Yards and Landscape

This row of houses are the only surviving slave dwellings from the Cameron plantations. Enslaved builders and masons built these houses in 1851. Enslaved families lived here from 1851 to 1865, and freed people lived in these houses long after emancipation.

In the 1850s, four enslaved families shared space in one of these buildings. As many as a hundred people may have lived in this row of houses. At dawn, almost every person over the age of 12 was forced out of these houses to work in the fields and workshops until dusk. Young children, elders, and injured or disabled folks were left behind to care for the houses and each other.

The community in these quarters refused to allow their living spaces to be confined by the designs of enslavers. Although each family had a room indoors, they created outdoor living spaces between these houses. These outdoor spaces were places enslaved people could design and shape for themselves.

They uprooted the grass in front of each house and created dirt yards. Each day, they swept the yard to keep it smooth and clear. These swept yards were an ancestral tradition rooted in West African practices. The swept yards discouraged mice and vermin from getting close to the houses. They also created an outdoor living and working space. Enslaved people used the swept yards for butchering, candle making, laundry, and any other task too dirty or hot to fit into the indoor rooms.  

But these swept yards were more than just working space. These yards were also community space, a place for enslaved people to gather together. These yards were spaces for friends and family to visit, places for prayer and for play, places to teach children, places to marry or mourn together. Any large gathering of enslaved people was forbidden by the Cameron family and their overseers, but enslaved people constantly found ways to subvert this.

Enslaved people at Horton Grove likely also created an outdoor cooking area. In the hot North Carolina summer, folks cooked outside as much as possible to keep the heat of the fires away from the houses. Here, this outdoor cooking may have also allowed enslaved people to share the work of cooking, or to pool food together for communal meals. Communal cooking and meals is also a West African cultural retention.

What is a West African cultural retention? When we talk about a cultural retention, we mean a piece of culture that was passed down from person to person and persisted even through enslavement. In many cases, these retentions might have had deep personal or family meaning, but they also were part of survival for enslaved Africans and African Americans. For example, cooking communally might have reflected the traditions of ancestors, but it also was an efficient way to share the labor of feeding families. Pooling limited ingredients together might have guaranteed a more nutritious, diverse diet for everyone in this community.

Another cultural retention here at Horton Grove might have been the food the cooks were cooking. These houses were surrounded by small garden patches, where enslaved families raised vegetables to add to their limited food rations of cornmeal and salt pork. Enslaved people often planted food for themselves on spare land beside their houses, or in the scraps of land with worst soil— in places that enslavers had written off as not profitable.

They planted foods like okra, field peas, and melons. All these plants were originally from western and central Africa, and were brought to North America through the slave trade. Enslaved people grew them and spread them to sustain their West African cooking traditions— but also as a simple means of survival.

These plants also happened to thrive in bad soil and in drought. An enslaved family could rely on them for food even in the harsh heat of July and August. An enslaved person who had little time to coddle the plants could still rely on the nutrition they would provide each summer.

Although this landscape might look quite different today, this history gives us a powerful way to remember how enslaved people shaped this landscape. The swept yards, cooking spaces, and gardens that were once around these houses would have shown the humanity, culture, and history of enslaved people every single day— in spite of the ways those in power fought to dehumanize enslaved people.