Horton Grove

Hi, welcome to Horton Grove. I’m Vera Cecelski, the site manager for Stagville State Historic Site. Horton Grove is the heart of our historic site. These buildings are original slave dwellings from the Bennehan and Cameron plantations. Richard Bennehan founded a plantation here in 1776. By the time his grandchildren, Paul and Margaret Cameron, inherited the plantation in the 1850s, their family enslaved over 900 people. This site at Horton Grove is one of many sections of this massive plantation complex. It’s extraordinarily rare to have surviving slave dwellings in the United States, and these buildings can teach us a great deal about the lives of enslaved people here at Stagville.

In this tour, you’ll hear me use words that focus on the humanity and agency of enslaved Africans and African Americans. This may mean I used different words than you are used to to talk about the history of American slavery. Instead of using the word “slave,” you’ll hear me say “enslaved person.” You may hear me say “enslaver” when you might have heard “slaveholder” or “owner” used before.

Look closely at the house in front of you. This building was built in the early 1850s by enslaved craftsmen. While most enslaved people here grew crops like corn, wheat, and rye, there were also many skilled craftsmen including: blacksmiths who made the hinges on these buildings, carpenters who shaped the boards, and brick masons who constructed the chimneys on the buildings. You can see the work of their hands and minds just in the detailed construction of this house.

Four families lived in this house in the 1850s. Each family had one room as their home-- parents, children, and maybe grandparents or cousins all shared this space. About 20 or 30 people lived in total in this house-- anywhere from 3 to 10 people living in each room. There was a fireplace in each room for light and warmth. Families made their own furniture and tools, or traded with other enslaved people for goods and supplies. 

From all the vast wealth and crops of this plantation, enslaved people were only issued very limited supplies from the plantation stocks—just enough for them to survive. Each family received a weekly ration of cornmeal and salt pork, and a yearly ration of rough cotton clothing.

Families here lived in fear of separation, sale, and violence, and these dangers were very real for families at Horton Grove. Overseers could search these houses at any moment. “Books were not allowed in the houses,” an enslaved boy named Morgan remembered. Enslaved people were also forbidden to leave the quarter at night. An enslaved man named Jim, who was found leaving his house after dark, was beaten and whipped by an overseer. 

But the enslaved community here found ways to use these buildings as places of refuge and resistance as well. You can imagine enslaved people gathering in this house in the dead of night to pass messages or share news they received from distant family members. Enslaved people in these buildings resisted slavery, day after day. They resisted by planning sabotage or by planning ways to get away from work or to reconnect with sold family. 

And families at Horton Grove probably had secret church services inside their houses, late at night or very early in the mornings, when overseers would not overhear and catch them. A girl named Mary remembered listening to her mother sing a hymn that went: “when our bondage it shall end, by and by, by and by.” They prayed “to be delivered from slavery,” remembered Morgan, “they prayed constantly for freedom.”

Horton Grove was a site of captivity and of forced labor, but enslaved people made these houses into a place to dream of freedom, even in the midst of enslavement.