plantations with slave quarters tours

North America
10 Notable Southern Plantation Tours...

8 Most Notable Southern Plantation Tours in the United States

History buffs with an interest in the southern part of the United States will enjoy these plantation tours. They offer insight into the history of slave labor, plantation living and how the south evolved into what it is today.

Oak alley plantation, vacherie, louisiana.

view at the mansion at the Oak Alley Plantation, Vacherie, United States

Located in Louisiana, Oak Alley Plantation was first a sugar cane plantation started by Valcour Aime, who purchased the property in 1830. He established an enslaved community who worked the plantation. Then in 1836, Jacques Roman acquired the Oak Alley property and began to build his own home on the plantation. Accomplished entirely by slave labor, his home was built in Greek Revival style using bricks made on site and marble shipped in by steamboat to construct the dining-room floor. The self-guided exhibit at Oak Alley focuses on the lives and living conditions of those who were owned and kept on the plantation. Visitors learn about life after emancipation and can stop by the Blacksmith Shop, which acts as a tribute to Louisiana craftsmen and the history of forging metalwork.

Oak Alley Plantation has been the filming site of popular media works, including the 1993 film, Interview With a Vampire, and Beyoncé’s 2006 music video for the song Deja Vu.

Belle Meade Plantation, Nashville, Tennessee

Historical Landmark, Architectural Landmark

What started as a single log cabin is now a plantation located outside of Nashville, Tennessee that serves as an educational resource. Founded by John Harding in 1807, “Belle Meade” translates to mean beautiful meadow in old English and French . It began as a 250-acre property that eventually became a 5,400 thoroughbred horse farm. It had a Greek Revival Mansion, a train station and a rock quarry that supported five generations of owners and their enslaved workers. Today the site retains 34 acres of the original property, including the mansion and original homestead. It is dedicated to the preservation of Tennessee’s Victorian architecture and equestrian history.

Visitors to Belle Meade Plantation enjoy a tour of the property led by trained and costumed guides, who share the history of the mansion, as well as many other historic buildings like a horse stable, carriage house and log cabin. Free wine tasting is offered at the site’s winery after tours, and there is a gift shop and restaurant for visitors as well.

Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, Charleston, South Carolina

Historical Landmark

A tree by the riverbank at the Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, Ashley River Road, Charleston, SC, USA

Back in 1676, Thomas Drayton and his wife Ann established the Magnolia Plantation along the Ashley River in South Carolina . The couple were the first in a line of Magnolia family ownership that has lasted for more than 300 years. During the Colonial era, the plantation saw immense growth due to the cultivation of rice. Once the American Revolution began, troops occupied the land and Drayton, along with his sons, became soldiers fighting the British. In 1825, Thomas Drayton’s great grandson willed the estate to his daughter’s sons, since he had no male heirs to leave the property to. One of the sons died of a gunshot wound, leaving the second brother a wealthy plantation owner at the age of 22. The American Civil War threatened the welfare of the Drayton family, the house and the gardens on the plantation. But the plantation recovered and saw additional growth of the gardens, which became the focus. The property was saved from ruin when it opened to the public in 1870. The plantation offers half-hour long guided tours taking visitors through the Drayton family home – the third in more than three centuries – and gives a glimpse of what plantation life was like in the 19th century onward. There are 10 rooms open to the public, furnished with antiques, quilts and Drayton family heirlooms. More than five years ago, Magnolia’s Cabin Project started as an effort to preserve five structures on the property that date back to 1850. The structures are former slave dwellings that are now the focal point for a 45-minute program in African American history .

Destrehan Plantation, Louisiana

The Destrehan Plantation in Louisiana was established in 1787. It is located 25 miles from downtown New Orleans. It was the home of successful sugar producers Marie Celeste Robin de Logny and her husband, Jean Noel Destrehan. By 1804, 59 enslaved workers inhabited the property, producing over 203,ooo pounds of sugar. The Destrehan Plantation was the site where one of the three trials following the 1811 Slave Revolt took place. It was led by Charles Deslondes, and was one of the largest slave revolts in U.S. history.

Visitors can tour the restored plantation, which is surrounded by lush greenery and looks over the Mississippi River. Stories of the Destrehan family and those who were enslaved are shared through guided tours, which also feature historic exhibits and the opportunity to participate in period demonstrations. Plantation tours also include access to the Jefferson Room, which displays an authentic document signed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

Nottoway Plantation, White Castle, Louisiana

The south’s largest antebellum mansion is Nottoway Plantation. Located in Louisiana northwest of New Orleans and southwest of Baton Rouge, Nottoway is a Greek and Italianate style mansion full of extravagant features and details. It was completed in 1859 and the construction was commissioned by prestigious sugar planter John Hampton Randolph. The mansion became home to John, his wife Emily Jane, and their 11 children. As a wealthy businessman, John wanted no expense spared when it came to the home’s design. The 53,000 square foot mansion has 64 rooms with features like 22 massive exterior columns, 12 hand carved Italian marble fireplaces, 15 1/2 foot ceilings and a lavish pure white oval ballroom. Modern bathrooms with running water and a gas plant that provided gas lighting throughout the home were also installed per John’s vision.

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John’s wish was for the mansion to be a place where he could entertain visitors in extravagant and elegant style. He wanted a home that would be admired by all, seen by river boaters on the Mississippi River or riders on a horse drawn carriage traveling on Great River Road. When you visit Nottoway Plantation today, costumed plantation tour guides take you through the mansion, sharing details of the property’s construction and history. Over the years, Nottoway Plantation went through several different owners and years of decline, but managed to survive the Civil War. This is a testament to the loving care that the mansion has received by those who are determined to keep its history alive.

Pebble Hill Plantation, Thomasville, Georgia

The original owner of Pebble Hill Plantation in Georgia was Melville Hanna, who acquired the property in 1896. In 1901, he gave the property to his daughter, Kate. She immediately began construction on Pebble Hill, hiring architect Abram Garfield, and was actively involved in the design process. The first building was a log cabin that served as both a school and a playroom for her children. Several of the buildings were neo-classical brick structures that include the Plantation Store, the Pump House, the Waldorf and the Stables Complex.

Kate was a humanitarian who provided many benefits to the employees who worked on the plantation. Over 40 families of employees lived in furnished cottages, the Visiting Nurse Association provided medical services for employees and their families, and two schools were built and maintained for employees’ children in grades 1-7.

After Kate’s death in 1936, her daughter Elisabeth “Pansy” inherited the plantation. She wanted it to become a museum, and in 1956 formed the Pebble Hill Foundation to make the property open to the public. After her death in 1978, the plantation became property of the Pebble Hill Foundation, which maintains and manages the estate today.

Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, Nashville, Tennessee

Located about 10 miles east of downtown Nashville, Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage offers self-guided audio tours and interpreter led tours of the former president’s estate. General admission plantation tours cover over 1,000 acres of farmland that used to be The Hermitage Plantation. The Hermitage was a self-sustaining property that relied on slave labor to produce cotton. President Andrew Jackson and his wife Rachel lived there for several years in the late 1700s. The Jackson family survived on profits made from the crops that the slaves worked every day. When he first bought The Hermitage in 1804, he owned nine African American slaves. At the time of his death in 1845, he owned about 150 slaves who lived and worked on the property.

Although slaves could not legally marry, Jackson encouraged his to form family units. This was a way to discourage slaves from trying to escape, since it would be more difficult for an entire family to safely flee.

Take a plantation tour of the Hermitage to walk through the mansion, the exhibit gallery and the grounds, where both President Jackson and his wife are laid to rest. Costumed tour guides will share the detailed history of the Jackson family, the plantation and the buildings and original belongings that remain on the property.

James Madison’s Montpelier, Virginia

Ambrose Madison, a planter and slaveholder in Virginia, along with his wife Frances and their three children, arrived in 1732 to a plantation they called Mount Pleasant. One of Ambrose’s grandchildren, James, spent his early childhood at Mount Pleasant while construction began on a brick Georgian house that would later become the center of James Madison’s Montpelier .

It was on this very land that James Madison contemplated ideas and shaped the United States as the country’s fourth president. With 2,650 acres of horse pastures, rolling hills and scenic views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, James Madison’s Montpelier offers insight into the Madison family history, and provides a deeper look into James Madison’s presidency . Just behind Mount Pleasant is the Madison Family Cemetery, where both James and Dolley Madison are buried.

Exhibits on the property include the 1910 Train Depot, which explores the African American struggle for civil rights . It opened in 2010 and is a permanent exhibit on the plantation. There’s also The Mere Distinction of Colour, which allows visitors to hear the stories of those who were enslaved at Montpelier, as told by their descendants. It recounts the events that took place at the Madison’s home, as well as the South Yard of the property, where the slaves lived and worked. The exhibition also explores how the legacy of slavery impacts race relations and human rights in modern America.

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HISTORY & LEGACIES

Whitney plantation, the plantation every american should visit, -national geographic.

THE WHITNEY INSTITUTE EDUCATES THE PUBLIC ABOUT THE HISTORY AND LEGACIES OF SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES

Whitney Plantation (legal name The Whitney Institute) is a non-profit museum dedicated to the history of the Whitney Plantation, which operated from 1752-1975 and produced indigo, sugar, and rice as its principal cash crops. The museum preserves over a dozen historical structures, many of which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Whitney Plantation Historic District.

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The 3 best new orleans plantation tours.

Learn about the Big Easy's role in slavery on one of these daytrips.

Best New Orleans Plantation Tours

Slave quarters with large bowls in front of the house

Courtesy of New Orleans Kayak Swamp Tours

Whitney Plantation's exhibits are largely devoted to the lives of the enslaved people who worked on the property hundreds of years ago.

Known for its Creole cuisine, Mardi Gras festivities and iconic architecture, New Orleans has something to offer every traveler, especially history buffs. The area's antebellum plantations offer a look at the lives of enslaved workers, how local landowners ran their farms using – and profiting off – the labor of the enslaved and how agriculture impacted New Orleans.

Picking the right tour means more than picking a plantation close to your hotel. (Many plantations are located within an hour's drive of the French Quarter .) You'll want to find a tour where first-person accounts depicting the brutal conditions enslaved workers had to endure are the focus. These stories help to provide a more complete picture of plantation life and provide context for why plantation owners were able to afford the luxurious mansions preserved on the property. Additionally, look for plantations that emphasize researching about the lives of enslaved workers, plantations that do not host weddings and those that employ descendants of former slaves.

Not sure where to start? Begin at Evergreen Plantation. This research-focused property is not open to the public, but you can explore its comprehensive website to learn more about the lives of the enslaved men, women and children who were forced to work on the plantation. Visitors can also peruse a slavery database, read biographies of slaves who labored at Evergreen and take a virtual tour.

Taking into account the above criteria – as well as traveler opinion and expert sentiment – U.S. News identified some of the top New Orleans plantation tours.

Gray Line – Whitney Plantation Tour

Price: Adults from $79; kids from $39 Duration: 5.5 hours

Opened to the public in 2014, Whitney Plantation offers a distinct look at the enslaved people who lived and worked at the site more than 200 years ago. This Gray Line tour, which lasts about 5.5 hours, allows access to museum exhibits, artwork and recorded first-person slave narratives. Reviewers say this tour is particularly powerful and important and describe it as a must-do activity. They also appreciate the bus drivers who share more tidbits of information on the drive to Whitney.

Tours depart Wednesday through Monday at noon and 1 p.m. Ticket prices start at $79 for adults and $39 for children 12 and younger. Gray Line offers other plantation tours, ghost tours, swamp tours and more.

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Two statues of enslaved children on front porch

New Orleans Kayak Swamp Tours – Whitney Plantation & Swamp Kayak Tour Combo

Price: From $195

Duration: 8 hours

Travelers say this daylong tour is a wonderful way to experience two must-do New Orleans attractions. Half the tour is a kayak trip through Manchac Swamp to see cypress trees and local wildlife while learning about the history of the area. The other half is a moving visit to Whitney Plantation, where the experiences of enslaved workers are the main focus. In between the activities, you'll stop for lunch (at your own expense).

Fees start at $195 per person, regardless of age, and tours begin at 9 a.m. Wednesday through Monday. Transportation to and from New Orleans (pickup is near Frenchmen Street) is included. The company says the paddle is suitable for beginner kayakers. It also offers kayak excursions through Honey Island Swamp, among other options.

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Legendary Tours – Laura Plantation Tour

Price: Adults from $79; kids from $45 Duration: 5.5 hours

Named for Laura Lucoul, a Creole member of the family who owned the plantation, Laura Plantation allows visitors not only to explore the lives of enslaved workers on the property, but to also learn more about Louisiana's Creole heritage. During this half-day outing with Legendary Tours, travelers will explore the plantation in depth, view slave quarters, see the great house and much more. Tourgoers commend their drivers and say the guides at Laura Plantation are excellent.

Tours last about 5.5 hours and operate Wednesday to Monday beginning at 10 a.m. (though keep in mind, transportation pickup starts at 8 a.m.) Tickets start at $79 for adults and $45 for children 5 to 12; kids 4 and younger explore for free. Fees include round-trip transportation from select areas of New Orleans. Legendary Tours also offers tours exploring other area plantations.

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Whitney Plantation Tour

Visiting the Whitney Plantation is a profound experience, shedding light on the history of slavery since its founding in 1752. The five-hour tour includes original slave cabins, exhibits of artifacts like clothing and tools, and old sugar cane fields. A chapel offers spiritual guidance for descendants of slaves. The Whitney Plantation provides an unparalleled glimpse into America’s past, educating visitors and honoring those impacted by the dark history of slavery.

Our Plantation tours

Front facade of whitney plantation near new orleans, la

Delve into the deep and powerful history of Whitney Plantation with our immersive tour. Engage with thought-provoking exhibits and well-preserved structures that vividly portray the lives and stories of the enslaved.

A front view of oak alley plantation near new orleans, louisiana

Oak Alley Plantation Tour

Uncover the rich history of Oak Alley Plantation on our exclusive tour. Stroll through the majestic oak-lined pathways and explore the grand mansion, surrounded by stunning landscapes that highlight the beauty of this iconic estate.

Laura alley plantation tour: historic house

Laura & Oak Alley Tour

Join us on a unique journey through the contrasting histories of Laura and Oak Alley Plantations. At Laura Plantation, experience the vibrant Creole culture and personal stories of its residents. Then, be awed by Oak Alley’s beauty.

What you'll See

Tour the “Big House,” the main residence on the plantation, where you can see the stark contrast between the lives of the enslaved and the opulence of the plantation owners. This grand house, with its lavish furnishings and architecture, starkly contrasts the simple and harsh living conditions of the enslaved. It provides a vivid context for understanding the social and economic dynamics of the plantation system, highlighting the disparities in wealth and power.

Antioch Baptist Church

Step inside the Antioch Baptist Church, a spiritual and historical landmark on the plantation. Originally built by former slaves, this church serves as a powerful symbol of faith and resilience. Visitors can reflect on the deep sense of community and hope that this sacred space provided to the enslaved and their descendants. The church also stands as a testament to the enduring strength and unity of the African American community in the face of adversity, preserving their cultural and spiritual heritage.

Historic Slave Cabins

Explore the meticulously preserved slave cabins that stand as poignant reminders of the harsh conditions endured by the enslaved people. These cabins, constructed with basic materials, provide a stark contrast to the grandeur of the plantation house, offering an immersive experience into the daily lives and struggles of those who lived and labored here.

Slave Revolt Memorial

The Slave Revolt Memorial at Whitney Plantation stands as a poignant tribute to the brave individuals who participated in the 1811 German Coast Uprising, the largest slave revolt in U.S. history. This powerful monument, crafted by artist Woodrow Nash, features hauntingly lifelike sculptures that evoke the courage and resilience of the enslaved men and women who fought for their freedom. The memorial offers visitors a deeply moving and educational experience, shedding light on a crucial yet often overlooked chapter of American history.

The Field of Angels

The Field of Angels at Whitney Plantation is a deeply moving memorial dedicated to the memory of the 2,200 enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish before the age of three. This installation, created by artist Rod Moorhead, features delicate angel sculptures symbolizing the lost lives of these innocent children. Each name inscribed on the granite slabs surrounding the field serves as a somber reminder of the harsh realities of slavery.

Exhibits & Artifacts

Whitney plantation tour: statues inside baptist church

HEAR FROM OUR CUSTOMERS

Hands down the best tour I’ve taken. Derek was a tremendous host/driver/tour guide. Gave great tips on food, restaurants, and day/night life. Would definitely recommend this tour company/driver. Very enriched history in Louisiana! Thank you Derek for your hospitality!

Super great tour at the Whitney plantation. Very informative. Incredibly moving as it actually goes into the history of the enslaved people that worked there. Our bus driver Larry was also really friendly and gave great commentary on the attractions and areas we drove through.

Very interesting tour of Whitney Plantation that gives you a complete enactment of life in those times. Tour bus driver/guide, Dwayne was an exceptional asset to the tour. Had an extremely courteous, informative, funny personality that enhanced the experience. He is a very knowledgeable person. Highly recommend it.

The best tour ever! Pick up was on time! Very convenient! They offer multiple pick up locations! We did Laura plantation + Oak Alley plantation! We had the absolute best driver Michelle! She was extremely knowledgeable & friendly! She made the drive feel short & sweet! The best driver ever!

Michelle picked us up promptly and treated us to NOLA history and places of interest during the ride. The Laura Plantation and Oak Alley Plantation are beautiful and full of history. The guides at both were wonderful story tellers. Highly recommend.

Derek picked us up on time and had so many helpful tips to give during our stay in NOLA. He was very knowledgeable about things to do and places to eat around the area. He kept us entertained during our travels to the tour and was a blast. The plantation was gorgeous with so much history. Highly recommend.

Why book with us?

Your safety is our top priority at Cajun Encounters. We adhere to the highest safety standards and regulations, ensuring that every tour is conducted with your well-being in mind.

Flexibility

For your convenience, we offer multiple pickup locations around New Orleans, including the most popular spots and hotels. This ensures that starting your journey is as easy and hassle-free as possible.

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Easy Pickup Locations

Oak Alley & Laura Plantation Tour

History of whitney plantation.

Whitney Plantation, located on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Wallace, Louisiana, stands as one of the most poignant historical sites in the United States. Founded in 1752 by Ambroise Haydel, a German immigrant, the plantation was initially established as a sugar plantation, a common venture in the region due to the favorable growing conditions for sugar cane. Over the centuries, Whitney Plantation evolved, witnessing significant changes and becoming a symbol of the deeply entrenched institution of slavery in the American South.

The plantation’s history is intricately linked to the labor of enslaved Africans and African Americans who worked its fields and maintained its operations. In its early years, the Haydel family owned and managed the plantation, relying heavily on enslaved labor to cultivate and process sugar cane. By the mid-19th century, the plantation had become one of the most prosperous in Louisiana, with extensive sugar cane fields and a large enslaved population.

The original layout of Whitney Plantation included the “Big House,” slave cabins, a church, and various outbuildings. The Big House, constructed in the late 18th century, stands as a testament to the wealth and opulence of the plantation owners, contrasting sharply with the stark conditions endured by the enslaved workers. The slave cabins, built of simple materials, provide a glimpse into the harsh living conditions that characterized the lives of the enslaved population.

A defining aspect of Whitney Plantation’s history is its role in the 1811 German Coast Uprising, the largest slave revolt in American history. Led by enslaved men and women seeking freedom and justice, the revolt began near New Orleans and involved hundreds of participants. Although ultimately suppressed, the revolt highlighted the intense resistance and desire for freedom among the enslaved population. Today, a memorial at Whitney Plantation honors the bravery and sacrifices of those who participated in the uprising.

In the years following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Whitney Plantation underwent significant changes. The plantation continued to operate, but the labor dynamics shifted dramatically. Sharecropping and tenant farming replaced the institution of slavery, bringing new challenges and hardships for African American workers. Despite these changes, the plantation remained an important agricultural site, contributing to the region’s economy.

In the late 20th century, Whitney Plantation began to transform from a working plantation to a historical site dedicated to preserving and interpreting the history of slavery. In 1999, John Cummings, a New Orleans attorney, purchased the plantation with the vision of creating a museum that would educate visitors about the realities of slavery in America. Under Cummings’ leadership, extensive restoration and preservation efforts were undertaken to maintain the plantation’s historic structures and landscapes.

Whitney Plantation officially opened to the public in 2014 as a museum and memorial dedicated to the enslaved. It is unique in its focus on the lives and experiences of the enslaved people who lived and worked there. The museum features exhibits that include oral histories, artifacts, and art installations that tell the stories of the enslaved individuals and their descendants. Memorials and sculptures throughout the plantation grounds honor the memory of those who suffered under slavery.

Today, Whitney Plantation serves as a powerful educational resource, drawing visitors from around the world. It provides an unflinching look at the history of slavery and its lasting impact on American society. By preserving this history and sharing the stories of those who lived it, Whitney Plantation plays a crucial role in fostering understanding, reflection, and dialogue about one of the darkest chapters in American history.

Whitney plantation image gallery

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An Ethical Guide to Plantation Tours

Middleton Place National Historic Landmark And America's Oldest Landscaped Gardens In Charleston SC.

Wormsloe is often cited as one of Savannah’s top attractions. A quick internet search describes it as a state park, famous for its avenue of oak trees dripping with Spanish moss, under which visitors line up to take pictures and even get married. Tripadvisor reviews call it “breathtaking,” “magical,” and “like a fairy tale.” You'd never know Wormsloe was actually a plantation that ran on the labor of enslaved people.

Many travelers approach plantations, a cornerstone of tourism in the South, as they would parks, museums, or historical sites: a beautiful place to learn something about local history before having a cocktail or going out to dinner. But plantations need to be experienced differently. Black people were enslaved, raped, tortured, and killed for hundreds of years on these lands. They are America’s concentration camps.

Rather than shy away from the painful truth, plantations must expose it. They are a vital educational resource with which to combat modern-day racism.

The institution of slavery “translates into virtually every kind of social and economic racial disparity that you might think of today in terms of education, net worth, health, and mortality,” says Bernard Powers, director of the Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston and consultant with Middleton Place plantation. “It’s one thing to hear that. It’s another thing to go to a plantation site where you can see where the deed was done, see the implements of oppression, see the chains.”

Plantations are uniquely equipped to offer such an impactful, immersive experience. If such tours no longer existed, Powers says, “we would be far closer to developing an amnesia about what happened in the past, and the way in which the past continues to dog us in the present.”

Visitors are surprised to hear from Toby Smith, the lead interpretive aide at Charleston ’s McLeod Plantation , that the descendants of people enslaved at McLeod continued to live there, occupying huts without running water, until 1990. “It begins to sink in how very recent this is,” she says. McLeod’s Black visitorship rose after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, though Black and white visitors alike are “looking for answers.”

Some people don't want to hear about slavery when they're “on vacation,” says Brigette Janea Jones, former director of African American studies at Nashville’s Belle Meade plantation. But the experience can be life-changing.

“For many people, they leave feeling much better than they came, that they faced their fears,” Smith says. However, plantation tours vary tremendously, which poses a problem for travelers as they try to choose which one to visit. Some plantations celebrate the white slave-owning family and the upper-class furnishings of the big house with no mention of the atrocities that occurred there. Others are dedicated to honoring the lives of enslaved people, or are imperfectly working toward that goal.

This quandary also applies to historic houses, colonial attractions, and other slavery-era sites that functioned like plantations, but perhaps don’t look like them at first glance. Savannah’s Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters is one of the oldest examples of urban enslaved people’s housing in the South—but it was only in 2018 that “slave quarters” was added to its official name. Because of that, and its city setting, most visitors don’t view it as a plantation, says Bri Salley, marketing and communications manager for Telfair Museums, whose properties include Owens-Thomas. Visitors come primarily to learn about architecture and decorative arts, but receive an education on slavery too, hearing letters from enslaved people about their experience as cooks and groundskeepers.

With so many different types of plantations out there, with ranging emphasis on the history of enslaved people, we’ve created this guide to help travelers navigate their decision-making process. Here are some considerations for your next trip.

Take plantation tours that center Black voices

An exhibit inside the church at Whitney Plantation, in Louisiana

Look for plantations that focus heavily on the lives of enslaved people and tell their first-person stories, but more than that, look for plantations that employ Black historians, tours guides, and administrators. Avoid whitewashed storytelling that aims to make the experience more palatable, like tours that revolve around the slave-owning family and the luxurious furnishings of the big house.

Brigette Janea Jones is a fifth-generation Tennessean whose family was enslaved in Tennessee, and she led a Journey to Jubilee tour during her time at Belle Meade plantation, a tour that focused on the lives of enslaved people. She recited narratives recorded from enslaved people, whom she viewed as her own family, and the experience was very emotional for her. Journey to Jubilee began as an exhibit in 2007, but “grew like wildfire” once the tour launched in 2018, and there was a subsequent push not to have such segregated tours as they had been operating before she launched this program.

Jones says part of the solution was to put more Black artifacts, like portraits of enslaved people, inside the big house to acknowledge their role there, instead of regarding it as a purely white space. “White people can do this work,” says Jones about curating an experience that amplifies Black voices. “But Black people should be doing it.”

Avoid plantations that host weddings

When Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds had their 2012 wedding at Boone Hall Plantation, in South Carolina, activists sounded the alarm on the decision. Since weddings are a reliable source of revenue, many plantations are reluctant to give it up, but the practice is both inappropriate and disrespectful, drawing parallels to throwing a birthday party at Auschwitz. Similarly, avoid plantations that promote honeymoon packages, girls getaways, or other recreational products that detract from a serious discussion of slavery.

For Pia Spinner, a descendant of people enslaved in Virginia and the education research assistant at Virginia’s Menokin plantation, this practice must stop industrywide. “No more plantation weddings,” she says, adding that while weddings did happen on plantations, those of enslaved people were often done in secret and went unrecognized. Menokin does not host weddings.

While the revenue may be tempting, a different business model is possible, says Joy Banner, director of communications at Whitney Plantation outside New Orleans . Whitney is famous for focusing exclusively on Black lives, and it does not host weddings or other events that detract from this mission. “There is opportunity to be honest and still have a sustainable business,” she says.

Look for the living descendants of enslaved people

Plantations should collaborate with the living descendants of people who were enslaved on the property. Descendants should have a say in how their family stories are told, how the property is managed, and how the organization interacts with the surrounding community.

Joy Banner is not just an employee at Whitney Plantation—she’s also a descendant of people enslaved on that very property, and she says that descendants are a crucial part of fulfilling Whitney’s mission. Besides herself, descendants occupy various other positions within the organization, including as interpreters and front desk staff.

“You’re gonna need to contact the descendant community,” says Janea Jones, advising other curators to collect the oral histories of descendants when developing their historic interpretations. In addition to working with Belle Meade in Nashville , Jones also worked with nearby Rippavilla plantation.

At Middleton Place, living descendants have joined the board of trustees and contributed valuably to the plantation’s storytelling, says Jeff Neale, director of preservation and interpretation. For years Middleton hosted separate reunions for Black and white descendants, until the first integrated one in 2006, a turning point says Neale, who joined Middleton in 2009. “From what I was told, people were a little worried, but it turned out to be an incredible experience.”

Large iron bowls used by enslaved people for boiling and refining sugar cane at Whitney Plantation

Ask about reparations

It’s ideal, though rare, for a plantation to give reparations to its living descendants, or allow descendants to have a say in how reparations are administered. Some plantations are working toward this, either in the form of direct monetary compensation or bolstering economic activity in the descendant community.

There’s an ongoing discussion at Menokin about compensating descendants, Spinner says. “I truly believe that all sites that want to work with the descendants of the people that they owned and benefitted from should compensate them.” McLeod is also considering compensating descendants, some of whom have visited and given feedback on the experience, says Smith.

“The descendants that contribute to the narrative of a plantation should be compensated,” says Banner of Whitney. “What that compensation looks like should be directed by the descendants.” She says plantations should make some kind of direct payout to descendants, though this has not been instituted at Whitney, and the pandemic put big collaborative projects like this on the back burner.

Direct payouts aside, Whitney has fostered some economic activity for the descendant community. Years ago Banner's sister opened a bakery near Whitney, and after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, the business closed. When Whitney opened to the public in 2014 and attracted visitors to the area, the business reopened as Fee-Fo-Lay Café , and it became a place where Whitney visitors could continue their conversations about slavery’s legacy. Descendants starting their own businesses is “the most powerful access that a plantation can give to a descendant community,” Banner says.

Broaden your view of when slavery happened

A view of the big house at McLeod Plantation, in Charleston

The story of slavery is not confined to a 250-year period. Plantation tours should discuss the lives of African people before the transatlantic slave trade, the fact that plantations were built on land taken from Indigenous peoples , and the links between slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, police brutality, and other current events.

For Spinner at Menokin, it’s important to acknowledge the murder and displacement of Native peoples to make way for plantations in the first place. “We do bring up the fact that this is Rappahannock land,” she says, adding that there are ongoing discussions about how to better include the tribe, honor its legacy, and have members use the land—to hold ceremonies, for example.

“Our Native American brothers and sisters were here first,” says Smith of McLeod. On her tours, she also traces enslaved people back to their lives on the African continent. She takes visitors down to Wappoo Creek and goes backward in time, by river to the Port of Charleston, by ocean back to Africa, and that opens up a discussion about the diversity of languages and cultures there. This topic is particularly personal for Smith. When her great-great grandmother was a young girl, she was taken away from her family in what is now Ghana, and brought to the United States. Smith says she mourned this familial loss. “Tell the story of who they were before they were captured,” she says. “America only knows Black people as captured.”

Last but not least, it’s crucial to connect the past to the present. Plantations should explain how slavery gave way to rampant lynchings during the Jim Crow era, alongside which police brutality flourished, long before the Black Lives Matter movement of today. During this time, countless George Floyds were killed, many of whose deaths did not spark nationwide protests.

Honest storytelling is fundamental to this entire effort, says Banner of Whitney. “If we are true to what the plantation was about, the difficulty of the labor that was involved, the system of slavery that kept people in prison on this land, rather than treating it like it’s this beautiful southern resort that was just magical for everybody, then we will be able to contribute a huge amount of progress toward racial healing.”

For more information

Whitney Plantation: 5099 Louisiana Highway 18, Edgard, LA 70049; whitneyplantation.org McLeod Plantation: 325 Country Club Drive, Charleston, SC 29412; https://ccprc.com/1447/McLeod-Plantation-Historic-Site Menokin Plantation: 4037 Menokin Road, Warsaw, Virginia 22572; menokin.org

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Drive Yourself Laura Plantation: Louisiana's Creole Heritage Site Tour

Explore laura plantation's creole history.

At Laura: A Creole Plantation (1805), step beyond the myths of the American South and walk in the footsteps of 4 generations of one Louisiana Creole family, both free and enslaved. Visit this historic sugar farmstead and experience what has been called the "the best history tour in the U.S."

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DRIVE YOURSELF to the plantation and join our next available guided walking tour.
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First-hand, intimate accounts of owners, women, children and slaves.
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Booking Details

Once purchased please make sure to have your confirmation number available on your mobile device to begin your tour. Directions are listed above from New Orleans to each plantation and then back to the city. Parking is available at the plantations.

Arrival Details: Upon arrival at Laura, proceed to the admissions desk to check in. Plantation ticket office opens at 9:30AM and the first tour is at 10:00 AM with the last tour at 3:20 PM.

Duration: The guided (walking) tour of the main house, gardens and slave quarters lasts approximately one hour and fifteen minutes. *Note that self-guided tours are prohibited.

Parking: Public parking is available at the plantation.

Cancellation Policy: No refunds will be given on the voucher unless plantations are closed. If the plantation is closed for weather, please call us at 225-265-7690 to make other arrangements. Transportation is not provided for this tour so please be sure you have transportation before booking. You must have your voucher available to show at the gate on your smartphone or device. Online tickets are non-refundable, however, tickets are valid up to 30 days from the date of purchasing the tickets.

Groups: We do not take reservations for groups of fewer than 20 persons. For groups of 20 visitors or more, reservations are mandatory. See: Information for Groups. For smaller groups (10-19 persons), it is highly recommended that you call in the morning so we can offer you our best service and availability for that day. If you are less than 10 persons you do not need to call.

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Plantation tours bypass the ‘big house’ to focus on the enslaved

Deep Read ( 10 Min. )
By Noah Robertson Staff writer
Lindsey McGinnis Correspondent

Updated Jan. 28, 2021, 9:09 a.m. ET

For over a century, the history of American slavery has been insufficiently and inaccurately told, typically privileging the enslavers over the enslaved. But efforts to correct the record are underway on former plantations from Wallace, Louisiana, to Medford, Massachusetts. Some sites no longer include the manor house in their tours, sharing details instead about the lives of the enslaved people.

“We are the stewards of spaces that can offer answers,” says Michelle Lanier, director of the North Carolina Division of State Historic Sites and Properties. “There’s a grand healing that I think is attempting to emerge through our nation’s greatest wound.”

Why We Wrote This

By portraying slavery accurately and inclusively, some former plantations are doing their part to combat racial injustice. They hope letting the past inform the present will help heal “our nation’s greatest wound.”

At the former plantation of President James Monroe in Virginia, descendants of the enslaved are helping to right the record. “The true, deep-down hope is that this could be a roadmap to something bigger that our whole country can get behind,” says Jennifer Stacy, a member of the site’s Council of Descendant Advisors.

Meanwhile, at the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Massachusetts, Executive Director Kyera Singleton is working to expand the site’s role in social justice work by helping people learn from the past. “This history of injustice ... will keep happening if we don’t actually confront systemic inequalities and racism in this country,” she says.

Beside the long path to the Wappoo Creek stand symmetrical rows of Southern live oaks, arranged like the pillars of a temple. Down the dirt road below, shaded by the leaves and long beards of Spanish moss, Toby Smith leads her first tour of the morning to the Wappoo’s marshy banks. Then she asks them to look right.

Miles away, past mud flats, fishing boats, and the Ashley River, sits Charleston, South Carolina. If they drifted on the water for about an hour, they’d hit the city harbor. If they floated past for another three months, she says, they’d arrive on the West Coast of Africa.

That’s how Ms. Smith says she starts her tours of McLeod Plantation Historic Site, where she’s worked as a guide for the past two years. Her trip to the milky green waters of the Wappoo Creek is a regular pilgrimage, designed to help visitors imagine the journey of enslaved Africans who once stood on the same land. Starting near the water, she says, lets the tour walk in their footsteps.

For the next hour, Ms. Smith explains in a phone interview, she guides her group through the plantation grounds and lets them ask questions about its 37 acres. They pass the cramped slave quarters and palatial manor house. They pause at the slave cemetery and walk into the fields of sea island cotton, still growing. Inside the cotton gin house, they gaze at small dimples in the walls. Some days, Ms. Smith lets the group know that those are fingerprints left by enslaved children who hand-molded the bricks.

“We are walking on the blood, sweat, and tears of real human beings,” she often tells visitors. “That has a very profound impact on people. ... Sometimes you don’t have to say anything. It’s just the presence.”

McLeod is among a growing number of sites that recognize the power of that presence. Its vision is to interpret the legacy of slavery, where slavery took place. Behind that, the focus is a recognition that the history of American slavery has been insufficiently and inaccurately told, often privileging the enslavers over the enslaved. Gradually, that’s changing as historians acknowledge that every life on plantations like McLeod mattered.

Reconstructing the lives of enslaved people is difficult, but from Wallace, Louisiana, to Medford, Massachusetts, many sites on the ground zero of slavery are accepting their role in that effort. Recent calls for racial justice have demanded a reckoning with wrongs that date back centuries. Places like McLeod harbor that history – and with it hope for catharsis.

“Basically we’ve been miseducated”

For many Americans, that wound has grown more painful with the way it has historically been taught, says Derrick Alridge, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and Human Development.

Dr. Alridge recently chaired Virginia’s Commission on African American History Education, charged with auditing the state’s efforts to teach Black history. Released last August, its 80-page report identifies faults endemic to curricula across the country.

Long dominant have been so-called master narratives, which teach American history through the lives of U.S. presidents or other “great men.” People of color – and especially African Americans – are often segregated into sections that cover only “messianic figures,” like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Regular Black Americans, including enslaved people, are rarely given space.

“You can’t erase history. You can ignore it, which is something we’ve done for centuries,” says Jody Allen, an assistant professor of history at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. “There’s a real understanding that basically we’ve been miseducated in this country.”

Understanding the legacy of slavery, says Professor Alridge, is crucial to addressing its impacts today. Connecting historical dots – from the Black Lives Matter movement to the civil rights movement to abolition – puts the present in context and makes history real, he says.

At a place like McLeod, where that history is as real as it can get, the stakes for getting it right are high.

Bypassing the “big house”

Just as the historical narrative has traditionally focused on the owning class, plantation museums have orbited the “big house,” says Shawn Halifax, cultural history interpretation coordinator for the Charleston County Park & Recreation Commission, which runs McLeod.

Typically, visitors marvel at the opulent homes of slave owners, he says, while enslaved people are treated as footnotes. “The furnishing of these former dwellings oftentimes tends to create a type of nostalgia, which is the very thing that through our interpretation we’re trying to move beyond,” says Mr. Halifax.

At McLeod, the big house is empty, and the tour does not take visitors inside. Interpreters teach about William Wallace McLeod – the plantation’s owner and a Confederate soldier – but they focus on the 100 or so people enslaved on the site, telling their stories and saying their names.

More than 800 miles southwest, Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, takes the same approach. Before the pandemic, the former sugar cane plantation attracted around 100,000 visitors each year, says Executive Director Ashley Rogers.

It, like McLeod, teaches slavery from the perspective of enslaved people and will soon empty its big house. “We’re trying to use this plantation as a vehicle to get people to understand the system of slavery more broadly,” says Ms. Rogers.

One way they do that is by making sure Whitney’s history speaks to today. Only two of the original 22 slave quarters are still standing, but they aren’t relics. After the Civil War, many of Whitney’s enslaved people had little choice but to keep farming sugar cane and living in their same quarters. Some of their descendants stayed until 1975.

“Our entire point of what we’re trying to do is to teach people about the past so that they understand the present,” says Ms. Rogers. “If history doesn’t have an impact that you can still feel, then it’s just an interesting story.”

Seeing today through the lens of yesterday

Sometimes the past and the present collide.

Jennifer Stacy grew up near Charlottesville, Virginia, about 10 miles from Highland, the plantation of President James Monroe. Her family used to drive past the site on their way into town, and she would read the sign: Home of James Monroe. She knew about slavery, and she knew her grandfather was also a Monroe. Even as a girl, she sensed the two were somehow connected.

Decades later, Ms. Stacy learned that she’s a descendant of Ned Monroe, an enslaved man at Highland who helped build the University of Virginia. Three years ago, she joined the estate’s newly formed Council of Descendant Advisors , a group of 10 descendants who advise the site on its efforts to tell a fuller story.

“It’s now shared authority, where the goal is to reinterpret the history there and to get it right,” Ms. Stacy says. “The true, deep-down hope is that this could be a roadmap to something bigger that our whole country can get behind and start doing, because it is who we are.”

Highland, like other plantation sites across the country, is researching the lives of those enslaved on its land – constructing genealogies, reviewing oral histories, and panning streams of centuries-old documents. The task, though, requires swimming against the currents of history. Researchers engaged in this work often face a dearth of primary sources, low funds, and small staffs.

This is especially true in the North.

Records show slavery is central to Northern states’ histories. Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and other influential figures in the North who supported abolition owned slaves, and New England colonies played a critical role in the transatlantic slave trade. There were enslaved people in every Rhode Island township, historians say, and local merchants bankrolled more than 500 voyages to West Africa during the Colonial period. All the other colonies combined sent 189.

But Americans’ postbellum memory associates slavery almost exclusively with former Confederate states. Research on slavery outside the South is thin, and long-held notions of Northern heroism can chill attempts to learn more.

Correcting the record

“There is this great desire for people to want us to have made greater strides, but we are working against 50-plus years of America’s educational system,” says Lavada Nahon, interpreter of African American history for the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

While many sites in the North are adopting an approach similar to Whitney’s or McLeod’s, rediscovering an entire state’s role in slavery is a massive effort in historical forensics.

Artifacts have been mislabeled and misinterpreted, and important history has been lost in translation. In New York, this could mean translating early documents from Dutch to English or interpreting confusing terminology – a recent paper published by the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany argues that the “servants” listed in Alexander Hamilton’s cash book were actually enslaved people. Even cursive handwriting can challenge the newer generation of historians.

“It is not as if we are choosing not to honor our ancestors,” Ms. Nahon says. “It is time-consuming work.”

It’s also work that evolves. Heidi Hill, historic site manager at Schuyler Mansion, says the site has been compiling research on free and enslaved Africans since the 1980s. They’ve long incorporated names, numbers, and the type of work enslaved people did into their tours and other events.

“But now we’re asking different questions,” says Ms. Hill. “Who were these people? Where did they come from? Who were their family members? How did they connect?”

Piecing together the lives of enslaved people

When communicating with a largely miseducated public, making the historical narrative more inclusive requires a powerful commitment.

Kyera Singleton heard about the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts, at a conference in 2019. She’d grown up in the Northeast, studied slavery, and still had no idea there were freestanding slave quarters in the North. But while the scholar in her wanted to visit, Ms. Singleton had a familiar fear: that the history would be whitewashed and the trip would be more painful than illuminating.

Still, she decided to go and soon learned that the site had undergone a dramatic rebranding in 2005, bringing enslaved people into focus.

“Every room that we went in, we talked about the enslaved people,” she says. “It shows that their names matter, their lives matter, their history matters.”

Ms. Singleton was so impressed that she applied to work at the museum, and since April of last year, she has served as executive director. In her new role, Ms. Singleton is eager to uncover how the enslaved people who lived at the site experienced slavery, resisted it, and advocated for their freedom – a challenging mission that includes archaeological and archival research, partnering with universities, and a lot of guesswork.

“You might not find all of the information that you want,” she admits. “And that’s a part of the cruelty of history in many ways – whose lives were deemed important enough to document versus those whose lives were deemed unimportant.”

The paucity of first-person accounts of slavery has long been an excuse to avoid difficult conversations, says Cordell Reaves, historic preservation programs analyst for New York’s Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

“That is … a terrible disservice to the general public,” he says. “[Visitors] can be engaged in having a conversation around ongoing research, even if we are not absolutely certain about the outcome.”

Lately, Ms. Singleton has been working to increase the visibility of the Royall House and Slave Quarters, hoping to expand the site’s role in present-day social justice movements by helping communities understand that last year’s assaults against Black people, including by the police, were not unique.

“This history of injustice has been happening long before 2020,” says Ms. Singleton. “It will keep happening if we don’t actually confront systemic inequalities and racism in this country.”

Interrupting the cycle of history

The country has chosen not to confront the history before, and the history repeats. Generations come; generations go. The next sometimes forgets the last.

But places like McLeod remember, says Ms. Smith, the interpreter near Charleston.

Her tour ends, she says, at the Wisdom Oak, thought to be at least 200 years old. Ms. Smith asks her group to imagine what memories are caught in its branches.

Ms. Smith tells her group that she is a direct descendant of slaves, some of whom may have lived just 20 miles from McLeod. Her great-great-grandmother Idella was taken from modern-day Ghana in the 1840s, after the slave trade was illegal in America. Ms. Smith is alive today because Idella survived that voyage at the age of 8, mourned her losses alone, and started a family, living until 1941.

This work is “a way for me to keep them alive, share their memories, and also to give them a measure of honor and dignity that they never had in life,” says Ms. Smith.

Then, at the roots of the Wisdom Oak, she tells her group about a visitor to McLeod six years ago. A month before Dylann Roof killed nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, he visited McLeod and took pictures of himself there.

“People physically recoil at the fact that he was on the property,” says Ms. Smith. “But it gives us an opportunity to talk about hatred and why we cannot let hate end the conversation.”

There’s no agenda, no judgment, no attempt to sanitize what went on then or now, she says. It’s just a moment to pause, to acknowledge the pain, and to ask what they’ll do about it.

Maybe listen – to each other, or the ancient oak above them.

“Ultimately, we hope that it could be a place always of conversation and healing,” says Ms. Smith, “and people will leave better than when they came.”

Walter Houston Robinson contributed to this report.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the title of Whitney Plantation Executive Director Ashley Rogers and the spelling of Derrick Alridge.

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Whitney Plantation Tour

5 hours and 25 minutes

A personal look into the lives of owners and enslaved people in antebellum Louisiana.

In 2014, the Whitney Plantation opened its doors to the public for the first time in its 262 year history as the only plantation museum in Louisiana with a focus on slavery. Through museum exhibits, memorial artwork, restored buildings, and hundreds of first-person narratives, visitors to Whitney will gain a unique perspective on the enslaved people who lived and worked here.

The early owners of Habitation Haydel, later known as The Whitney Plantation, became wealthy producing indigo before the plantation transitioned to sugar in the early 1800s. Whitney is also significant because of the number of its historic outbuildings which were added to the site over the years, thus providing a unique perspective on the evolution of the Louisiana working plantation.

The Big House is one of the finest surviving examples of Spanish Creole architecture and one of the earliest raised Creole cottages in Louisiana. Although a limited portion of the original tour, the house is undergoing renovations in 2021 and it is not currently open.

The Whitney Plantation Historic District is on the National Register of Historic Places. As a site of memory and consciousness, the Whitney Plantation Museum is meant to pay homage to all enslaved people on the plantation itself and to all of those who lived elsewhere in the United States.

On your journey to this historic setting, you'll also have the opportunity to enjoy a panoramic view of Lake Pontchartrain as you cross the Bonnet Carre Spillway (the flood outlet of the Mississippi River). Travel past Laura, Oak Alley, Evergreen, Felicity & St. Joseph Plantations, ghosts of the past that front the Mississippi River, where rich crops of sugar cane, cotton, and indigo from these fertile lands once traveled to ports of trade.

What's included?

Entry or admission fee
Entrance fees
Round-trip transportation from the French Quarter
Audio Tour Experience Via Whitney Plantation App
Food and drinks
Gratuities (optional)
Hotel pickup and drop-off (must meet at 400 Toulouse Street)

Please note

Confirmation will be received at time of booking
Check-in is 15 minutes prior to start time.
The Whitney Plantation is a self-guided tour. Please make sure to download the Whitney Plantation app on your cell phone, tablet, or iPad to listen to an audio tour.
If the guest needs a wheelchair lift equipped bus, then special arrangements need to be made with the supplier. This must be arranged 48 hours prior to tour date. Contact details will be on your voucher.
Guests visiting Whitney using a wheelchair will have access to the gift shop, restrooms, and museum. The plantation grounds are accessible; however, there are uneven gravel paths. The main house tour is not accessible to guest traveling in wheelchairs and is not required to be modified as it is a historic home; however, the first floor is accessible. Guests would be able to view the slave quarters, but would not have access to enter.
You can present either a paper or an electronic voucher for this activity.

The Whitney Plantation is a self-guided audio tour experience. Please make sure to download the Whitney Plantation app on your cell phone, tablet, or iPad to listen to an audio tour.

What to bring

contact info, (504) 569-1401, [email protected], gray line new orleans, 400 toulouse st new orleans, la 70130 usa, useful links, let's connect.

Whitney Plantation: Tour of an American Slavery Museum

By: Author Dave Lee

Posted on Last updated: October 7, 2021

In planning my third trip to New Orleans , going on a Whitney Plantation tour was high on my to-do list.

I wanted my first southern plantation experience to be more than a photo-op.

The Whitney Plantation is the first museum dedicated to American slavery.

The 2,000-acre sugar plantation dates back to 1752 when it was developed by German immigrants Ambroise Haydel and his wife.

According to the plantation's website , it stayed in their family for 115 years, before being “sold to Bradish Johnson, a major businessman and plantation owner with roots in Louisiana and New York.”

Fast forward to the early 2000s, and John Cummings, a successful lawyer from New Orleans, purchases the property as a real estate investment.

Over time, he realizes how little he knows about the history of the slaves who once worked on such properties.

And as he learns more, he decides to invest millions of dollars of his own money into turning the plantation into a museum honoring their experience.

Table of Contents

The Antioch Baptist Church

The children of whitney, the wall of honor, allées gwendolyn midlo hall, the field of angels, the slave quarters, robin's blacksmith shop, the kitchen, the big house, getting to whitney plantation, whitney plantation tour.

The Whitney Plantation opened in December 2014.

Unlike most plantation tours that focus on the large houses of the owners, the Whitney Plantation tour is given from the slaves' perspective.

Visitors meet their guide in the Welcome Center, which also serves as a tasteful gift shop, primarily offering books on slavery.

The 90-minute walking tour begins with a visit to the Antioch Baptist Church, which was built in 1870 on the eastern side of the Mississippi River.

Slaves would come from nearby plantations to worship there.

The church was donated and relocated to the Whitney after its community opened a new, larger one in 1999.

Walking inside the historic wooden structure, one's attention is drawn to the lifesize sculptures of child slaves.

Their innocence and vacant eyes evoke empathy.

“ The Children of Whitney , a series of sculptures by Ohio-based artist Woodrow Nash , represent these former slaves as they were at the time of emancipation: children.”

The children bring the space to life in a way I've never experienced in a museum before. We would see more of them as the tour continued.

Next, we visited The Wall of Honor, which memorializes stories from the 350 slaves who worked on the Whitney Plantation.

Etched into the granite slabs, in their own words, are horrific, heartbreaking accounts of their treatment.

My words certainly won't do these stories justice, so I took a few photos to share here.

“The most crue master in St. John the Baptist Parish during slavery time was a Mr. Valsin Mermillion. One of his cruelties was to place a disobedient slave, standing, in a box, in which there were nails placed in such a manner that the poor creature was unable to move. He was powerless even to chase the flies or sometimes, ants crawling on some parts of his body.” — Mrs. Webb, Louisiana Slave

“We jus' have co'n braid and syrup and some times fat bacon, but when I et dat biscuit, she comes in and say, ‘What dat biscuit?' I say, ‘Miss, I et I's so hungry.' Den she grab dat broom and start to beatin' me over de head wid it and callin' me low down nigger and I guess I jes' clean lost my head 'cause I know'd better fan to fight her if I knowed anything ‘tall, but I started to fight her and de driver, he comes in and he grabs me and starts beatin' me wid dat cat-o'-nine tails, and he beats me 'till I fall to de floor nearly dead. He cut my back all to pieces, den dey rub salt in de cuts for mo' punishment, I's only 10 years old.” — Jenny Proctor

Following The Wall of Honor, we had a few minutes to walk through a memorial to the 107,000 Africans enslaved in Louisiana during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The memorial is named after Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a historian, teacher, and author who compiled a database known as “Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719-1820.”

The black granite walls are filled with more names, stories, and images of the enslaved.

See also: Zanzibar's Prison Island in Tanzania

The Field of Angels recognizes the 2,200 slave children born in St. John the Baptist parish between 1823-1863, many of whom died before their second birthday.

Most were buried on the grounds of the plantation; some were buried in the cemetery of a nearby Catholic church.

“Death rates on Louisiana’s cane plantations were relatively high compared to cotton or tobacco plantations. Many of the children honored at this memorial died of diseases, but some of them died under tragic circumstances such as being hit by lightning, drowning, or burning.” — Whitney Plantation website

The striking statue at the center of the memorial is “Coming Home” by Rod Moorehead. It depicts a black angel carrying a baby up to heaven.

The Whitney originally had 22 cypress slave cabins.

However, in the 1970s, all but two were destroyed to make more room for larger trucks and more modern harvesting equipment.

Some of the family owners, who were focused on selling the property rather than preserving it, believed the value would increase as a result.

The rest of the cabins visible on the Whitney Plantation were purchased from the Myrtle Grove Plantation.

The Children of the Whitney make another appearance on the porch of a slave cabin.

This particular cabin had a wall in the middle, splitting the single building up for use by two or more people.

Each side had a fireplace, a bedroom, and what appeared to be a sitting room.

Constructed in Pennsylvania in 1868, this rusty metal jail was donated to the Whitney by a Louisiana couple.

The metal box, about the size of a shipping container, would have been used to hold slaves who were caught trying to escape.

It is similar in design and appearance to what was used during slave auctions, as well.

As the Whitney Plantation tour continued, we passed by Robin's Blacksmith Shop.

According to a plaque, Robin was an enslaved man born in 1791 on the east coast of the U.S.

His job was to provide all the metalwork for the plantation, including “horseshoes, nails, hinges, and curtain rods.”

Built in the early 1800s, Whitney's kitchen is the oldest detached kitchen in Louisiana.

Here, a slave was responsible for cooking all the meals for the plantation owner's family.

Pigeon holes were cut in the roof so that the loft could be used as an additional pigeonnier (a space created for pigeons to nest).

Last but not least, we walked from the kitchen to The Big House, where the plantation owners lived.

The house was rebuilt in its current form sometime before 1815, making it a little over 200 years old.

It's an excellent example of Spanish Creole architecture.

Front view of The Big House, which is the last stop on the Whitney Plantation tour

Each floor has seven rooms. However, the guided tour only passes through the dining room in the middle of the ground floor.

There's not much to see. I found it the least interesting part of the experience.

Overall, I found the effort to present plantation life from the slaves' perspective to be a success.

Walking the grounds where so many indentured men, women, and children toiled without choice, were mercilessly tortured, and sexually abused is a heavy experience.

The investment in bringing a church, slave cabins, and original artwork to the grounds has paid off.

The Children of the Whitney, especially, give faces to the names and stories.

Seeing them throughout the tour reminds you what happened there was real, not some abstract history lesson.

There's no public transportation from New Orleans to the Whitney Plantation, so the easiest thing to do is sign up for a tour, which includes roundtrip bus transportation (from the French Quarter) and admission for a guided tour.

I went in partnership with Gray Line , which sells adult tickets for $69. Children age 6-12 cost $35 each.

The whole trip takes five hours. To make a full day of it, you can add a second plantation for an additional cost.

I also visited Oak Alley Plantation, where the focus is on the owners' home and oak trees. It's a beautiful property, and there are some slave cabins to see; however, the impact wasn't the same.

If you have a car and prefer to visit Whitney Plantation independently, it's recommended you buy your tickets in advance. Adult admission is $25; children age 6-18 are $11 each.

Where to Stay in New Orleans: The Quisby is centrally located in the Garden District, a 15-minute walk from the French Quarter. Free breakfast, an on-site bar open 24/7, and dorms starting at just $18 are a few of the reasons to stay here. Click here to check availability

My trip to New Orleans was in partnership with New Orleans & Company and The Quisby; this tour was provided compliments of Gray Line.

Dave is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Go Backpacking and Feastio . He's been to 66 countries and lived in Colombia and Peru. Read the full story of how he became a travel blogger.

Planning a trip? Go Backpacking recommends:

G Adventures for small group tours.
Hostelworld for booking hostels.

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Tours & Day Passes

VISITOR INFORMATION

GUIDED TOUR SEASON

May 1 ~ October 31

Thursdays ~ Sundays 10am ~ 3pm

Tours on the Hour. Last Tour at 2pm

Tour Admission :

$10 adults, $8 students/seniors

Members Free

Children under 5 Free

BOOK GUIDED TOUR HERE

~ additional visitor information below ~

——–

Another Great Way to

Enjoy & Explore Mount Harmon!

Available Daily 9am ~ 5pm

Year Round (weather permitting)

BOOK DAY PASS HERE

Explore and enjoy Mount Harmon’s beautiful and historic grounds, gardens, picnic areas, miles of scenic nature trails and 200-acre waterfront Nature Preserve.

Grounds, Gardens & Nature Preserve Access Only

(historic buildings/tour not included)

Day Pass Admission:

$10 adults, $8 students/seniors.

You will receive e-confirmation good for admission.

Please have printed or digital copy ready to present upon request.

Many thanks for following our L eave No Trace Guidelines.

Well behaved dogs on leashes welcome on grounds with leave no trace rules.

Click Here for Day Pass Preview Video

Did you Know?

Mount Harmon is not state or federally funded, so is dependent upon revenue generated by tours, day passes, memberships, special events, grants, contributions, bequests, and sponsorships.

Thank you for your support for Mount Harmon,

an important heritage destination for our community and region.

———–

SPECIAL GROUP TOURS

By Appointment

March ~ November

(Advanced Reservations Required)

Click Here to email us about Group Tours!

Special Group Tours are available for groups of 8 or more, March through November, and made by advanced reservation. Special Group Rate: $8/person.

Special Group tours: include guided tour of our historic manor house, colonial kitchen, smoke house, and quarters, as well as self guided tours of boxwood garden and grounds, and can be customized to suit special interests of your group.

We also offer special living history and nature add-on programs for special groups, such as hearth cooking, spinning/weaving demonstrations, colonial life and trades, guided nature walks, and hay wagon rides for an additional fee.

Tour visitors are welcome to enjoy our beautiful grounds and nature trails after the tour, and to bring a picnic to enjoy at our scenic picnic areas.

Interested in booking a special group tour, email [email protected] .

Bring Friends & Family to enjoy Mount Harmon.

We look forward to welcoming you!

More About Visiting Mount Harmon:

Visitors can enjoy Mount Harmon’s history and natural beauty in two fun ways!

Guided Tours May 1 ~ October 31 and Day Passes Year Round.

Mount Harmon’s Guided Tours feature guided tour of all three floors of historic Mount Harmon, one of the most beautifully restored Georgian manor houses in Maryland open to the public.

Guided tours also include tour of our Plantation Outbuildings: colonial kitchen, and replica smoke house, and slave quarters, as well as self guided tours of our gardens and grounds which include a 200-acre nature preserve with miles of waterfront trails and picnic areas. Many thanks for following our leave no trace guidelines.

Our Mount Harmon Day Pass (manor house/historic buildings not included/grounds only access) is a wonderful option for nature and history lovers for enjoying our beautiful gardens, grounds, and 200-acre nature preserve with over 5 miles of nature trails, picnic areas, and canoe and kayak launch ~ great for hiking, picnicking, and exploring our scenic and historic site and waterfront.

We hope this gives you more reasons than ever to come out and enjoy Mount Harmon! So visit often, and bring friends and family to enjoy our Mount Harmon Guided Tours and Day Passes.

We hope you fall in love with Mount Harmon like we have and consider joining our membership program, a great way to enjoy and support Mount Harmon throughout the year. Members receive free admission and many additional benefits while helping to keep Mount Harmon preserved, maintained, and open to the public. Click Here for Membership information and to join now.

We look forward to seeing you at Mount Harmon!

Proceed down our 1.8 mile scenic lane. Follow signs to visitor parking and check in. We look forward to seeing you!

Planning Your Visit

Arriving by water: Come to Mount Harmon by boat, as colonial-era visitors to Mount Harmon did in the 18th century. Mount Harmon is proud to welcome registered visitors and members via our new dock, located to the right and up the shore from the Prize House. The dock has a 30 ft T-head and floating dock with mean high tide of 5 feet. Dock coordinates are 39.22.44 N. 75.56.17 W. Head left from dock and follow arrows and mowed trail to manor house. All visitors by boat must have confirmed Day Pass, Guided Tour tickets (May – October), or be FOMH Members.

We suggest you plan to allow at least one hour for the tour, and additional time to explore the gardens, grounds, nature trails, and waterfront. Registered visitors and members are welcome to bring a picnic to enjoy on our grounds and scenic picnic areas. Recommendations for area restaurants to visit before or after your tour by emailing [email protected] .

Points of Interest

Manor house.

Mount Harmon is a brick Georgian manor house that dates to 1730 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The manor house has been restored to the 1760 – 1810 period, and is furnished with American, English, Irish and Scottish antiques, to reflect Mount Harmon’s owners of that period who actively traded with the British Isles. The Chinese Chippendale staircase and elegant furnishings reflect the refinement of plantation culture in early America. Mount Harmon was restored to its colonial era appearance when it was a prosperous tobacco plantation, and was restored by Marguerite du Pont Boden, a direct descendent of the colonial owners. Mount Harmon was part of the colonial revival movement in the 20th century and part of the legacy of the du Pont family to preserve America’s architectural heritage.

Formal Boxwood Garden

The formal boxwood garden enclosed by serpentine brick walls is a Thomas Jefferson design and evokes Mount Harmon’s golden age. Between the boxwood garden and the manor house are a pair of magnificent English Yew trees (Taxus baccata, variety dovastonii). These 200-year-old yews are among the oldest in the United States. The boxwood garden is a popular site for weddings, and overlooks McGill Creek.

Plantation Kitchen

The plantation kitchen is an original building and recalls domestic life and work on a colonial American plantation. It stands apart from the manor house and was restored and furnished with authentic kitchen artifacts of the colonial era. The plantation or colonial kitchen features open hearth where meals were prepared for the plantation owners. Hearth cooking programs are featured here for special events and school field trips.

Smoke House

The smoke house was on Mount Harmon’s colonial inventory, though like many clapboard buildings did not stand the test of time, and was recreated as part of our expanded living history campus to bring to life the working plantation outbuildings, each with a unique purpose and history. Prior to electricity and refrigeration, smoke houses were fixtures on plantations and used to smoke, cure, and store meats.

Slave Quarters

The replica slave quarters depicts the simple and sparsely furnished dwellings that housed the enslaved and indentured laborers who lived and worked at Mount Harmon, to bring to life their stories and history that enabled Mount Harmon to prosper.

Tobacco Barn

The replica tobacco barn depicts the colonial barns used to cure and store the cash crop tobacco. Tobacco was widely popularized during the colonial era and became so valuable it was used as currency, to pay taxes, and in global trade. The tall and steep roof pitch was purposely designed to maximize the amount of tobacco that could be cured, in turn increasing profits for the plantation owners.

Prize House

Education & discovery center.

Housed in the renovated plantation stables, the Education & Discovery Visitor Center features Mount Harmon’s Highlights in History Exhibit, expanded educational programs, and is available for special and community events. Mount Harmon’s gift shop is located here and full of unique gift items for all ages.

Nature Trails

A network of more than 5 miles of nature trails, provides easy access to the plantation’s pristine natural surroundings – a historic Tidewater landscape, little changed by time for everything else odonate therapeutics . The trails allow visitors to explore the plantation’s scenic and historic waterfront, rare tobacco prize house, and diverse ecosystems full of wildlife.

Wildlife is abundant at Mount Harmon. The entire plantation is a nature preserve, and all forms of plants and animals on the property are protected. Visitors are requested not to pick the flowers or otherwise disturb plants and animals.

Rare and Endangered Species

Several rare and formerly endangered species live at Mount Harmon. A pair of American bald eagles nests in the vicinity and can be seen hunting over the plantation. The American Lotus (Nelumbo lutea), a relative of the water lily and the largest wildflower in the United States, is rare in Maryland and neighboring states but abundant at Mount Harmon with its peak flowering in August.

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Enslaved People Lived Here. These Museums Want You to Know.

Tours of historic houses in the South used to focus on the fine furniture and design. Now, some are talking about who built them.

A Different Look at Historic Homes of the South

View Slide Show ›

By Tariro Mzezewa

A few years ago, people touring the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters in Savannah, Ga., would have heard a lot about George Owens, the lawyer, farmer and Congressional representative who lived in the massive neoclassical home in 1833. And about banker and slave trader Richard Richardson, for whom the house was built in 1816. They might have heard Emma Katin’s name, but not about how the enslaved black woman spent most of her nights sleeping on the wooden floors of the house, so that she could be available at all hours to the infants in the Owens family.

They wouldn’t have heard about the 14 other enslaved people who lived there. And there’s a good chance that guests would not have heard about the 400 other slaves the Owenses had on their other nearby properties.

“Those pieces of the story would have been missing because she would have been treated as an accessory to the Owens’ lives,” said Shannon Browning-Mullis, a curator of history and decorative arts for Telfair Museums, which owns the house and has been in charge of rethinking the way its history is told.

In cities including Savannah and Charleston, S.C., where Confederate statues, elegant mansions and plantation weddings are common, tourism has often taken the form of nostalgia for the antebellum South, Southern charm and Southern hospitality. For years, tours of historic homes would focus on their architecture and fine furniture, but not on how the wealth so clearly displayed depended on enslaved labor.

There is a growing consensus among the interpreters who guide people through historic properties that by excluding stories of the enslaved, institutions like historical societies, museums and tour companies have sent the message that power and wealth were not directly connected to slavery, and racism, and erased the stories of the black people who built these cities.

Now that’s changing.

“When we come to see historic houses, often we are coming to see what it looked like to live in the past and a lot of us are sometimes just coming to see a pretty house,” said Lacey Wilson, a historic interpreter for Telfair Museums, to a group of tourists on a recent tour. “What we’re looking at is the political power of the people who lived here. All the beautiful decorative objects throughout the house — the money coming for all these things came primarily from the enslaving of other human beings.”

During Ms. Wilson’s tours, visitors hear that 26 people could sit at the Owenses formal dining room table when it was extended; that the crown molding that runs just below the room’s ceiling was rare at the time it was created; that the rooms were fully carpeted to show off to guests that the family was well-off.

But Ms. Wilson doesn’t stop there. She explains, in detail, that the presentation of wealth wasn’t possible without the enslaved people on the property. The meals served on that elaborate table were prepared by a black butler named Peter; the crown molding was dusted multiple times a day; the carpet was taken apart at least twice weekly, beaten and spot-cleaned with boiling water by the enslaved people in the house, including the children.

“The first thought coming in is how beautiful this room is, and it absolutely is, but this is how the Owenses and Richardsons would have wanted you to see this space,” Ms. Wilson said in the house’s second dining room. “It’s more than likely that is not how the enslaved people would have seen the space.”

In November the house was renamed to include “and Slave Quarters” in its title.

Stories of urban slavery

The shift toward telling stories of slavery more accurately and fully has happened over the past few years and has been most visible on some plantations like Oak Alley and the Whitney plantation in Louisiana, at the McLeod Plantation in Charleston and at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation in Virginia. The shift has also been visible in museums around the country. The opening of the National Museum of African-American History in Washington and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama have forced institutions to reckon with how they tell the stories of the African-Americans who built so many of the buildings tourists come to see. Later this year, the International Museum of African-American History will open in Charleston.

When many Americans think of slavery, they have the misconception that it was strictly an agricultural institution, with black people forced to labor on farms, picking cotton, sugar and tobacco. But historians say that by 1860 slaves made up 20 percent of the population in major cities, and in Charleston black people outnumbered whites. Urban slaves, like Ms. Katin, were forced to work night and day for wealthy families. Many of the houses where they labored were home to prominent politicians of the day, and are both popular tourist and school field-trip destinations.

“The thing about historic houses is that they play a key role in educating America in who we are as a country,” said Elon Cook Lee, a historic house consultant and the president of the Black Interpreter’s Guild. “Elementary, middle and high school students come year after year and in many cases this is their first time learning about slavery.”

Beautiful prisons

At the Aiken-Rhett House in Charleston, questions of how enslaved carriage drivers, cooks, butlers, gardeners, laundresses, nursemaids, carpenters and seamstresses would have seen the home where they toiled are now central to tours of the property.

In that home, tours focus on where the enslaved worked and slept, not where the white families socialized. The tours begin in a basement and visitors are taken through the servants’ hall, the kitchen, the ancillary kitchen and the slave quarters. In those quarters, they see where Ann and Tom Greggs and their children Phoebe and Henry slept; where Dorcas and Sambo Richardson, and their children Charles, Rachael, Victoria, Elizabeth and Julia slept; and where Betsy Crutchfield and her children Thomas, Jane and William slept.

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A few miles away, at the Nathaniel Russell House , there is an effort to make storytelling about urban slavery more inclusive of the experiences of the enslaved. Two years ago, artifacts were found in the space where the enslaved would have lived from around the 1830s to the 1860s. The house belonged to the slave trader Nathaniel Russell in 1808 and was later home to a governor, Robert Alston.

When Lauren Northup, director of museums for the Historic Charleston Foundation , leads a tour or when visitors listen to the self-guided audio tour of the house, they hear how the enslaved people in the house and the white family would have interacted in almost every room. The differences between the spaces where the white family lived and socialized compared to where the enslaved toiled are stark. Tourists also hear, again and again, about how every aspect of the house, which was built by a wealthy merchant, was designed to let the owners see and control the enslaved.

Most guests at the Nathaniel Russel House remark on the beauty of the mansion and its décor, Ms. Northup said, adding that she reminds them that the house was built with the purpose of “keeping people in, keeping people from seeing each other, from socializing, from talking,” she said. “It was a prison. That is what I’m trying to make people understand — you are in a beautiful prison.”

Galvanized by church shooting

Ms. Northup said that her organization has been actively working to change its storytelling since the mid-1990s. But in 2017, when she, with the help of art conservator Susan Buck, discovered that much of the original fabric of the slave quarters were intact, with artifacts, there was an urgency to study, preserve and open the space to the public.

They were also galvanized by the 2015 killing of eight black parishioners and their pastor at Emanuel AME church, by Dylann Roof, a man who professed white supremacy.

In the wake of the shooting, the church became a tourist destination and a symbol of resilience and community, but also of what can happen when communities don’t confront racism or tell their histories honestly.

“If there was any good to come out of the tragedy that happened at Emanuel, it was that it showed people that we still have a racial problem in Charleston, in America and we have to talk about it,” said the Rev. Joseph Darby, vice president of the Charleston N.A.A.C.P. “The history in tours, the history of the Civil War, still affects criminal justice today.”(The reverend, like many African-Americans, prefers the Gullah Geechee tours in Charleston, which tell the stories of the descendants of West Africans who were brought to America’s southeastern coast more than two centuries ago.)

Of the 400,000 enslaved people who were brought to the United States, 40 percent arrived in Charleston before going anywhere else; the city was the wealthiest in the colonial era, in large part because of the labor of slaves. A 2017 College of Charleston study found that the wealth gap between white and black families in the city is as large as it was half a century ago.

After the Emanuel shooting, “things changed in Charleston,” Ms. Northup said. “That was such a watershed time for Charleston because of Emanuel. The community fundamentally and irrevocably changed.”

Increasingly, the people going on house tours are looking for more history and are trying to satisfy “a hunger” for history and truth, Ms. Browning-Mullis in Savannah and Ms. Northup in Charleston said.

A search for more factually accurate information about slavery and African-American history in Georgia is what led Jason Lumpkin, a pastor in Atlanta, to the Owens-Thomas House with his wife and two daughters in March. Mr. Lumpkin was surprised with how well the experiences of the enslaved were explained, and he appreciated that he did not have to specifically request information about black people as if it were supplementary.

“A few years ago, we did a tour where slavery was just glossed over and I had to ask about it to hear about it,” he said. “I don’t feel like that was the case at the Owens-Thomas House. They were intentional to talk about slavery and the issues associated with it and address them head on. I appreciated the fact that as bad as it was they were honest and in-depth.”

Mr. Lumpkin said that in addition to passing down stories about ancestors who were enslaved, he and his wife try to find different ways of teaching their daughters about their family history, and that history is incomplete without a discussion of slavery.

“I don’t trust the school system to tell them the true story of slavery,” Mr. Lumpkin said. “Knowing there are discrepancies out there in how that history is told, it’s even more important that as parents we be intentional in making sure our daughters understand and learn outside of school, and tours like this are a way to do it.”

A long way to go

Changes in the way history is presented aren’t universal, but changes made by a few houses may inspire others to follow suit. After all, the Nathaniel Russell House as well as a handful of others that are currently rethinking their tours all said they looked to the Owens-Thomas House for lessons in how to do better.

Ms. Cook Lee, of the Black Interpreters Guild , said that how stories of the enslaved are told matters because when black children hear about slaves as “window dressing” or accessories to the lives of white families, the children’s own perceptions of blackness can be negatively affected.

“Kids start to think, ‘my ancestors just stood in a back corner with no thoughts’ or ‘I wish I was white because white people do so many great things and are creative and smart,’” Ms. Cook Lee said.

Historically accurate tours can give black children in particular a link to their American identity instead of a perception that they aren’t as central to the American story as their white peers. “I’ve had ancestors fight in nearly every war and that makes me feel a connection to this country,” she said.

52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Follow our 52 Places traveler, Sebastian Modak, on Instagram as he travels the world , and discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook . And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter : Each week you’ll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world.

Tariro Mzezewa is a travel reporter at The New York Times. More about Tariro Mzezewa

Upcoming Events

Jepson Center & Telfair Children's Art Museum
Telfair Academy

Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters

Built in 1819, this mansion exemplifies the neoclassical styles popular in England during the Regency period. The Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters allows visitors to explore the complicated relationships between the most and least powerful people in the city of Savannah in the early 19th century.

Our tours focus on the art, architecture, and history of the home through the lens of slavery. Visitors will experience an inclusive interpretation of not only the wealthy families that inhabited this home for a span of over 100 years, but of also the enslaved people who lived and labored here.

Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters Tours

Guided tours are given at 15-minute intervals. The last tour begins at 4:00pm.
Tours typically last around 45 minutes to an hour.
Tour groups consist of up to 12 people.
Please check in onsite to get a tour time, even if you’ve purchased tickets at our other two sites.
Daily tours at the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters fill up fast on a first-come, first-served basis.

*Due to the historic nature of the site, the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters contain the original staircases of the site with no elevator access.

Jepson Center : 7 mins
Telfair Academy : 7 mins

History of the Richardson-Owens-Thomas House

Shipping merchant and enslaver Richard Richardson commissioned this house around 1816, and his family moved in upon its completion in 1819. The home was designed by English architect (and relative to Richardson by marriage) William Jay but was constructed by builder John Retan and likely a team of free and enslaved men in his charge. The property also included a two-sided privy and a building located on the east end of the lot, which was divided into a carriage house and slave quarters.

The Richardsons only lived in the home for a few years before they saw a steady decrease in their prosperity. After the combination of the financial Panic of 1819, a yellow fever epidemic, a fire that destroyed half the city, and the death of Frances and two of the children, Richardson decided to sell the house and move to Louisiana, where he had family and business interests.

By 1824, the Bank of the United States owned the home, which they leased to Mary Maxwell as a boarding house. The Marquis de Lafayette was a guest of Mrs. Maxwell when he visited Savannah in March 1825 as part of his whirlwind tour of the United States for the 50th anniversary of the American Revolution.

In 1830, lawyer, landholder, and enslaver George Welshman Owens purchased the property at auction for $10,000. He lived here with his wife, Sarah, their six children, and up to fourteen enslaved laborers. Over the next 121 years, the home would continue to be owned by the Owens family until the last descendent, Margaret Gray Thomas, George Owens’s granddaughter, bequeathed the property upon her death in 1951 to the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences to be run as a house museum in honor of her grandfather, George Owens, and her father, Dr. James Gray Thomas. The site opened to the public in 1954.

Carriage House

Orientation gallery.

The south half of this building originally housed horses and carriages on the first floor with a hay loft on the floor above.

Slave Quarters

The north half of the building contains the original slave quarters for the site. This two-story structure was composed of three rooms on each level. About five to fourteen enslaved people, most of which were female and children or teenagers, lived and worked on the site at any given time. These individuals worked in domestic labor duties like cooking, cleaning, washing laundry, and raising children.

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Parterre Garden

The parterre style garden occupies the space between the main house and the carriage house. This area originally functioned as a work yard, which likely included a small kitchen garden, areas to dry laundry and clean rugs, and perhaps pens and coops for small livestock and chickens. It even contained a two-sided privy, or outhouse, in the northeast corner.

Originally, this space was a work yard. In 1956 it was transformed into an English parterre garden.

The Mansion

Public spaces.

When the Richardson or Owens families entertained, they did so in the public spaces of their home: the drawing room, front hall, and dining room. These spaces, designed in the finest Regency style and filled with American and English furniture and decorative arts, were intended to impress. They feature elaborate molding, faux finishes, curved walls, and decorative sidelights.

Entertaining spaces also allowed for transfers of information, both intentionally and circumstantially. Peter, the Owens family’s enslaved butler, doubtlessly listened closely as George Owens debated politics and policies that would affect the lives of himself and his family and friends.

Private Spaces

The bedrooms, library, and family dining room of the home were considered more private spaces utilized by the family and close friends, rather than entertaining spaces for formal events. These rooms allow for an in-depth exploration of how the economic elite and their enslaved servants interacted on a daily basis.

Second-floor bridge inside the house

The formal dining room

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Butler’s Pantry

Enslaved butlers managed not just the daily operations of upper-class homes, but also the enslaved staff that serviced them. In addition, enslaved butlers maintained the fine silver, china, and glassware used in entertaining. They would have stored valuable items in this space, which is complete with original cabinetry’s faux finishes, reproduced according to the results of paint analysis.

The basement, which retains many original components, contains the kitchen, scullery, a large cistern, and other workspaces. These wonderfully preserved spaces offer more interpretive text and material to help visitors understand the day-to-day lives of the enslaved people who lived and worked here.

Bathing Chamber at the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters

Name Wall at the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters

Decorative Arts

The furniture and decorative objects from Telfair’s collection that are displayed at the Owens-Thomas House date largely from the early to mid-19th century. Most were produced in England or America. About one third of the objects descended in the Owens family, and many others were owned by wealthy Savannahians of the same period.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

When we open the site each day, tour slots are available for visitors on a first-come, first-serve basis. You must book a tour in-person at the ticket booth. If you would like to book a tour for later in the day, you are more than welcome to choose a later timeslot as long as we have enough available capacity for your group! We recommend showing up as early as possible if you have a large party or would like to reserve a particular tour time that day.

Unfortunately, we only reserve tour slots for the current day. However, if you have a large group consisting of 12 people or more (i.e., a Girl Scout Troop, school groups, a large family/travelling tour group, etc.), visit telfair.org/group-tours/ for more information and advanced booking options. Keeping in mind our limited capacity and staffing requirements, we request you make your reservation at least four weeks in advance.

We currently do not have an online booking system, and tours may only be booked in-person at the ticket booth. We apologize for any inconvenience!

Yes, all visitors must reserve their tour times in-person at the ticket booth. The line ensures that tour times are made available to all our visitors on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Telfair Museums only offers a three-site pass to ensure that our visitors have the opportunity to experience all the museum has to offer at one combined price.

Our interior waiting area has limited capacity, so keep in mind that we are only able to allow one group in at a time. Approximately 5-10 minutes before your tour begins, a Historical Interpreter will welcome all visitors in the tour group to spend the remainder of their waiting time in the Orientation Gallery. This space houses displays of introductory information available to read while you wait, as well as benches that visitors may rest on indoors before their tour starts.

If your waiting time is 20 minutes or more, we have additional benches in the Courtyard and Garden on the property. You are more than welcome to visit another location during your waiting time, just be sure to return 5-10 minutes prior to your tour start time

We put out the sold-out notices as soon as we reach our capacity for the day, so if you haven’t already checked in at the ticket booth to receive your tour time, we unfortunately don’t have the capacity to accommodate you today. While we’d love to allow as many visitors as possible to experience this site, we have limited visitor entries each day to help preserve the historic integrity of the buildings themselves.

Guided tours typically last somewhere between 45-60 minutes.

Due to our buildings’ capacity limits and other logistical challenges, we currently only offer guided tours through the property which begin every 15 minutes. However, the other two Telfair Museum sites do not require a tour, so if you prefer a self-paced experience, we recommend visiting the Telfair Academy and Jepson Center!

While some of us would love to accommodate all kinds of furry friends, our sites only allow service dogs required for a disability.

We have paper transcripts of the audio tour available in Spanish, so just ask a Historical Interpreter and we’ll be happy to assist you! We are currently working on developing translations in additional languages, and we appreciate your patience while we expand our language accessibility.

The Orientation Gallery and Slave Quarters have ramped entrances, but the main building is unfortunately not ADA accessible. There are several flights of stairs within the house itself, but there are benches and chairs throughout where visitors who would like to opt out may sit and wait for their group. We apologize for the inconvenience!

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One Man’s Epic Quest to Visit Every Former Slave Dwelling in the United States

Joseph McGill, a descendant of slaves, has devoted his life to ensuring the preservation of these historic sites

Tony Horwitz

At a bygone plantation in coastal Georgia, Joseph McGill Jr. creaks open a door to inspect his quarters for the night. He enters a cramped cell with an ancient fireplace and bare walls mortared with oyster shell. There is no furniture, electricity or plumbing.

“I was expecting a dirt floor, so this is nice,” McGill says, lying down to sample the hard pine planks. “Might get a decent sleep tonight.”

Some travelers dream of five-star hotels, others of visiting seven continents. McGill’s mission: to sleep in every former slave dwelling still standing in the United States. Tonight’s stay, in a cabin on Georgia’s Ossabaw Island, will be his 41st such lodging.

McGill is 52, with a desk job and family, and isn’t fond of sleeping rough. A descendant of slaves, he also recognizes that re-inhabiting places of bondage “seems strange and upsetting to some people.” But he embraces the discomfort, both physical and psychological, because he wants to save slave dwellings and the history they hold before it’s too late.

“Americans tend to focus on the ‘big house,’ the mansion and gardens, and neglect the buildings out back,” he says. “If we lose slave dwellings, it’s that much easier to forget the slaves themselves.”

A century ago, the whitewashed cabins of former slaves remained as ubiquitous a feature of the Southern landscape as Baptist churches or Confederate monuments. Many of these dwellings were still inhabited by the families of the four million African-Americans who had gained freedom in the Civil War. But as blacks migrated en masse from the South in the 20th century, former slave quarters—most of which were cheaply built from wood—quickly decayed or were torn down. Others were repurposed as toolsheds, garages or guest cottages. Of those that remain, many are now endangered by neglect, and by suburban and resort development in areas like the Georgia and Carolina Low Country, a lush region that once had the densest concentration of plantations and enslaved people in the South.

McGill has witnessed this transformation firsthand as a native South Carolinian who works for the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Charleston. But it wasn’t his day job that led him to sleep in endangered slave cabins. Rather, it was his weekends as a Civil War re-enactor, wearing the uniform of the 54th Massachusetts, the black unit featured in the movie Glory . Donning a period uniform and camping out, often at antebellum sites, “made the history come alive for me,” he says. Re-enacting the 54th has also drawn public attention to the pivotal role of black soldiers in the Civil War. So in 2010, when Magnolia Plantation near Charleston sought to publicize restoration of its neglected slave cabins, McGill proposed sleeping in one of them.

“I was a little spooked,” he says of his overnight stay. “I kept getting up hearing noises. It was just the wind blowing limbs against the cabin.” His simple bedroll, laid on the hard floor, also didn’t make for a comfortable night. But the sleepover succeeded in drawing media attention to the slave cabins, which have since been opened to the public. So McGill began compiling a list of other such structures and seeking out their owners, to ask if he could sleep in them.

He also tried to recruit members of his re-enacting unit to join him on his overnights. One of them, Terry James, says that at first, “I thought Joe had lost his mind. Why go stay in a falling-down slave cabin with snakes and insects?” But as James reflected on his ancestors, who not only survived slavery but also succeeded after the Civil War in buying and farming land that is still in his family, he decided he “needed to know more about what they endured and overcame.” So he accompanied McGill on a wretched August overnight in a cabin that had been boarded up for years and was infested with mold. “The air was so awful we slept with the door open,” James recalls. “It was hot and humid and buggy as heck.”

For their next overnight together, James chose to make the experience even more unpleasant. He showed up with antebellum wrist shackles he’d been lent by the owner of a slave relic museum and put them on before lying down for the night. “I wanted to honor the ancestors who came over in the middle passage,” James explains, “and to feel a little of what it was like to be bound.”

Now he knows. “It’s impossible to really get comfortable with your wrists shackled.” He woke repeatedly during the night and lay awake thinking about enslaved Africans packed into the bowels of ships. His constant jostling and the clank of his shackles kept McGill awake and haunted him, too. Even so, James has repeated the ritual at more than a dozen slave dwellings since. “It makes you realize how blessed you are that your ancestors survived and struggled so that eventually their children could have a better life,” he says. His overnights have also become a source of gentle teasing by his wife, who tells him, “You’d rather sleep in shackles in a slave cabin than sleep with me.”

James and his irons weren’t part of McGill’s recent weekend in Georgia, but it was a remarkable outing nonetheless. McGill’s destination, Ossabaw Island, can be reached only by boat from a dock ten miles south of Savannah. Ossabaw is the third largest of Georgia’s barrier islands and among its least developed. In fact, its principal inhabitants are 2,500 feral pigs, as well as alligators, horseshoe crabs and armadillos. Only four people live there full time, including a 100-year-old heiress from Michigan who enjoys reading Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie novels in her family’s mansion.

“I’m not sure if this is the Old South, the New South or the weird South,” McGill says, as he disembarks at a wharf and walks past palm trees and salt marsh to a well-shaded Victorian hunting lodge. “All I know is it’s very different from other places I’ve stayed.”

The island’s centenarian, Eleanor Torrey West, whose parents bought Ossabaw in 1924 as a Southern retreat, maintains life rights to her family’s house and grounds. The state now manages the island in association with the Ossabaw Foundation, which sponsors educational programs, including one scheduled in conjunction with McGill’s visit. Among the dozen people along for the trip is Hanif Haynes, whose forebears were among the hundreds of enslaved people on four plantations that once dotted Ossabaw. Many former slaves remained after the Civil War, as sharecroppers, before resettling on the mainland in the late 19th century, mostly in the community of Pin Point, the birthplace of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

“We left the island, but held on to the traditions and language,” says Haynes, who switches easily into Geechee, the Creole tongue of the Georgia Sea Islands, where isolation and close ties to West Africa and the Caribbean created a distinctive and enduring culture (its cousin in South Carolina is known as Gullah). One mark of this coastal culture that remains is “haint blue,” an azure paint that slaves and their descendants applied to doorways and windowsills to ward off spirits. The practice is thought to derive from West African beliefs that water forms a divide between the spirit and human world.

“Haint blue” paint is still visible on the three surviving slave cabins at Ossabaw, which stand in a tidy row beside what was once a field of Sea Island cotton. The cabins’ building material is also distinctive. While most slave dwellings were made of wood, and less commonly, brick, those at Ossabaw are tabby: a concretelike mixture of oyster shell, lime, sand and water. Tabby was a cheap and convenient resource along the coast, and also durable, which helps explain why Ossabaw’s cabins have survived while many others have not.

Another reason the cabins endured is that they were occupied long after the Civil War and as recently as the 1980s by caretakers and cooks working on the island. The cabins are now being returned to their original appearance. Each one is 30 by 16 feet, divided into two living spaces by a large central chimney with an open fireplace on either side. Eight to ten people would have occupied each dwelling. This left little or no room for furniture, only pallets that could be laid on the floor at night.

“Cabins like this were basically used for sleeping, and cooking indoors when the weather was bad,” McGill explains. Otherwise, slaves who labored in the fields lived almost entirely outdoors, working from sunup to sundown, and cooking and doing other chores (as well as gathering to eat and socialize) in the yard in front of their adjoining cabins.

There were originally nine cabins on this “street,” or row of slave dwellings. Of the three that survive, only one had glass in the window frames and wood covering the dirt floor. This may indicate that its original occupant was the plantation’s “driver,” a slave foreman given small privileges for supervising other bondmen. This cabin has also undergone last-minute restoration in time for McGill’s visit, including the installation of yellow pine floorboards from the mid-19th century.

“When people know I’m coming they spruce the place up,” McGill says, unfurling his bedroll. He approves of this, since “it means they do preservation work that’s needed now, rather than putting it off.”

Ossabaw, a low-lying island ringed by tidal marsh, has swarms of gnats and mosquitoes, as well as chiggers. But this early summer night turns out to be uncharacteristically free of insects, apart from blinking fireflies. McGill is also reasonably comfortable, having brought a pillow and a cotton pad to put under his bedroll—while noting that slaves would have had only simple bedding stuffed with straw, corn husks or Spanish moss. In the dark, his thoughts are likewise focused on practical matters, rather than mystical communion with the enslaved who once slept here. He speculates, for instance, about the opportunity and challenge for slaves seeking to escape an island like Ossabaw rather than a mainland plantation. “I’ll need to research that,” he says, before drifting off to sleep, leaving me to toss and turn on the hard wood floor to the sound of his snores.

In the morning we awake to birdsong and sun streaming through the cabin’s open window. “It’s almost 7. We slept in,” McGill says, checking his watch. “The slaves who lived here would have been in the fields for more than an hour already.”

McGill often shares his experiences with school groups and other visitors to antebellum sites like Ossabaw. When doing so, he speaks plainly about the cruelties of slavery. But he strives to keep pain and outrage in check. “I’m not trying to provoke people to anger,” he says. His missions are preservation and education, and he needs the cooperation of the owners and stewards of former slave dwellings who might be put off by a more strident approach. He also feels blacks and whites need to talk openly about this history, rather than retreat into age-old division and distrust. “I want people to respect and restore these places, together, and not be afraid to tell their stories.”

This has happened in gratifying ways during a number of his stays. He tells of two sisters who had avoided any contact with the Virginia plantation where their ancestors were enslaved, despite invitations to visit. After overnighting with him at a slave cabin on the site, and realizing there was genuine interest in their family’s history, one of the women became a volunteer guide at the plantation. Local students, black and white, have joined McGill and written essays about how the experience changed their views of race and slavery. “Suddenly, what I read in textbooks became something I was able to see in my mind’s eye,” wrote one teenager in South Carolina.

McGill has also found that older white Southerners who own or operate properties with slave dwellings are much more receptive to his project than they might have been just a decade or two ago. In only a few instances have his requests to stay been rebuffed. More often he’s been enthusiastically welcomed, dined with his hosts and even been given the keys to the big house while the owners go off to work. “Sometimes I sense guilt is part of what’s driving people, but whatever it is, having me visit and acknowledge their preservation of these places makes them feel they’re doing the right thing,” he says. “It’s not a cure-all for what happened in the past, but it’s a start.”

McGill’s trip to Georgia is a case in point. En route to Ossabaw, he gives a talk at a museum in Pin Point, the coastal community where descendants of the island’s slaves now reside. As soon as he finishes, he’s approached by Craig Barrow, a 71-year-old stockbroker whose family has owned a neighboring plantation called Wormsloe for nine generations, and by Sarah Ross, who heads a research institute on the site. They invite McGill to stay the next night at a slave cabin on the 1,238-acre property, which has an avenue of moss-draped oaks more than a mile long and a columned mansion so large that the family removed 18 rooms in the 20th century to make it more livable.

Barrow, who lives there with his wife, says he grew up giving little thought to the surviving slave cabin and cemetery on the property, or to the generations of African-Americans who lived and labored there. But over time, he says, “I’ve come to an appreciation of what those people did. My people sat around having big dinner parties—they weren’t doing the work. The people who lived in those cabins sweated in the fields and built everything—they made it all happen.” Barrow also regrets his youthful opposition to integrating the University of Georgia. “I was wrong, that’s why I’m doing this,” he says of his invitation to McGill and support of the Wormsloe Institute’s research into slave life on the plantation.

The work being done on Ossabaw Island and at Wormsloe reflects a trend across the South. On Edisto Island in South Carolina, the Smithsonian Institution recently dismantled a former slave cabin that will be rebuilt for display at the Museum of African American History and Culture, due to open on the National Mall in 2015. Nancy Bercaw, the project’s curator, says the Edisto cabin is critical because it speaks to the everyday experience of many African-Americans, before and after slavery, rather than being a relic associated with a specific famous individual such as Harriet Tubman. While watching workers carefully dismantle the perilously decayed cabin, made of wood planks and crudely insulated with newspaper, she was also struck by how easily these rare structures can be lost.

This danger has influenced McGill in a different way. He applauds the Smithsonian’s painstaking reconstruction of the simple cabin, but is open-minded about dwellings that have been saved in less pristine ways. He once stayed at a slave dwelling that’s now a “man cave,” with a lounge chair, gas fireplace and refrigerator filled with beer. His quarters at Wormsloe in Georgia are likewise comfortable, as the surviving cabin is now a guest cottage with beds, a bathroom, coffee machine and other amenities.

“This is definitely the luxury end of the slave-dwelling universe,” he says, settling on a couch at the cottage after touring the plantation on a golf cart. “Sometimes these places have to evolve to continue to exist.”

McGill’s mission has also evolved over the past three years. He originally dubbed his overnights the Slave Cabin Project, but soon realized this conjured stereotypical wood shacks perched beside cotton fields. Now that he’s stayed in structures made of brick, stone and tabby, in cities and on small farms as well as plantations, he emphasizes the diversity of slave housing and of the slave experience. In talks and blog posts, he now speaks of his Slave Dwelling Project. He’s also cast his net far beyond his South Carolina base, at least to the degree that his budget allows. So far, McGill has stayed in 12 states, as far west as Texas and as far north as Connecticut. “We shouldn’t give the North a pass on slavery,” he says, since blacks were once enslaved there, too, and Northerners were key players in the slave trade, the purchase of slave-grown cotton, the sale of goods such as “Negro cloth” to slave owners, and other enterprises.

Northerners were also complicit politically, helping to craft a Constitution that safeguarded the rights of slaveholders and electing slaveholders in 12 of the nation’s first 16 presidential elections. Which leads McGill to ponder what is perhaps the biggest “big house” of them all. It was built with slave labor and serviced for decades by slaves who cooked and cleaned, among many other tasks. Slaves lived as well in the mansion, generally in the basement, though one “body servant” shared the bedroom of President Andrew Jackson.

“Staying at the White House, that would be the crown jewel,” McGill says dreamily, before dozing off at the cabin in Georgia. “I’ll have to get to work on making that happen.”

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Tony Horwitz | | READ MORE

Tony Horwitz was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and wrote for the New Yorker . He is the author of Baghdad without a Map , Midnight Rising and the digital best seller BOOM . His most recent work, Spying on the South , was released in May 2019. Tony Horwitz died in May 2019 at the age of 60.

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‘These are our ancestors’: Descendants of enslaved people are shifting plantation tourism

At three plantations in charleston, s.c., black descendants are connecting with their family’s history and helping reshape the narrative.

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Robert Bellinger was driving down Ashley River Road in Charleston, S.C., enjoying the landscape of live oak trees and Spanish moss, when it dawned on him exactly where he was headed and why.

“It just hit me,” Bellinger recalled of his drive in November 2016. “I thought, ‘I’m headed to a family reunion on a plantation where my ancestors were enslaved.’”

Bellinger, a historian and researcher from Boston, was on his way to Middleton Place , a former rice plantation in the Ashley River Historic Corridor. Today, Middleton Place is a national historic landmark and museum, and it is home to the oldest landscaped gardens in the United States.

A local's guide to Charleston

Bellinger learned about his family’s connection to Middleton Place decades before deciding to make the trip. In 1983, his cousin Mamie Garvin Fields, then 90 years old, published “ Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir ,” which recounts the family’s generational connections to the low country, including stories about Fields’ enslaved grandfather. His own family research helped Bellinger find ancestors at Middleton dating back to 1790.

He also learned that Middleton Place hosted descendant reunions every few years, gathering both Black and White descendants for a weekend of on-site research presentations, history lectures and informal dialogues. With some trepidation, he decided to attend.

“Just three days before, we had a presidential election, the results of which I was not too crazy about,” Bellinger said. “I was saying to myself, now why am I heading to a plantation in this climate?”

The past two decades have seen a shift among plantation museums across the south. Previously, the majority of tours focused on the architecture of the main house, the landscapes and the economics of slavery. But today, a growing number of these sites are making efforts to confront slavery head-on, emphasizing the narratives of the enslaved and often requesting the help of their descendants.

At Middleton Place, it began with Earl Middleton, a noted civil rights leader and Tuskegee Airman from Orangeburg, S.C., who in 1997 became the first Black descendant asked to join Middleton Place’s board of trustees. Earl Middleton’s grandfather, Abram, was enslaved there until the end of the Civil War . After emancipation, newly freed Black families needed a surname to be counted as citizens by the government; some families adopted the surname of their former masters, making today’s search for descendants easier for historians.

For Black tour guides in Savannah, the historical is personal

Middleton Place had previously hosted two reunions for White descendants, and in 2001, Earl Middleton was integral in the board’s decision to find and invite Black descendants as well.

“When a plantation comes to a Black family, there’s often suspicion, rightfully so,” said Tracey Todd, president and CEO of the Middleton Place Foundation. “But with the help of Dr. Earl Middleton acting as a liaison, as well as our continued genealogy research, we had a turnout of about 350 people at that first combined reunion in 2006.”

According to Todd, who is the first person outside the family to lead Middleton, about 30 percent of the descendants at the reunion were Black, and the event was “a little tense at times.” Ty Collins, one of the Black Middleton descendants who attended the first combined reunion, agreed.

“At first, it was a warm and fuzzy kumbaya, I’ll-be-glad-when-this-is-all-over kind of moment,” Collins joked. “I don’t know what our expectations were going into it, but it has resulted in a lot of communication between family members over the years."

Collins is a former English and theater professor who, after attending the reunion, began to volunteer at Middleton Place, giving tours and even performing dramatic interpretations of the daily lives of his ancestors. He is preparing to launch the African Heritage Seed Project, which includes researching and cultivating seeds of African origins on site.

Earl Middleton died the following year in 2007, though the combined reunions continued in 2011 and 2016, the year his cousin Bellinger arrived on his first visit to Middleton.

“We see Middleton very differently than many other people of color do, because these are our ancestors. We have a right and a specific need to acknowledge their presence.” — Ty Collins, one of the Black Middleton descendants

Since that first visit in 2016, Bellinger has remained involved at Middleton Place, acting as the site’s scholar-in-residence in 2019.

Collins and Bellinger said they agreed that being able to identify the soil their ancestors worked on is heavy but necessary knowledge to have. “I guess the word that would come up is ‘bittersweet,’” Bellinger said. “You know where they were and you know the conditions they were in, but now you also have the opportunity to know their names and celebrate their successes.”

“We see Middleton very differently than many other people of color do, because these are our ancestors. We have a right and a specific need to acknowledge their presence,” Collins said.

As plantations talk more honestly about slavery, some visitors are pushing back

Recently while giving a tour of Eliza’s House, a renovated slave cabin at Middleton Place, Collins greeted a Black couple in the home — and made a surprise family connection.

Vincent and Dorothy White, visiting from Athens, Ga., had never been to Middleton Place before; they decided to pull over because they have Middletons in their family from South Carolina.

“One of [Vincent’s] cousins married a Kenneth Middleton family, so we got curious … And then we found Earl Middleton in this book," said Dorothy White, referencing a book about slavery at Middleton.

“That’s his cousin!,” she said, pointing at her husband.

Vincent White nodded, “I have pictures of me, Earl and Kenny from back in the day!”

Collins was delighted. “That makes us cousins, too,” he said. “Dr. Middleton is still bringing us together.”

Magnolia Plantation , another former rice plantation near the Ashley River, has been owned by the Drayton family since 1676. Black people have lived and worked at Magnolia throughout its 350-year history, first as enslaved workers and then, after emancipation, as paid garden staff.

In 2008, Taylor Drayton Nelson, then CEO of Magnolia, partnered with genealogist and anthropologist Toni Carrier to launch Lowcountry Africana , an online database that has since helped thousands of people learn about their enslaved ancestors at Drayton Hall, Magnolia Plantation and in the lowcountry area, including comedian Chris Rock and former first lady Michelle Obama.

“For White Americans, genealogy is primarily a hobby. It’s a leisure pursuit,” said Carrier, now director of the Center for Family History at the International African American Museum. “But for African Americans, it’s much deeper than that. It’s a yearning to know who came before you.”

Using 10,000 pages of historical documents and oral histories, researchers uncovered an initial 1,568 names of the enslaved and their family members. An ad Nelson placed in Charleston’s Post and Courier newspaper helped locate Susan Weston Bennett, the granddaughter of Adam Bennett, the later-freed enslaved overseer at Magnolia Plantation.

Bennett descendants continue to visit Magnolia, even getting married on the crest of the plantation’s White Bridge . Susan Weston Bennett, who died in 2016, celebrated her 90th birthday at Magnolia in 2006.

“For White Americans, genealogy is primarily a hobby. It’s a leisure pursuit. But for African Americans, it’s much deeper than that. It’s a yearning to know who came before you.“ — Toni Carrier, genealogist and anthropologist

When the remaining Bennett family left Magnolia in the 1930s, another Black family, the Leaches, came to live and work in the gardens.

“Rev. Willie Leach worked as gardens superintendent alongside my grandfather,” Moore said. “His son Johnnie Leach worked as the gardens superintendent alongside my brother for several years after my grandfather’s death.”

Until 1969, Johnnie Leach lived with his family in one of the five slave cabins at Magnolia, situated in a row commonly referred to as “The Street.” At the time, the cabins had been updated with electricity, but the Leach family still used an outhouse and a gas stove. Years later, running water was added, but in 2008, each cabin was restored to demonstrate the historic building materials and living conditions as part of the “Slavery to Freedom” tour.

Two of Johnnie Leach’s sons, Isaac and Ted, who work at Magnolia, say they remember their childhood there fondly.

A local's guide to Savannah

“Growing up here, sometimes my friends [would ask] ‘Damn, you actually live there?’,” said Ted Leach, who at 54 is the youngest of Johnnie’s 16 children. “We can’t forget what happened with slavery, of course, but for us, this place was just home. My dad worked here for about 70 years.”

“Our grandfather [Willie Leach] was a botanist and he grafted camellias here for years,” said Isaac Leach. “This place will continue to change hands in the family and each person will have their ideas about how to run it, but what I see is African Americans doing this propagation and tending to the landscape. I’m looking at what our folks have done to this land and what they put into it.”

Both Isaac and his grandfather Willie have camellias named after them and registered with the American Camellias Society.

Growing up on James Island from the 1970s to ’80s, Kerri Forrest passed McLeod Plantation every day.

“We’d drive by and someone would say ‘Your grandfather used to live there,’ ” said Forrest of the slave cabins on Folly Road. “According to my dad and my aunts, my grandfather Coleman was the gravedigger there and was supposedly the last person buried in the graveyard.”

She also learned that not only was her great-grandfather Stephen Forrest enslaved at McLeod, but also he was left in charge of the plantation when owner William W. McLeod served in the Civil War.

“It was always just part of the family story,” Forrest said. “Unfortunately, my grandfather was already dead by the time I was born, and my grandmother passed away before I was 10 years old. I’ve had these stories all my life, even though I didn’t have people to necessarily connect them to.”

Established in 1851, McLeod was known for producing sea island cotton, a rare and expensive strain unique to the Lowcountry and tended to by enslaved workers from West and Central Africa. The home was occupied by the McLeod family until 1990, and the site changed ownership several times before ultimately being sold to the Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission in 2011 . As the park system prepared to restore the site and open it to the public, Forrest’s family stories became especially relevant.

“At the time, they were getting [McLeod] ready to turn it into an open park site,” Forrest said. “I mentioned my great-grandfather was the slave who held it down when McLeod went to war. That’s when we started talking about my family tree and how many of the older family members were still alive.”

From there, more puzzle pieces started to fall into place, including a photo of Forrest’s great-grandmother Harriet found by the South Carolina Historical Society; the picture shows her sitting on a stoop and smoking a cigar. Forrest said she appreciates how the research has reframed her perspective.

“Growing up, you didn’t want to talk about your enslaved ancestors because the assumed narrative was that they were just labor, they weren’t actually smart and they had no skills,” Forrest said. “But truly, these enslaved Africans brought skills that they used to build the city and to create an economic engine.”

Forrest spoke about her family connections to McLeod at the site’s opening in 2015 and has since stayed in touch. As director of Lowcountry programs at the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation , she hopes to partner with McLeod in the future and support their efforts to tell complete narratives.

According to Shawn Halifax, the cultural history interpretation coordinator at McLeod Plantation, the work to engage descendants of McLeod is an ongoing process meant to recover history that was once intentionally hidden.

"But truly, these enslaved Africans brought skills that they used to build the city and to create an economic engine.” — Kerri Forrest

“Traditionally speaking, sites of slavery have engaged in efforts to misrepresent, ignore, even at times, annihilate the history of the majority of the people that occupied these spaces,” said Halifax. “Subsequently the stories and the narratives that have been crafted traditionally at places like this have been crafted by folks that have been actively engaged in that work. Engaging descended communities is a way for people to take back their history. ”

McLeod continues to research using not only the oral histories from local families, but also the cemetery on-site.

Southern neighborhoods have been named ‘plantations’ for decades. That could be changing.

“Archaeologists that have studied [the cemetery] said that it was used as early as the American Revolution all the way until 1965,” Halifax said. “Not everyone that's buried has a direct connection to the site, but the names of people that are descended from here are ones that we continue to try to uncover and research.”

As a direct descendant, Forrest looks forward to engaging in conversations about the future of the cemetery.

“There’s been a lot of conversation in Charleston lately about those burial grounds,” she said. “With all of the development pressure going on in Charleston right now, you’re seeing so many burial sites being desecrated for development. I hope we’re able to actually honor the lives of those who have been laid to rest there.”

A photo caption in a previous version of this story misidentified a slave cabin as a cabin at McLeod Plantation. It is located at Magnolia Plantation. The caption has been corrected.

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‘Slave Play’

M.g. zimeta.

Slave Play , which ended its West End run at the Noël Coward Theatre last week, is a play by Jeremy O. Harris about three Black people who are sexually disengaged in their interracial relationships because of anhedonia from racial trauma. Desperate to feel something, they sign up for ‘Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy’ to enact ‘slave play’ sexual fantasies with their partners.

The Black female lead wants her white husband to pretend to be a plantation overseer to her mammy persona and rape her. The Black male character wants his Latino partner to pretend to be a white indentured servant to his Black plantation overseer persona and lick his boots. The biracial male character wants to pretend to be a mulatto servant who doesn’t know what he wants, and so his white female partner does what she wants, which is peg him with a black dildo that her persona, a plantation mistress, says is a family heirloom. This is the first 25 minutes or so of the two-hour performance. The characters then have a group therapy session to discuss what they have learned about one another and themselves. But like the characters, I struggled to feel anything.

Several months ago, there were news stories that a Downing Street spokesperson had criticised the theatre’s plans to host two ‘Black Out’ performances of Slave Play with talkback sessions after the show. ‘Obviously, these reports are concerning and further information is being sought,’ Rishi Sunak’s spokesperson was quoted as saying, ‘but clearly, restricting audiences on the basis of race would be wrong and divisive.’

I was intrigued by the Black Out idea : Harris had described it in 2019 as a way for Black audiences to be ‘radically invited’ into a cultural space from which they had previously been excluded, enabling them to explore their experiences of theatre ‘free from the white gaze’. (In 2017, the Bristol Old Vic had staged an all-female Medea by Chino Odimba , with an all-female audience night and post-show discussion.) So I went to both an ‘ordinary’ performance of Slave Play and a Black Out performance and talkback the following evening.

In Slave Play , the characters bait one another into glib expressions of racial hatred and then the action immediately moves on, with no mutual accountability, no reflection on the shared consequences of what has just happened and no path to insight. The controversy in the spring seems to have followed a similar pattern. On 29 February, the remarks by the Downing Street spokesperson were picked up by the BBC , LBC , Telegraph , Guardian and Evening Standard , leading with ‘wrong and divisive’. Within 24 hours it had been repeated by the Independent , ITV, Sky News , NBC News , The Stage , Variety and Hollywood Reporter – followed by weeks of media and social media reactions, interviews and op-eds about the Black Out concept.

The spokesperson had been reacting to a question at the daily media briefing, but when I tried to find out what the question had been and its context, none of the journalists who’d reported on it as a race controversy responded. (None of those with bylines were Black.) I approached the production’s PR agency, About Grace PR , introducing myself as a Black journalist writing about the Black Out concept, but they declined to answer my questions. (None of them were Black, either.) They also declined to give me a copy of the statement they had issued to other journalists at the time.

When I arrived at the Noël Coward Theatre for the first performance, I asked the usher whether I could interview any cast or crew about their experiences of the Black Out. I was directed to a more senior staff member, a white woman, who told me that I was not allowed to interview staff, and also not allowed to report who had prohibited me. A white security guard was summoned, and I was not allowed to enter the theatre until I showed them I had crossed out ‘duty manager’ in my notebook.

David, a middle-aged white man from Canada, told me he was there because he wanted to learn about Black culture. ‘There was another Black play on down the road, but this one was £20 cheaper and had Kit Harington in it.’ Poppy, a white British woman in her late twenties, was there for work, hosting summer exchange students from the US: she considered the play to be ‘vital London culture’ despite its Americana.

After the play, Adele, a Black woman in her early forties, said that she thought it ‘usefully laid out the fears of both sides of the interracial conversation’. Fareedah, a Black woman in her early twenties, said the play was ‘therapeutic for people trying to understand their first interracial relationship. You watch it and you think: “Oh, now it all makes sense.”’ A young Pakistani woman told me she was in a relationship with a white man and had found the play ‘a bit triggering’. She had felt uncomfortable when white people around her had been laughing, and would have felt safer at the Black Out night. Kacey, a Black man, told me: ‘Every time the audience laughed, I looked around at the afros and those people were stony-faced. The only time Black people had some joy was near the end, and that’s when the white people were quiet.’ He shook his head. ‘The play set up an Us v. Them dynamic. It was like Arsenal v. Chelsea: now they’ve got the ball, now we’ve got the ball.’

The next night, in the queue for the Black Out performance, I spoke to Isabella, a middle-aged white Italian woman who lived in Germany. She’d read about the play in Sexuality beyond Consent , a book on ‘the erotics of racism’ by a white psychoanalyst which included a chapter on the author’s own ‘traumatophilia’ obsession with Slave Play. Isabella didn’t have any experience of interracial relationships, and didn’t know it was a Black Out night. All the other white people I spoke to hadn’t been aware that it was a Black Out night: several had chosen to attend that evening because of the talkback, and some said they had been given free tickets by the talkback organisers. I began to wonder if the Black Out had been cancelled, and so I checked at the Box Office. ‘Tonight is a Black Out performance,’ I was told.

Sj, a Black person of mixed heritage, was there for the talkback and felt ambivalent about the presence of white people in the audience. ‘It would have been better to do more talkbacks than only on the Black Out night. When people see that there’s a talkback, they’re going to want to attend even if they’re not Black.’ For Babs, a middle-aged Black woman, ‘a Black community talkback is just as important as the Black Out performance.’ Her companion, Lucy, believed that ‘if it wasn’t flagged to white attendees that it was a Black Out evening, then that takes the choice away from them to co-operate with the Black Out principle.’ Someone else observed that if the white audience members hadn’t known it was a Black Out night, and the Black audience members weren’t told that the white people didn’t know, then the Black people might feel hostile without the white people knowing why, and this wasn’t fair on either.

At the first performance I went to, around three-quarters of the audience was white; at the Black Out around three-quarters of the audience was Black. The play’s group therapy session is facilitated by a pair of scholars who are also an interracial couple: a Latina and a Black woman. There are several moments when the others talk over the Black woman scholar, stand in front of her or sprawl into her space so she has to move aside. Whenever this happened at the Black Out performance the audience was vocally indignant; with the majority white audience there was no reaction at all. They were silent, too, during the interracial rape scene; at the Black Out performance, the audience chattered and chuckled as Harington prowled around naked cracking a whip. There were wolf whistles when he took off his trousers, and laughter. Finally I felt something: I felt bad for Kit Harington.

The talkback session began with the host reminding us that Downing Street had called the Black Out divisive. Harris celebrated the importance of the Black Out space for the Black community, away from the white gaze. Questions were invited from the audience. The first person to be given the microphone was a white man. As a child in America, he said, he’d been dressed up in colonial outfits and taken on plantation tours. Watching Slave Play tonight was the first time he’d had critical perspective, and now he felt inner chaos. He wanted to know what to do about not having psychological safety in his relationship. Harris observed that there’s inequality in all relationships.

Harris was asked about the evolution of Slave Play . He spoke about couch-surfing on the brink of homelessness in Highland Park, Los Angeles, and spending time on Twitter and Tumblr, watching posts go viral and becoming ‘hyper links’. He had asked himself: ‘What could be the thing that gets me a hyper link and gets me out of here?’

There are ways to do this with sincerity and care. In 2012 the RSC staged an all-Black Julius Caesar , with the story brilliantly transposed to a post-independence African state poised between democracy and authoritarian rule. Asians Have Feelings Too was a queer East Asian music and comedy night by the Mollusc Dimension at the Rich Mix in London in 2022, open to all. When people on either side of me described the post-show panel discussion as ‘healing’ and ‘nourishing’, I realised that I hadn’t been aware of hurt or deprivation. I was surrounded by intimacies I couldn’t reciprocate, forms of courage I’d never had to learn, shared knowledge I wasn’t entitled to and harms that I was helpless to ameliorate and might have benefited from. I wanted the people around me to think of me as an ally, but recognised that in this space they shouldn’t have to think of me at all.

Fredric Jameson 1934-2024

The editors, the pager attack, brazil burning, forrest hylton, elias khoury 1948-2024, what computers can’t do, eli zaretsky.

Fredric Jameson died yesterday at the age of 90. He had taught since 1985 at Duke University. His many books include The Political Unconscious,...

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Stories of slaves come to life on Louisiana plantations
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Slave Quarters · George Washington's Mount Vernon
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Four Fascinating New Orleans Plantations to Tour
Plantation tours: Correcting the record at slavery’s ground zero

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THE MODERN DAY SLAVE PLANTATION…
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8 Most Notable Southern Plantation Tours in the United States
Explore the history and architecture of plantations that once relied on slave labor in the south. Learn about the lives and stories of the enslaved and their owners through guided tours, exhibits and demonstrations.
Whitney Plantation
Whitney Plantation (legal name The Whitney Institute) is a non-profit museum dedicated to the history of the Whitney Plantation, which operated from 1752-1975 and produced indigo, sugar, and rice as its principal cash crops. The museum preserves over a dozen historical structures, many of which are listed on the National Register of Historic ...
The 3 Best New Orleans Plantation Tours
Gray Line - Whitney Plantation Tour. Price: Adults from $79; kids from $39. Duration: 5.5 hours. Opened to the public in 2014, Whitney Plantation offers a distinct look at the enslaved people ...
Whitney Plantation Tour
Whitney Plantation Tour. Visiting the Whitney Plantation is a profound experience, shedding light on the history of slavery since its founding in 1752. The five-hour tour includes original slave cabins, exhibits of artifacts like clothing and tools, and old sugar cane fields. A chapel offers spiritual guidance for descendants of slaves.
An Ethical Guide to Plantation Tours
Plantation tours range widely, and not all of them center Black voices. ... Savannah's Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters is one of the oldest examples of urban enslaved people's housing in ...
Laura: A Creole Plantation Tour
Duration: The guided (walking) tour of the main house, gardens and slave quarters lasts approximately one hour and fifteen minutes. *Note that self-guided tours are prohibited. Parking: Public parking is available at the plantation. Cancellation Policy: No refunds will be given on the voucher unless plantations are closed. If the plantation is ...
Kingsley Plantation
This includes the slave quarters, barn, waterfront, plantation house, kitchen house, and interpretive garden. There are interpretive signs everywhere detailing the history of the plantation. We learned about the history of Kingsley Plantation taking a self-guided audio tour "Lion's Story Teller." So much interestng history to learn about.
Plantation tours: Correcting the record at slavery's ground zero
Plantation tours bypass the 'big house' to focus on the enslaved. These cramped slave quarters are part of the 37-acre McLeod Plantation Historic Site in Charleston, South Carolina. The site's ...
Owens
The Owens-Thomas House slave quarters is complete with the nation's largest expanse of slave-applied haint blue paint, made from indigo and thought to ward off evil spirits. The tour also provides an exploration of the home's remarkable features, including Savannah's earliest system of indoor plumbing, an indoor bridge and the balcony ...
Things to Do in New Orleans
The plantation grounds are accessible; however, there are uneven gravel paths. The main house tour is not accessible to guest traveling in wheelchairs and is not required to be modified as it is a historic home; however, the first floor is accessible. Guests would be able to view the slave quarters, but would not have access to enter.
Whitney Plantation: Tour of an American Slavery Museum
The Whitney Plantation opened in December 2014. Unlike most plantation tours that focus on the large houses of the owners, the Whitney Plantation tour is given from the slaves' perspective. Visitors meet their guide in the Welcome Center, which also serves as a tasteful gift shop, primarily offering books on slavery. The Antioch Baptist Church.
Tours & Day Passes
Guided tours also include tour of our Plantation Outbuildings: colonial kitchen, and replica smoke house, and slave quarters, as well as self guided tours of our gardens and grounds which include a 200-acre nature preserve with miles of waterfront trails and picnic areas. Many thanks for following our leave no trace guidelines.
Enslaved People Lived Here. These Museums Want You to Know
Tours of historic houses in the South used to focus on the fine furniture and design. ... Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters in Savannah, Ga., would have heard a lot about George Owens, the ...
Visit the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters
Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters. Open 10am-5pm today. View Hours. Built in 1819, this mansion exemplifies the neoclassical styles popular in England during the Regency period. The Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters allows visitors to explore the complicated relationships between the most and least powerful people in the city of Savannah ...
Middleton Place Beyond The Fields Tour, Guided African American Slave
Eliza's House. Eliza's House is a Reconstruction-era African American freedman's dwelling containing a permanent exhibit on slavery entitled Beyond the Fields. Based on extensive research over the course of a decade, the exhibit documents the story of slavery, in South Carolina and at Middleton Place. The focal point of the exhibit is a ...
Middleton Place Historic Site, House Museum, and History Tours
The Story of Annette Mayes 1846 - 1940, Stories of Middleton Place. Annette Mayes was born at Middleton Place about 1846, her life spanning the days of slavery, Reconstruction, and first third of the 20 th century. Her name first appears on Middleton Place slave lists in 1853, where she is listed with her father July (who took the surname Wright upon emancipation), mother Dye, and sister Molly.
One Man's Epic Quest to Visit Every Former Slave Dwelling in the United
McGill's mission: to sleep in every former slave dwelling still standing in the United States. Tonight's stay, in a cabin on Georgia's Ossabaw Island, will be his 41st such lodging. McGill ...
South Slave Quarters Museum Exhibit
The South Slave Quarters Exhibit. ... Both plantation residents and formerly enslaved people who fled here seeking freedom confronted new challenges and opportunities. In May 1861, the Lee family left Arlington House, and the US Army crossed the Potomac River to occupy the estate. ... Return to Virtual Tour Ready for the real thing? Plan Your ...
James River Plantations
Treasures from three centuries can be seen at the James River Plantations along Virginia's scenic Route 5 in Charles City County. The county, strategically located between the James and Chickahominy Rivers and close to the colonial capitals of Jamestown and Williamsburg, was the first westward expansion of English-speaking America.
Plantation tourism is shifting. Descendants of the enslaved are part of
The past two decades have seen a shift among plantation museums across the south. Previously, the majority of tours focused on the architecture of the main house, the landscapes and the economics ...
Slavery at Monticello Tour
Explore Before You Visit. Mapping Address. 1050 Monticello Loop. Charlottesville, VA 22902. General Information (434) 984-9800. THOMAS JEFFERSON FOUNDATION ®. Helpful Links. About. Hours of Operation.
Gamble Plantation Historic State Park
70000189 [1] Added to NRHP. August 12, 1970. The Judah P. Benjamin Confederate Memorial at Gamble Plantation Historic State Park, also known as the Gamble Mansion or Gamble Plantation, is a Florida State Park, located in Ellenton, Florida, on 37th Avenue East and US 301. It is home to the Florida Division United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).
List of plantations in Virginia
This is a list of plantations and/or plantation houses in the U.S. state of Virginia that are National Historic Landmarks, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, other historic registers, or are otherwise significant for their history, association with significant events or people, or their architecture and design. [1] [2] [3]
M.G. Zimeta
At the first performance I went to, around three-quarters of the audience was white; at the Black Out around three-quarters of the audience was Black. ... As a child in America, he said, he'd been dressed up in colonial outfits and taken on plantation tours. Watching Slave Play tonight was the first time he'd had critical perspective, and ...

8 Most Notable Southern Plantation Tours in the United States

History buffs with an interest in the southern part of the United States will enjoy these plantation tours. They offer insight into the history of slave labor, plantation living and how the south evolved into what it is today.

Belle Meade Plantation, Nashville, Tennessee

Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, Charleston, South Carolina

Destrehan Plantation, Louisiana

Nottoway Plantation, White Castle, Louisiana

Become a Culture Tripper!

Pebble Hill Plantation, Thomasville, Georgia

Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, Nashville, Tennessee

James Madison’s Montpelier, Virginia

HISTORY & LEGACIES

THE WHITNEY INSTITUTE EDUCATES THE PUBLIC ABOUT THE HISTORY AND LEGACIES OF SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES

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Gray Line – Whitney Plantation Tour

New Orleans Kayak Swamp Tours – Whitney Plantation & Swamp Kayak Tour Combo

Legendary Tours – Laura Plantation Tour

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Whitney Plantation Tour

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Antioch Baptist Church

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Slave Revolt Memorial

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An Ethical Guide to Plantation Tours

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A personal look into the lives of owners and enslaved people in antebellum Louisiana.

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