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Published: January 21st 2012
Historic Stagville plantation house
The plantation house at Historic Stagville. Quite a contrast to the popular view of a plantation!Today, I am in Durham, North Carolina.
Most people know Durham as the home of Duke, one half of the most
contested rivalry in US sports (Red Sox vs Yankees has the same level of heat, but historically has been more one sided).
I came here for another reason, to explore the legacy of North Carolina’s slave communities.
The place to do this is
Historic Stagville.
There are many old plantations in North Carolina that are now historic sites.
Historic Stagville is one of the few that have their slave quarters intact.
Historic Stagville
The plantation site now looks very different that it did before the Civil War.
Back then it was all open fields.
Now it is covered with trees.
The trees are certainly beautiful to look at, but they give a very different impression to what it looked like in the old days.
Tours of the plantation start with the owner’s house, the
Bennehan Home.
I call it a “house” because it looks very different to the usual idea of a plantation mansion.
It’s made entirely of wood.
The mansions of popular imagination
Stagville house garden
Recreation of the Stagville house garden, which grew food for the household. When this was an active plantation, it had open fields behind it. are located on rivers, so marble and other material could easily be ferried in.
Stagville was located along a bumpy wagon road.
Everything in the house is made of native material except the windows and nails, which were carried in by wagon.
Once inside, the owner’s wealth becomes more evident.
Every room features intricately carved woodwork.
Many of them were painted, which was a time consuming and expensive process before the Revolutionary War.
The windows are English glass.
The main entertaining room is larger than an average farmer’s house.
The guide does a very good job of pointing all this out.
They also talk about the implications of being located on a bumpy wagon road.
When guests came to visit, they stayed for weeks.
Thirty or more people would commonly live in the house for a month at a time.
They slept on cots in the attic.
The next part of the tour is the
slave quarters.
These buildings are unusual for their time.
In the early 1820s, a yellow fever epidemic had swept through the plantations.
The plantation
Stagville slave quarters
At the time they were built, these were the best made cabins in the south. owner was losing his valuable human investment to death.
The solution was to build better buildings.
The typical slave quarters at the time was a straw shack with a dirt floor.
Stagville has proper cabins with wood floors and even fireplaces to keep warm in the winter.
Four families lived in each cabin, one per room.
Those who were elderly or very young slept on cots, and everyone else slept on sheets on the floor, which were rolled up each day to create floor space.
Meals were cooked and eaten communally at fire pits located outside the cabin.
This had two main purposes.
First, each family brought different food to the meal, leading to better nutrition.
Second, bringing everyone together created a sense of community and allowed traditions from Africa to survive.
These cabins survived due to their unusual construction.
After the Civil War, Stagville turned to
sharecropping to survive.
The owner basically rented out his land to former slaves, who raised their own crops and gave the owner a share of the proceeds.
It was a pretty hard life.
The sharecroppers stayed in
Cooking pit
Reconstructed cooking pit at Stagville slave quarters the cabins, since they were made so well.
In fact, some of them were occupied until the 1960s.
The last item on the tour is a large barn.
At the time of its construction, it was the largest barn in North Carolina.
The purpose of the barn was to house mules used in the fields.
The barn is built entirely of wood on a base of local stone.
It is designed like an upside down ship.
Archeologists believe that the slaves that built the barn were familiar with shipbuilding, and used similar techniques here.
For example, all joint connectors are made of wood; it expands and shrinks at the same rate as the surrounding timbers, so they stay tight.
The slaves did a very good job.
The plantation has suffered through two centuries plus of hurricanes and tornadoes and the barn has suffered no damage whatsoever.
North Carolina Central University Art Museum
My other site today was a different sort of legacy.
North Carolina Central University was the first public university for African Americans founded in the state.
It is still one of the
Stagville barn
Interiour of a two centry old barn at Stagville, built like an upside down ship. largest historically minority institutions.
The university has an
art museum which concentrates on African and African American artists.
Most of the museum was taken up by a sculpture show, of a realist sculptor that few people know anymore,
Richmond Barthe.
His work sits in front of numerous public buildings, and he even designed part of the façade for the Social Security Building in Washington DC, yet he has faded into history.
The show is an attempt to rectify this.
Since I don’t like this type of sculpture, the show was only partly successful.
The rest of the museum, the
permanent collection, was better.
Most people know of only one African American artist from before 1970:
Jacob Lawrence, a American Scene artist who did the famous
Great Migration series.
Some of his prints are on view, along with many other artists that few people know.
Each set of paintings is accompanied by a biography.
One artist earned money for paint by preaching.
The style ranges all over the place, from realism to abstraction to folk art.
The most moving painting for me was Remembrance, a memorial to civil rights workers killed in the
North Carolina Central Uniiversity
Folk art on the grounds of North Carolina Central University South in the 1960s.
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