And I was out there ready to meet the throngs of people who were coming. Four people came. Two of them were lost looking for the Laura Plantation, but I kept them there to take the tour.

Charlie S. O.: John Cummings is the Founder of Whitney. He’s a former attorney from New Orleans. He bought the property back in 1999 from a petro chemical company that planned to build a factory on the land. After Cummings read more about the history of slavery at the plantation, he got to work turning it into a museum.

John Cummings: Here’s what happened. We got it, and again, we didn’t know what the hell we were going to do. We really didn’t. Most people operate on the regime of ready, aim, fire, and we operated under ready, fire, and aim and see if we did anything good. And if we didn’t, just go back and change it.

Charlie S. O.: He spent fifteen years and ten million dollars creating what’s there today. Whitney has come along way since four people showed up on opening day. They expect more than 100,000 visitors by the end of this year.

John Cummings: It’s just rewarding that the people who go there go back and tell everybody about it and then they come. What we’re doing here, representing the facts of slavery unvarnished, and sometimes they’re not pleasant, but we think it’s important that people come to see them because these facts were deliberately withheld from them in their education.

Charlie S. O.: I asked Cummings what it’s like for him walking around Whitney and what really stands out on the grounds.

John Cummings: This church that we have, it’s the Antioch Church, but it was originally Anti-Yoke. It was built by men and women who had been freed from slavery for only two years.

Ashley Rogers: Okay, so we’ll just pop in here real quick.

Ashley Rogers: It’s a very old church. It was built by formerly enslaved people. When the congregants purchased the land in 1868, it was two parcels of land in Paulina, and in that document, it says that the purchase of the land was for the purpose of building Anti-Yoke Baptist Church. It’s Anti-Yoke. It’s in there multiple times. We know that’s not a mistake. And it’s something really interesting and quite beautiful, I think, to us that these formerly enslaved people named their congregation Anti-Yoke, and a yoke being a symbol of oppression and slavery that for them was only three years in the past. There were three men …

Charlie S. O.: As we stood inside the church, Rogers told me about its first congregants in the 1860s, how they had to pull all their money and resources together to buy the land and build the church in Paulina, Louisiana, and how formerly enslaved people built churches like this to unite their families and communities.

Ashley Rogers: I think that’s something that you can feel in a space like this. I love to think about what would those first worship services would have felt like for those formerly enslaved people who had had to pray in secret, who had had to hide their familial or community connections because of the structure of slavery, what it would have felt like to be free in a space like this.

Charlie S. O.: Scattered throughout the church are more than a dozen life-size statues of children. They’re meant to give an imagined face to the kids who were enslaved at the plantation.

Charlie S. O.: As we walked across the grounds, Rogers told me of other ways visitors are encouraged to remember those who endured slavery at Whitney. For example, at the beginning of the tour, everybody gets a card profiling a different person.

Ashley Rogers: It’s funny because so many museums do that and they do it in a way where it’s like, “Then you find out what happened to that person,” and you are that person for the day, and that’s not our intention. We never tell people that’s what it is, but they assume it, so they’ll walk it and they’ll go, “Oh, I’m Hannah today.” And we’re like, “No you’re not.”

Ashley Rogers: We really wanted those tags to be a way for you to keep a person with you, keep a memory of a person with you. I bristle at the idea of trying to make people imagine that they are enslaved people. Nobody alive today can imagine what it was like to be an enslaved person who was taken from Africa and forced across the Atlantic in the middle passage and enslaved here. Even to the extent that there’s modern day slavery, we’re talking about fundamentally different things.

Ashley Rogers: We just can’t understand that, that way, and I don’t want to put a visitor in that space.

Charlie S. O.: As Rogers showed me the rest of the plantation, a summer thunderstorm was brewing in the distance, but before the rain swept in, she showed me inside one more building.

Ashley Rogers: This is an original slave cabin, which still has cypress planks. You can see that there’s no insulation here. It’s a very, very simple style of construction. It would have been cold, it would have been hot. The rain came in.

Ashley Rogers: And usually during slavery, cabins like this, two different families would have lived in a cabin of this size. You have basically a room and a half for a whole family. How many people would live in the cabin depends on the size of the family. I’ll give you an example.

Ashley Rogers: There was a woman on this plantation. Her name was Francoise. She had her first child at the age of 13. She continued to have children. She had five children by the time she was 23, but that means that one side here, this front room with a bed or just pallet on the floor, would be the sleeping quarters, the living quarters, the dining quarters, the cooking quarters for Francoise and whoever else she’s living with, which could be to the order of five more people.

Charlie S. O.: The storm soon arrived with a steady downpour, so we retreated back to the Welcome Center. Inside the building, there’s a long wall that’s filled with notes from visitors recounting their experience at the museum like a big, public guestbook. Both Rogers and Joy Banner say even though Whitney grapples with a tough topic, they’re encouraged to see how the site changes those who visit.

Ashley Rogers: When we talk about slavery and public interpretation, one of the things we talk about is that the words that we have as visitors to describe our experience don’t always fit with what we learned. When you’re learning about the history of trauma and tragedy, it’s hard to say that you had a good visit or that you are happy that you came, but that impulse is there. I always say to visitors when they reach out to me that I’m glad that they had an impactful visit, and I’m glad that they had a meaningful visit.

Joy Banner: I encourage anyone who has a historical site or a home or attraction where slavery or a difficult topic is involved, I would encourage them to embrace it because people want the truth and they appreciate the truth.

Nathan Connolly: We’re joined now by Charlie in our studio. Charlie, tell me more about what you saw in the Whitney Plantation.

Charlie S. O.: Well, there’s a lot to take in at Whitney, but what really interested me was how the plantation has organized its space and how it’s different from most other plantations. Most other plantation sites see the main house or the big house, the house where the white family lived, as the focal point to organize the rest of the space around. But Whitney does something very different in that it uses its main building as the Antioch Church that’s been relocated to the museum. A visitor will first go through the Welcome Center and read more about the history of slavery in Louisiana, and then the tour starts in the church where folks watch a video before beginning to walk around the grounds.

Charlie S. O.: Here’s what Ashley Rogers said about Whitney’s use of space and how it compares to other plantation sites.

Ashley Rogers: For a very, very long time in this country, we have created a thing of plantation tourism and plantation tourism is touring a home, so visitors are confused about what a plantation is. I find this all the time. Even here, people get here and they go, “Where’s the plantation?” We’re like, “You’re on the plantation” because they don’t understand. They think a plantation is a house.

Charlie S. O.: Rogers actually talked to me more about how the white slave-owning family is not discussed much in the tours actually. They’re the Haydel family, and when they are mentioned in the tours – and granted, it does vary slightly tour-by-tour – but Rogers said they are mostly referenced in Whitney’s history when they conduct some business transaction or some business decision that directly affected the people who were enslaved at Whitney. So, they’re presented in the plantation’s history mostly when it affects the enslaved folks at the plantation.

Nathan Connolly: And did you have any sense at all about how patrons and visitors responded to the way that stuff was being presented at the Whitney?

Charlie S. O.: Yeah. It’s interesting to look at the wall in the Welcome Center that’s filled with those notes from people talking about their experience at Whitney. I’ll just say when I was there, I got caught in that thunderstorm, and while I was seeking shelter in the Welcome Center, there were still lots of people who were walking around the plantation to try to squeeze out the last bits of a tour. There’s a lot of white umbrellas, courtesy of Whitney, dotting around the space, which I thought was very powerful – people really going out of their way to get as much as they could out of this experience.

From Plantation To Private Venue

Across the South, plantations have been repurposed into private event venues that host celebrations like weddings and family reunions. For example, in North Carolina there are more than 15 event spaces that have “plantation” in their title. So how present is a plantation’s past during a celebratory event? Producer Charlie Shelton-Ormond went to a plantation in northeastern North Carolina to learn more.

Music:

Jetsam by Podington Bear

Driftwood by Podington Bear

Trundle by Podington Bear

Pulsars by Podington Bear

celebrations; commercialization; plantations

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Charlie S. O.: But of course, not every plantation has been repurposed into a museum like Whitney. As we mentioned earlier in the show, some plantations are actually used for private events, and I actually traveled to northeastern North Carolina to Warren County to visit one of these plantations that has been repurposed into a private event space, and I wanted to learn more about how this plantation is incorporating the site’s history into the experience for visitors.

Trish Peters: Hello!

Charlie S. O.: Ms. Peters?

Trish Peters: Yes.

Charlie S. O.: Hi, I’m Charlie.

Trish Peters: Hi Charlie.

Charlie S. O.: Nice to meet you.

Trish Peters: Come on in!

Charlie S. O.: Thanks.

Charlie S. O.: Trish Peters is the owner of Lake O’ the Woods Plantation. There, she hosts private events like weddings, banquets, and family reunions. Peters has also lived there since she and her husband bought the property of 110 acres back in the early 2000s.

Trish Peters: The house spoke to me. I mean, old houses have that magic. They speak to you. They embrace you and this house embraced me.

Charlie S. O.: And before Peters came along, Lake O’ the Woods was passed down through the Davis family for generations.

Trish Peters: Plantation was founded in 1829. It was a property, I think, about 4,000 acres that came onto it, so everywhere around you looked was Davis property.

Charlie S. O.: And back then, the Davis Plantation was by no means the only one in Warren County. In the mid-1800s, you’d see cotton and tobacco plantations as far as they eye could see. Before the Civil War, Warren County was one of the wealthiest counties in the state, but by the turn of the 20th century, the county’s economy started to crack.

Charlie S. O.: And despite attempts to revitalize the region, today, Warren County remains one of the poorest in North Carolina, but Peters says recently, more people have started to come into the area to restore its old homes and that Lake O’ the Woods stands out as a window into the past.

Trish Peters: We have the original stables, the original carriage houses. We have slave quarters still on the property. And everything was just kept for the purpose of the history. We are on the National Register of Historical Homes. We’re, in North Carolina, considered one of the premieres because we have so many of these dependency buildings.

Trish Peters: I think that if someone’s going to take upon the responsibility and the privilege of taking on a historical home, your goal is really to restore it.

Charlie S. O.: Initially, Peters says she wasn’t planning to host any events; she just wanted to live at the plantation. That is, after she finished all the remodeling. When they bought the place, nobody had lived there for about a decade and things were in rough shape. There was no heat or air conditioning and plaster was falling off the walls, but Peters knew the old house and the surrounding property had potential.

Trish Peters: We did massive restorations. Every cottage, every building I didn’t know what to do with, so I made accommodation. Every place I went, I said, “Oh, this will be a little cottage. I’ll just make another bathroom and a bedroom. Oh, this is lovely. Bathroom and bedroom. Oh! Let’s build this bathroom and bedroom.” We created things.

Charlie S. O.: Soon after she finished, people started asking Peters if she could host some weddings, so she decided to open up the property to ten events a year.

Charlie S. O.: If you look across the south, you’ll find many more plantations turned event spaces similar to Lake O’ the Woods. In North Carolina, for instance, there are more than fifteen sites that have plantation in their title that serve as private venues.

Trish Peters: The whole walking around the property, you feel the history here. I mean, obviously with weddings, you have your discos and your bands and things like that, but you’re still surrounded by what this property was and is, even with the kind of resort feel that we’ve added to it. But hopefully we’ve done it in a tasteful manner that respects the history of the house.

Trish Peters: This is called the Brick Room. The house was in pretty bad shape as that, I mean …

Charlie S. O.: We walked through the main house and Peters told me about the different rooms and what she’s refurbished.

Trish Peters: We have one of the original brick molds from when the house was being built because everything came off the plantation: all the floors, all the wood, everything came off the plantation including making the bricks.

Charlie S. O.: Then we ventured outside and roamed around the grounds. As soon as we stepped out of the main house, we came across a row of old buildings, each painted white with a sign identifying its role on the plantation.

Trish Peters: This is, here, the original smokehouse, the original work shed, the original chicken coop. That’s the original well from the 1800s.

Charlie S. O.: As we continued to walk, Peters pointed to a building off in the distance.

Trish Peters: Over across the field there is Uncle Saul’s Cabin, which is the last remaining slave quarters on the property.

Charlie S. O.: What was his role?

Trish Peters: He was just a worker for the Davis family and he was enslaved, and then after the Civil War, he was a freeman that still worked for the Davises, and that was his home.

Charlie S. O.: We didn’t look inside Uncle Saul’s Cabin because Peters says it’s just used for storage, but she did show me inside a building called the Summer Kitchen filled with original artifacts from the 1800s that guests are encouraged to explore.

Charlie S. O.: Then we stepped inside a little cabin called Clementine’s Cottage.

Charlie S. O.: I didn’t realize that you could actually stay in here.

Trish Peters: Oh yeah, this is accommodation. Clementine was the housekeeper of the Davises in the ’20s.

Charlie S. O.: She was African-American as well?

Trish Peters: She was African-American.

Charlie S. O.: Yeah.

Trish Peters: This was her little house. If you can imagine, this had a second story on it.

Charlie S. O.: Right now, this is maybe fifteen feet tall?

Trish Peters: Fifteen feet tall. Looking onto the front wall, there was a staircase that came up and there was kind of a sleeping loft. The bathroom was a kitchen, so that had a little gas stove …

Charlie S. O.: Today, Clementine’s cottage sits as a quaint getaway for guests complete with a pristine bathroom, a comfortable queen bed, and even a small collection of DVDs. It’s similar to the rest of the property’s country resort aesthetic. It has a faint echo of history that’s muffled by the luxury of modern amenities. Instead of the small stove Clementine used to cook meals, now a TV sits in the corner. Meanwhile, the wooden planks of Uncle Saul’s Cabin now hold the tools required for a plantation venue to run in this day and age.

Charlie S. O.: Even though these spaces look very different compared to when Clementine and Uncle Saul occupied them, Peters says it’s still important to include them at Lake O’ the Woods.

Trish Peters: The African-American history is extremely important. They were members of this family and as I told you the story about Uncle Saul, they were very kind owners, I guess. I hate that word, but anyway, they were kind owners. That’s part of the southern history.

Charlie S. O.: But even if the Davises were, as Peters said, “Kind owners,” some people say it’s inappropriate to host a celebration like a wedding at a place that has a history of slavery. I asked Peters about that. Here’s how she sees it.

Trish Peters: Well, we have African-American weddings here and mostly locals from Warren County that come. I guess I’m a northerner, so that history doesn’t really affect me per se, and I don’t – it sounds silly – I don’t see color. You know? People are people to me. The only time I’ve ever had any real kind of backlash, I have to say, was I was a guest at a wedding in Connecticut and I was accosted by these young people, African-American and white, saying, “How can you own a plantation? Why do you call it a plantation?” I said, “Well, that was the name of it. That’s what it was called, Lake O’ the Woods Plantation since 1829. What, do I just change the name?”

Trish Peters: And they kind of got all up in arms about it, but I just kind of looked at them and said, “Well, that’s the name of it.” The Davises were, yes, slave owners, as were some of the forefathers of our country, so therefore, it’s part of history. Is it a good part of our history? Absolutely terrible, horrible, but it’s still part of our history. So I just kind of say it’s history. Yeah, it doesn’t reflect upon me or the plantation. It’s a farm.

Charlie S. O.: As we walked back up to the main house, we passed some old farming equipment splayed along the driveway.

Trish Peters: That was all left as well through the generations that we’ve used as farm art.

Charlie S. O.: It’s one more reminder of how Lake O’ the Woods has tried to integrate some aspects of the house’s history into the present. It’s a history Peters says she feels responsible to share with others.

Trish Peters: People say, “Well God, how do you let people come into your home?” And I’ll say, “Well, it doesn’t really bother me because a house should be lived in.” I think that especially a home that’s as handsome and so rich in heritage and history like Lake O’ the Woods, that people should see it.

Trish Peters: I think in my approach is that I think of myself as a custodian and not an owner. I do title myself owner, but I’m really a custodian of it, and my job is to maintain it, keep its historical integrity, and to hopefully pass it on to someone else.

Ed Ayers: Once we started this story, an article came out in the Washington Post surveying people who had visited plantations. There was a lot of resentment that they were spending their vacation dollars to go see something pretty, nostalgic, pleasant, or patriotic, going to Presidents’ homes and stuff, and feeling as if they were hijacked in some ways for having to talk about slavery.

Ed Ayers: And so I wondered to what extent we think that places that are dependent upon tourism are capable of telling the story that may not be what people are looking for during their leisure time. Do we think there’s an intrinsic conflict or is this exactly when we should tell the story?

Nathan Connolly: I think that there are a number of different corners of the old slave south that depend quite mightily on tourist dollars. There’s a need to keep certain places relevant. A lot of rural areas, in particular, that might have large plantations rely on people going on, for instance, ghost tours of old plantation houses. I know Tiya Myles wrote a book about that or seeing, say, Native American plantations and the novelty of that.

Nathan Connolly: You know, I think there are a lot of different ways in which, again, when done tastefully or thoughtfully, it can even feel like less of a hijacking, say, of somebody’s vacation just because so much of the geography really puts you in that space at those places.

Joanne Freeman: Right. And these places, all of these kinds of places, whether you’re talking abut Mount Vernon or Monticello or these other plantations we’ve been talking about in this episode, they have a real power to them as places. People put themselves as tourists of one kind or another into those spaces because of that power. Now, some people who go and want to touch on something pretty as part of the power, maybe they might feel hijacked if there’s something there that isn’t pretty, but I guess if you’re going to understand that space and do justice to the power of that space, whatever reason brings people there, it’s the placeness of it that matters.

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Joanne Freeman: So I think in one way or another, the challenge is to be true to that place in a way that does the facets of it justice, and in a way that makes it clear that you can’t understand one part without the other.

Joanne Freeman: It makes me think of Monticello. As a UVA grad student, I definitely went to see Monticello many times, but what’s interesting about Monticello is Jefferson constructed it as a plantation so that he didn’t have to see enslaved labor; it’s underneath his house. It’s out of sight of his house.

Joanne Freeman: So in a sense, we still are doing sometimes some version of that today when we focus on the house and we don’t focus on anything else that’s around it. But places like Monticello and Montpelier are really doing extensive and I think really creative work – and actually, the Whitney Plantation as well – about how to weave those stories together so that you actually can’t see one without also acknowledging the existence of the other.

Nathan Connolly: Right. I remember, I think just last week I happened upon a nickel in my pocket and nobody carries coins anymore. I just turned it over, and again, this is not the first time I’ve ever seen a nickel. I’m a grown man, right? But I was like, “Wait. Hold on. There’s a plantation house on our money.” Right?

Joanne Freeman: Yeah.

Nathan Connolly: Monticello is on the nickel and it’s not there to capture slavery or the contradictions of capitalism and human bondage; it’s there to capture the great man that was Thomas Jefferson. It made me think a lot about national iconography and how things like the plantation house can just totally, to your point Joanne, be used, even as they’re there and built upon a certain kind of extraction and bondage, they’re there to actually conceal that history. The national iconography isn’t there to talk about the gritty and bloody parts. It’s actually there to be a unifying thing, including the actual image of Monticello on our currency.

Nathan Connolly: But it actually makes me wonder too about other kinds of national symbols and the work they do. And again, thinking about plantations like Arlington National Cemetery. That’s obviously an extraordinarily important and certainly intentionally solemn site, but I remember many shows ago when I learned in preparing that that was in fact also Robert E. Lee’s plantation, which I had not known my whole life.

Nathan Connolly: So again, I think there was a way in which national unity around a former plantation space was created without any of the backstory, no pun intended, about how that particular place came to be and what it was like to really live there.

Ed Ayers: I know all of us have worked with various sites to try to live up to their potential and I’ve worked with some of these plantation homes in Virginia. I know that people have to wrestle with what if this leads to a 30% decline in our visitation, putting the site at risk? Is that something we should even think about?

Joanne Freeman: Ed, you’re sort of asking about what do we do to wrestle with slavery and yet still have visitation at these sites? This is an obvious thing to say, but it’s how do we put slavery in our history in a way that people will still want to see it, and that’s where we are now, right?

Ed Ayers: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Joanne Freeman: That’s the question that can’t be avoided and that we’re struggling with, which is it’s here, it’s us, it’s who we are, so how do we get that to be recognized and talked about?

Nathan Connolly: Right, right.

Ed Ayers: I think that maybe these places, and building on your point too Joanne about the power of place, these places may be the best way to get people thinking about slavery, which is not in the abstract, but here is a plate that someone held in perpetual bondage. Here is the house where they had to raise children, and here are their names, and maybe here’s a picture. It may be that this is one of our best chances for people to actually think about slavery in a more compelling way.

Joanne Freeman: By making it human.

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Ed Ayers: You know, a lot of these plantations like Montpellier and Monticello are 501(c)3s, nonprofits with boards that are designed to tell the story forever. Others are businesses that are tied to the particular plans of a family. Should people know which is which before they visit them?

Nathan Connolly: Well, an argument can definitely be made that even though the act of slavery was profitable, the history of slavery ought not be, and that there are reasons to think about these sites as always needing to have some measure of public support so that the history can be told in ways that is grounded and conscientious and not necessarily worried about turning off your average tourist, however they imagine that tourist to be or look or to be concerned.

Nathan Connolly: So there’s a national treasure in this history, and I think to the extent that we have a variety of people who are interested in preserving it, that’s wonderful, but I also would be silly not to acknowledge that we have an economic consideration that can sometimes make it harder for people to take the topic as seriously as it needs to be.

Joanne Freeman: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at BackStoryRadio.org or send an email to BackStory@Virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio.

Joanne Freeman: Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan Connolly: A special thanks this week to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

Nathan Connolly: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Nathan Connolly: Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Announcer: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.

Announcer: BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.

Additional Resources

Used by BackStory:

Arnold Modlin Jr, Stephen P. Hanna, Perry L. Carter, Amy E. Potter, Candace Forbes Bright, and Derek H. Alderman, “Can Plantation Museums Do Full Justice to the Story of the Enslaved? A Discussion of Problems, Possibilities, and the Place of Memory”

Amy E. Potter, “‘She goes into character as the lady of the house’: tour guides, performance, and the Southern plantation”