Bennehan House

This white house was built for the Bennehan family early in this plantation’s history. While working as a storekeeper nearby in the 1770s, Richard Bennehan began to purchase enslaved people and land. He quickly profited from the forced labor of enslaved men, women, and children. In 1787, he purchased this hilltop from the Stagg family, and Bennehan ordered a house built here, at the place that he called Stagville. 

This grand house was the Bennehan family home from the 1790s until 1847. For the Bennehans, this building was a place of family, stability, luxury, and comfort. However, for enslaved people, this building was a site of hard labor, surveillance, anxiety, and danger. 

Enslaved cooks, nurses, and servants were forced to work in this house, constantly on call to attend to the Bennehans’ orders. As enslaved servants worked in the kitchen, stables, and yard, they knew the Bennehans could be looking out these large glass windows– surveilling them for any signs of resistance. As enslaved people cleaned the fine furniture of the Bennehan’s parlor, they knew that those luxuries had been purchased with profits from their families’ stolen labor and bodies. These same enslaved servants might have silently served food during dinner parties, all the while secretly listening in, gathering information to pass on to the enslaved community. 

Many of the surrounding trees were once cleared, so enslaved families nearby might have had a clear view up to the Bennehans’ house. Most enslaved people were forbidden to approach this house without their enslaver’s permission, but everyone who was enslaved here knew the power this building represented. Inside the walls of this house, the Bennehans might have negotiated deals to buy or sell human beings as property. Every enslaved person here knew that a single decision in the Bennehan house could sell a family, send loved ones away, or create new dangers for the enslaved community.