Stagville: The Size of the Wound
Near Raleigh Durham, North Carolina
North of Durham on Old Oxford Road, a two-story brick structure stands in a grove of trees. It is about two hundred years old. It was built around eighteen fifty-one by enslaved hands for the purpose of housing enslaved people. The structure at Horton Grove is one of the only surviving two-story slave quarters in North Carolina. It is part of what was once the Bennehan-Cameron plantation complex, the largest antebellum plantation in the state.
The numbers are worth sitting with. Richard Bennehan purchased twelve hundred acres in seventeen seventy-six and began growing tobacco. His daughter married Thomas Ruffin. Their son Duncan Cameron married Rebecca Bennehan. Through marriage the holdings combined and grew. By eighteen sixty, the Bennehan-Cameron family held approximately thirty thousand acres spread across several counties and held approximately nine hundred enslaved people in bondage.
Paul Cameron, who inherited the combined holdings, was by eighteen sixty the wealthiest man in North Carolina.
During the antebellum period, hundreds of people from Stagville were force-marched to Hale County, Alabama, where Cameron established a second plantation. The march was not recorded in survivor testimony that survives in the accessible public record. What survives is the destination: another plantation, another generation of enslaved labor in a place that had nothing to do with the place these families had known.
After emancipation in eighteen sixty-five, many formerly enslaved families remained on or near the Stagville land. Their presence was continuous for more than a century. The last descendant with direct ties to Stagville's enslaved community, known as Ephraim Hart, left the Horton Grove site in nineteen seventy-five. A hundred and ten years after emancipation. Some families had never left.
Historic Stagville is now a state historic site. It preserves the Bennehan house, the Horton Grove quarters, and a barn, on about seventy acres. The rest of the thirty thousand is subdivisions and roads.
