From Plantation To Private Venue

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.