An old Virginia plantation, a new owner and a family legacy unveiled.
January 26, 2022 11:05 AM Subscribe
The description of the property in the listing (“Sharswood”, Circa 1820. On ten acres in Virginia. $220,000) 2 years ago (“There is an old farm office on the property. Would make a cute guest house!”) reads different now: “An old Virginia plantation, a new owner and a family legacy unveiled.” (Washington Post, similar text at Tell Us USA.)
You can guess the basic facts of the article from the headline and the photo of the man who purchased the property, but there's a lot of stuff in the article about the generational pain and the meaning the youngest family members draw from learning the stories their ancestors wanted to forget. It's worth reading for that.
posted by fedward at 12:26 PM on January 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by fedward at 12:26 PM on January 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
I found the article really interesting. I can't imagine what that must feel like for the members of that family to spend time in that place, knowing that history. I think the article did a good job of laying out that it's not one emotion, it's a lot of them.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:39 PM on January 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by jacquilynne at 12:39 PM on January 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
wow, what a read. as a nation, a society, we (white people) need to face up to the magnitude of what was taken. this article is beautiful but also shows how little can be reclaimed, even in best of circumstances. I hope it brings healing to the Miller family.
posted by supermedusa at 12:59 PM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by supermedusa at 12:59 PM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
Great read indeed thanks for this masterpiece!
posted by aprilhaley at 2:48 PM on January 26, 2022
posted by aprilhaley at 2:48 PM on January 26, 2022
Amazing. I used to live about 5 miles from there on a different former plantation house (the owners then lived many states away and my family were renter/caretakers).
I can't say I've ever been past Sharswood because I never knew anyone who lived down that road and it was in the opposite direction of going to town.
posted by glonous keming at 2:51 PM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
I can't say I've ever been past Sharswood because I never knew anyone who lived down that road and it was in the opposite direction of going to town.
posted by glonous keming at 2:51 PM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
This is a lovely story about a fascinating family. I'm white, and I came from several generations of pretty shitty people, and I resent that I care about "where I came from," if that makes sense. There's a farmhouse in rural Michigan that was the "family farm" for awhile; my parents lived in it when i was a baby, along with some of my mom's aunts. I still feel connected to it, which kind of grinds my gears—I want to somehow be able to cast off my family's past, but it still has meaning for me.
I can easily imagine—and I've read a lot about these kind of stories, all the way back to Roots when I was 12 or 13—how vital knowing your family story can be if it's been deliberately and violently taken from you. It makes me happy to read about the family reunion at the house, and it makes me happy that the house is so charming. To claim the property, and live there on the same ground their ancestors did seems so powerful and immediate.
posted by Well I never at 4:31 PM on January 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
I can easily imagine—and I've read a lot about these kind of stories, all the way back to Roots when I was 12 or 13—how vital knowing your family story can be if it's been deliberately and violently taken from you. It makes me happy to read about the family reunion at the house, and it makes me happy that the house is so charming. To claim the property, and live there on the same ground their ancestors did seems so powerful and immediate.
posted by Well I never at 4:31 PM on January 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
Thank you so much for sharing this! It really hit me emotionally.
posted by Scout405 at 4:52 PM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Scout405 at 4:52 PM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
also shows how little can be reclaimed
While the history before Sarah's parents is undoubtedly lost unless a document trove from Back In Those Days is somehow unearthed on the property... I'd say, buying the house of the family who used to own your ancestors is one FUCKTON of a reclamation.
I hope this family has amazing times reuniting there for generations to come. Delightful and fascinating to read. As someone who really likes HLGates' PBS show Finding Your Roots, this was right up that same alley.
Thanks so much for posting!
posted by hippybear at 7:07 PM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
While the history before Sarah's parents is undoubtedly lost unless a document trove from Back In Those Days is somehow unearthed on the property... I'd say, buying the house of the family who used to own your ancestors is one FUCKTON of a reclamation.
I hope this family has amazing times reuniting there for generations to come. Delightful and fascinating to read. As someone who really likes HLGates' PBS show Finding Your Roots, this was right up that same alley.
Thanks so much for posting!
posted by hippybear at 7:07 PM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
I've been looking into the history of African Americans and enslaved people in my area the past couple of years.
What amazes me more than anything is the degree to which the history of this large group of people who played a substantial role in building up this area, once the U.S. made it a state, has been almost completely erased.
You have a hard time finding a name of ANYONE who was an enslaved person. I have managed to find full names for maybe 5 people and first names for a couple of dozen - mostly from slave sales and a practice that, as near as I can tell, amounted to slave holders mortgaging their slaves for cash. To do that, a complete record of the property was registered with the county, and if that property was people the record included a lot of details about them, including age, gender, and name.
Graves - nearly all erased. I know of about 5 that are still marked, or even recorded. 2 or 3 of those are actually unmarked but a memorial has been added in the past couple of decades. Usually the slave and/or African American section of a cemetery is just an area off in some back corner with zero markers or records. As near as we can tell, a big chunk of the Black section of Kansas City's oldest cemetery, which has some hundreds of unmarked graves, is now under a nearby commercial development.
When you read histories of the era, you often come across a statement like "Only about 5% of the area's population were slaveholders." Minimizing the very existence of enslaved people in a way that is probably technically true in some particular way and that is designed to make (white) people feel better.
In fact, I don't believe I have found a single landowner or farmer in the county who do NOT own a few slaves. There was one large plantation around with some several hundred slaves, but most places had just a few - 2 or 5 or 9 or maybe 15. Every prominent or wealthy citizen I've encountered owned slaves. Yes, a lot of the poorer workers living in cities, or general townsfolk, didn't have the money to own slaves or a particular reason to own them (as farmers and larger landowners did), but they were not the leaders of the county by any means.
Prominent civic leaders were all slave owners - there must be the occasional exception, but I have yet to find one.
Census records carefully list each slave by gender, age, color, and owner. The name of the enslaved person, though, is completely absent. Not needed for anything, I guess.
And it turns out that just prior to the Civil War, enslaved people amounted to more than 17% of the county's population. If you look down the list of 1860 county census totals for Missouri, you seen plenty of counties where enslaved people make up more than 10%, 20%, 25% of the population. In a couple of counties, slaves make up very nearly 50% of the population.
My point here is that Missouri is not known as a great slave state. Histories minimize the number of both slave owners and enslaved people. Missouri stayed with the Union in the Civil War (sort of - it's complicated) and it isn't really known as a great Southern state.
Yet there is a rich history of the contributions of many, many thousands of enslaved people here that is almost entirely unrecorded and forgotten.
After the Civil War, many former slaves stayed where they were - not having many other options - but as near as I can tell over the next 10-20 years most found some opportunity or other elsewhere and moved on. Having no real fond memories of their time here, they left and never came back. (And who can blame them.)
Who was left to record the area's history? Descendents of the slave owners, of course.
Descendents of the enslaved people were scattered far and wide, with other things to worry about than gathering up the few remaining records of their family who had lived and worked here for a few decades before moving on.
So we have a big and important part of our local history that has been almost completely erased.
Since noticing this, I've kept my ear to the ground as best I can. Here are a few of the most interesting stories that I have come across:
- Hiram Young - purchased his freedom, then founded a company specializing in building yokes and wagons - providing tens of thousands of the yokes and wagons that carried emigrants across the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California Trails from the 1850s to the 1870s.
(This is a great story, but bear in mind that "Free Colored" represented less than 0.5% of the county's population while enslaved people represented over 17%. So inspiring and interesting but very unusual in many ways.)
- Arrow Rock's Hidden Black History - Arrow Rock was one of the starting points and key outfitting points on the Santa Fe Trail from the late 1820s. When you visit the (well preserved) village of Arrow Rock today, what you are seeing is to a large extent the high-quality handiwork of enslaved people.
- Sophie White - after the Civil War, Sophie stayed on the plantation where she had lived for more than 30 years, cooking for the household and selling meals to Santa Fe Trail travelers. Before long she had accumulated enough savings that she served as a bank for her former owners. The cabin where she lived still stands, a few yards from the historic route of the Santa Fe Trail.
- Simpson and Catherine Younger were aunt and uncle of the infamous Younger brothers of Quantrill's Raiders and the James-Younger Gang. Their father manumitted them at his death and left their mother Elizabeth a large farm near Osceola Missouri along with a significant sum of money to educate Simpson and Catherine. All three lived fascinating yet very difficult lives.
- The Federal Writer's Project Slave Narratives are filled with many fascinating stories - though unfortunately they must be read with some hefty filters nowadays as they often tell a lot more about their authors than the subjects. A few particularly interesting stories:
* Sim Younger (mentioned above)
* Esther Easter - probably a very typical story in many ways. She took some revenge on her mistress, who had a very heavy hand with the whip, by letting husband know about wife's dalliance with the neighboring farmer . . .
* Bill Simms - Civil War veteran who was a teamster for both the Union & Confederate armies during the conflict. A more detailed history of his life is here.
* Sarah Rector - richest black girl in America
* Spotswood Rice - Escaped slavery to join the Union Army, then wrote to the owner of two of his children: "I offered once to pay you forty dollars for my own child, but I am glad now that you did not accept it. . . . Now you call my children your property. My children [are] my own and I expect to get them." He did eventually get them.
posted by flug at 1:12 AM on January 27, 2022 [24 favorites]
What amazes me more than anything is the degree to which the history of this large group of people who played a substantial role in building up this area, once the U.S. made it a state, has been almost completely erased.
You have a hard time finding a name of ANYONE who was an enslaved person. I have managed to find full names for maybe 5 people and first names for a couple of dozen - mostly from slave sales and a practice that, as near as I can tell, amounted to slave holders mortgaging their slaves for cash. To do that, a complete record of the property was registered with the county, and if that property was people the record included a lot of details about them, including age, gender, and name.
Graves - nearly all erased. I know of about 5 that are still marked, or even recorded. 2 or 3 of those are actually unmarked but a memorial has been added in the past couple of decades. Usually the slave and/or African American section of a cemetery is just an area off in some back corner with zero markers or records. As near as we can tell, a big chunk of the Black section of Kansas City's oldest cemetery, which has some hundreds of unmarked graves, is now under a nearby commercial development.
When you read histories of the era, you often come across a statement like "Only about 5% of the area's population were slaveholders." Minimizing the very existence of enslaved people in a way that is probably technically true in some particular way and that is designed to make (white) people feel better.
In fact, I don't believe I have found a single landowner or farmer in the county who do NOT own a few slaves. There was one large plantation around with some several hundred slaves, but most places had just a few - 2 or 5 or 9 or maybe 15. Every prominent or wealthy citizen I've encountered owned slaves. Yes, a lot of the poorer workers living in cities, or general townsfolk, didn't have the money to own slaves or a particular reason to own them (as farmers and larger landowners did), but they were not the leaders of the county by any means.
Prominent civic leaders were all slave owners - there must be the occasional exception, but I have yet to find one.
Census records carefully list each slave by gender, age, color, and owner. The name of the enslaved person, though, is completely absent. Not needed for anything, I guess.
And it turns out that just prior to the Civil War, enslaved people amounted to more than 17% of the county's population. If you look down the list of 1860 county census totals for Missouri, you seen plenty of counties where enslaved people make up more than 10%, 20%, 25% of the population. In a couple of counties, slaves make up very nearly 50% of the population.
My point here is that Missouri is not known as a great slave state. Histories minimize the number of both slave owners and enslaved people. Missouri stayed with the Union in the Civil War (sort of - it's complicated) and it isn't really known as a great Southern state.
Yet there is a rich history of the contributions of many, many thousands of enslaved people here that is almost entirely unrecorded and forgotten.
After the Civil War, many former slaves stayed where they were - not having many other options - but as near as I can tell over the next 10-20 years most found some opportunity or other elsewhere and moved on. Having no real fond memories of their time here, they left and never came back. (And who can blame them.)
Who was left to record the area's history? Descendents of the slave owners, of course.
Descendents of the enslaved people were scattered far and wide, with other things to worry about than gathering up the few remaining records of their family who had lived and worked here for a few decades before moving on.
So we have a big and important part of our local history that has been almost completely erased.
Since noticing this, I've kept my ear to the ground as best I can. Here are a few of the most interesting stories that I have come across:
- Hiram Young - purchased his freedom, then founded a company specializing in building yokes and wagons - providing tens of thousands of the yokes and wagons that carried emigrants across the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California Trails from the 1850s to the 1870s.
(This is a great story, but bear in mind that "Free Colored" represented less than 0.5% of the county's population while enslaved people represented over 17%. So inspiring and interesting but very unusual in many ways.)
- Arrow Rock's Hidden Black History - Arrow Rock was one of the starting points and key outfitting points on the Santa Fe Trail from the late 1820s. When you visit the (well preserved) village of Arrow Rock today, what you are seeing is to a large extent the high-quality handiwork of enslaved people.
- Sophie White - after the Civil War, Sophie stayed on the plantation where she had lived for more than 30 years, cooking for the household and selling meals to Santa Fe Trail travelers. Before long she had accumulated enough savings that she served as a bank for her former owners. The cabin where she lived still stands, a few yards from the historic route of the Santa Fe Trail.
- Simpson and Catherine Younger were aunt and uncle of the infamous Younger brothers of Quantrill's Raiders and the James-Younger Gang. Their father manumitted them at his death and left their mother Elizabeth a large farm near Osceola Missouri along with a significant sum of money to educate Simpson and Catherine. All three lived fascinating yet very difficult lives.
- The Federal Writer's Project Slave Narratives are filled with many fascinating stories - though unfortunately they must be read with some hefty filters nowadays as they often tell a lot more about their authors than the subjects. A few particularly interesting stories:
* Sim Younger (mentioned above)
* Esther Easter - probably a very typical story in many ways. She took some revenge on her mistress, who had a very heavy hand with the whip, by letting husband know about wife's dalliance with the neighboring farmer . . .
* Bill Simms - Civil War veteran who was a teamster for both the Union & Confederate armies during the conflict. A more detailed history of his life is here.
* Sarah Rector - richest black girl in America
* Spotswood Rice - Escaped slavery to join the Union Army, then wrote to the owner of two of his children: "I offered once to pay you forty dollars for my own child, but I am glad now that you did not accept it. . . . Now you call my children your property. My children [are] my own and I expect to get them." He did eventually get them.
posted by flug at 1:12 AM on January 27, 2022 [24 favorites]
flug, if you want to read more about slave-backed bonds, there's a section in The Half Has Never Been Told about them. (Sorry if you already have, but the way you describe the practice it sounds like you might not have.)
posted by praemunire at 10:27 AM on January 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by praemunire at 10:27 AM on January 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
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This was really moving.
Thank you so much for sharing this with us, channaher!
posted by kristi at 11:49 AM on January 26, 2022