Poplar Grove Plantation: Peanuts, Enslavement, and the Gullah Geechee
Near Wilmington, North Carolina
North of downtown, out toward Scotts Hill, Poplar Grove Plantation sits on a low rise above the coastal plain. It is one of the few surviving antebellum plantations in the Cape Fear region, and it grew rich on something you might not expect: peanuts.
Most tidewater plantations in the Carolinas ran on cotton, tobacco, or rice. Poplar Grove was different. The Foy family, who owned the plantation from the late eighteenth century, built their wealth on ground peas, what we now call peanuts. The credit for that production belongs not to the Foys but to the enslaved men, women, and children who cultivated the crop. Peanuts were a West African food, brought across the Atlantic in the slave trade, and the knowledge of how to grow and process them came with the people who had grown them at home.
In eighteen sixty, dozens of people were enslaved at Poplar Grove, many of them children. The plantation's peanuts were sold to markets well beyond the Cape Fear. Historians trace the popularization of peanuts as an American snack food in part through the distribution networks built on enslaved labor here and on similar coastal plantations.
Poplar Grove sits within the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, a federally designated zone stretching from Pender County, North Carolina, to Saint John's County in Florida. The Gullah Geechee are the descendants of West and Central African people enslaved on isolated coastal plantations, and because of that isolation they preserved a remarkable amount of their original cultural heritage: language, music, sweetgrass basket weaving, foodways, spiritual traditions. The Gullah creole language, spoken nowhere else in the world, developed along these low-country shores.
Before eighteen ninety-eight, Wilmington had its own Junkanoo festival rooted in Gullah tradition. After the coup and massacre, many Black families fled Wilmington. John Canoe celebrations continue today in New Bern.
