BackStory; The Long Shadow of the Plantation: How a Weighted Past Creates a Complicated Present

major funding for backstory provided by anonymous donor the national down for the canaries and the jaws of a robbery cornell memorial foundation this is welcome to back story the show explains the history behind today's headlines i'm joined freeman amazing collie and others if you do a podcast where all historians along with our colleague brian balogh and each week we explore a different topic in american history today we'll talk about plantations and how these spaces engage with the past start in southwest georgia or shows gerard has worked for fifty years to create a sustainable community for african american farmers i've been telling promise me is you you can't make it out there on your farm by unicef and mr you've gotta work with your brothers and sisters an area she was a co founder of an organization called new communities in albany ga she helped assemble a collective of black

farmers back in the early nineteen sixties at the time she was organizing for the civil rights movement and he started to notice a pattern what we realized as we were encouraging people to register to vote many of those individuals who were living on land owned by white people would be asked to leave there were so many individuals who we're at the mercy of farmers you know who employed them so we could have a mass meeting and i am a family show up sand they've been asked to leave the farm and we would have to work to try to find places for them to go so that's what prompted the whole idea of trying to create a community what can use got rolling there was some immediate intense pushback from white landowners in the area and those early meetings sometimes shots would be fired at the bill and some time

with some of those and them despite this hostility to rada new communities driving the nineteen seventies the group peanuts corn soybeans and salt cured meats like him and sausage animated operation there where we could sell products well we were also growing peanuts and other crops but we experience doubts and that led a lot of the seventies we tried to apply for an emergency law like all farmers were doing and when we went to the lover lovers the gas that you get along here over my dead body eventually face foreclosure and lost there were in nineteen eighty five years went by his ceramic work for other agricultural groups in the region but in the late nineteen nineties she received word of a class action lawsuit against the usda it was called pigford v gleckman the plaintiffs were black farmers who were

denied loans from the usda because of racial discrimination and they use the years nineteen eighty one to nineteen ninety six and that was because when reagan became president he obama's team the office of civil rights at usda so when our farmers complain when we find out about the treatment and the communities that we were getting those complaints the man in it where to go because reagan had abolish that part of that agency and our case we had to be compared to plantations in the area and it was just shocking and found that these plantations around here i won by rich people we're actually getting the long as we were denied we tried to live for irrigation actually have a contract to grow our lives a prius of eskimos to be shipped to store them in north east and now we were denied those

plantations with rich owners were getting irrigation you know they were getting the services that were denied to us shariah says they waited ten years for the case to be reviewed but finally in two thousand and nine she got a call from her lawyer she asked if we had heard and i said no she said we won now the way things usually happen i thought ok we won again to give us about him she asked me do you want to guess how much asset roses of at least a million dollars she said no as to where you know it was i don't believe and i think bob maya lin an asset a cry a madman two years later new communities was reestablished on sixteen hundred acres of land right outside of albany and this time the senate battling the plantation they owned it when we purchased the land we didn't know it was a four months later and patient

we just know it was a prime piece of proud and we were actually looking at two different tracks of man that i can tell you that the previous on the invented the system for pay and put fuel at the pump so yeah lots of money and the antebellum house on any other starters but he put three million dollars into restoring that house there's eighty five acre lake they are cabins down by the late as well as up near that main house now we started looking at the history of that land and that's when we found that it had been once only bad the largest slave owner and the wealthiest man in the state are well heeled harbor he all about man plantations and he kept the largest number of slaves on their property we also learned that when jefferson

davis was running from the union army actually spent some days a nice to be on their property so you are on one of the largest plantation in the state of georgia a place where severson davis literally laid his head during the age of the civil war and i have to imagine that that history shapes or at least adds a very profound context of the kind of work that you all are doing there now definitely so called blessing of the land sarandon you know the mark mckinney is where the first inhabitants of this property this area so we decided to try to bring as much of a mix of people as the curtain has propagated do the blessings in their charters so educational far people cause we fail it and a bed began an end slavery but we ought to be able to come together to do some healing and promote a better way than say

here in southwest georgia on their property you can teach our children black history when he got to sell a plantation we have a copy of a man's hour where a hundred fifty slaves were sold from that plantation on the seminal twenty nine eighteen fifty nine one of the things we've bowed to do is try to find the senators from from those slaves we know who bought them we just need to be able to do the research to find out and the center's when we start teaching our people they are history you couldn't find a better place to do that i think in that relationship between that the history in the memory of slavery and the contemporary struggled to protect really you know agricultural health for the entire country but also specifically for the very small number of african american farmers wise it's so connected in in your mind and in your efforts are well you know i grew up on a farm and i grew up in a

family that believed in farmland ownership and education i mean that was drilled in me so and then we was a roundabout plantations to a plantation then i joined some of now gravity into way was all about robert woodruff was a chair of coca cola thirty three thousand acre plantations are cds plantation still intact now you know so i'm surrounded bad big plantations but then where our lives of my family at all know how they ended up there but up around them and eighteen seventies senses they were there sharecropping to ballet and so i mean that's been drilled in me through the years to work hard to get an education that in like that where it was hard identity i wanted to get as far away from it as i could in fact if my father had not been

murdered i would be living in that cell and made a commitment to stay on the night of his death and work for change but aren't there was not much land because it kind of takes you cameras and all the other bag breaking work that we had to do but now i look back and i gather i've got what my grandparents and great grandparents were trying to do they educated math father and now uncles and cousins and so forth from that man and that what men ownership could do for you and when i normally say hey is they took six thousand acres from my house and god gave us a plantation intact all across the south there are hundreds of sites that once plantations the challenge today is what do we do with those cases today plantations have been repurposed into things like

museums and even private event spaces sides grappling with their complicated legacy on today's show we'll explore that question and taking to a few plantations that have radically different approaches to pass today there are approximately three hundred and seventy five plantation museums in the us and each one chooses to represent the history of the space in its own way these are important places of history this is where our culture is contested grapes so we're certainly interested in in with these places are putting forth in terms of history any potter is a geographer with a team of researchers called reset based at inequality the tourism industry and work of places to include the history people that had an absent or ignored the reset team recently looked at plantation museums in the south and how they present and discuss the history of slavery during two hours

as a geographer i think these plantations have such a powerful opportunity to put people in place i mean it's very powerful to be in place so there's the opportunity there are project side a more holistic look at the plantation so often you see more recent studies that it's just a singular case study so what we saw i did do was look at the whole thing are we wanted to talk to management and staff only wanted to speak with guidance we took two hours we interviewed visitors before they took their tour of the site in an actor to just get this holistic picture in these three different regions in the south the teen research plantations along the james river in virginia in charleston south carolina and on river road louisiana and potter says when it comes to discussing slavery many plantations still have lots of work to do for example a charleston even you know with our presence on these

tours only seventy percent of the two is that we are just a bit and thirty five to where's discuss slavery and even then you still have some it's a problematic representations of slavery happening so guide using passive voice or using words servant or by using the benevolent slavery trope so the faithful slave in the kind of novel a master rights of these things are still occurring even in these discussions of slavery so much of this is just giving them visitors what they want it i don't think it is so i'm one of the interesting things about our work that that makes it different is that we did it pre to wear survey and visitors in addition to view their interesting grounds and gardens they are also interested in slavery and when we did exit surveys with visitors so particularly in river road and in charleston

visitors ranked slavery as one of the highest levels of interest things that they are interested and so in some ways it's not how you may be giving them what they want and in there you still have that you know they're the romance but they are definitely interested in in slavery and they're not afraid to hear about it you didn't come to this trauma from an accurate perspectives my understanding you have some pursell experience on the ground wires so in the summer of two thousand they actually worked is it to work i had a plantation in bad racial easy an hour it was interesting because i was able to see firsthand the plantation that was actually engaged in this repaired at history work writes i could see plantation manager actively trying to incorporate stories of slavery throughout the entire plantation experience greg through that experience i also learned just how much agency guide to have in terms of telling the story is i think one of my contributions to the team was really in

thinking through how we approached our study of the plantation and understanding that guides are not just reciting a script right and so when you look at the sites you have to go on multiple too wears navy with this same guy had also multiple viewers with different acts to really get a sense of the types of narratives that are being put forth that these sites are more surprises that management doesn't force greater uniformity tortoises agencies that has since come from well it had many and their sites where we did research and died to create their own to where i mean of course they're given books in a variety of resources that many have again quite a bit ad agency in developing their own to her ceo this idea of the plantation educating that complex which i think i've been there that but that would tell me that the plantation entertainment complex so the plantation and human complex is essentially a mall tae functional site that seeks to both educate and entertain so we really is

saying this play out had plantations and that they are both educating but they're also creating a variety of tumors so they could have major to as they could have a petting zoo they're also hosting festivals and weddings other events that are not at all related to the history that they purport to tell him so this becomes a really problematic in terms there engaging meaningfully and deeply was slavery and that visitors can go to these sites and not at all here this history and engage with this history i know that interest in plantations has ebbed and flowed over the years when they have the plantations been really popular and then they faded and wordy think we are in the cycle now so magnolia plantation outside of charleston south carolina he opened an eighteen seventy and opened its guard last it died shortly after the civil war people have been visiting the sights for a long time you know i think we often think

of gone with the wind and certainly that was a really important and that is for plantation tourism but it was happening long before gone with the wind's speaking to channel stan nineteen twenties tourism in this city you have white elite charleston eons really putting forth this last cosmetology and really promoting the beauty of this ad you have in the nineteen thirties in city promoting the azalea first of all there are by nineteen thirties national geographic magazine show featuring two plantations middleton a magnolia and their gardens right so you have people really engaging in this beauty of the landscape before gone with the wind's i'm most serbs are plantations you see them really opening to the public in the nineteen seventies on which is interesting you know post civil rights this reaction drawn to civil rights say you have these moments but it's before gone with the wind it was already set in motion i would say

you know more recently our research shows and you know maybe this is more long term diet you know we were thinking that twelve years a slave in django unchained would maybe started put a dent in some of maybe the mythology that interesting me when we surveyed visitors when we asked at what media comes to mind it was overwhelmingly still gone with the way and how were very you know the majority of visitors are eternally older sewer be interesting to see ten fifteen years how these different movies and other things mean it will have an impact on day to islam you solace on the ground in two thousand and eight so i'm injured and watches for over decades are we making progress well i think that we are seeing more incorporation of slavery into traditional plantation to areas where we're really seeing the progress and just the forward

thinking is at sites like whitney of louisiana and mcleod in south carolina on these certain new plantation tourism sites they opened just a few years ago and they're not burdened by these traditional representations that some of these other sites feel that they need to uphold magnifying the folks in the beauty of this site however i'd hear some of the more traditional sites again our research shows for charleston seventy percent of tourists did discuss slavery but we have to be very critical and pop paul and think carefully about how they're talking about slavery at the charleston sites and why we call them on a plantation entertainment complexes that have these additional two hours so they essentially arce segregating slavery to these alternative cures or presentations and so a visitor can be quite possible that they can go to these sites and they just did a house or were they had not meaningfully engage with

slavery if they don't have time to do this self guided two hours or alternative cures and and once i you have to pay extra money for eddie's slavery centric to our right right so how do we set the story of slavery into the larger story about americans at the site was again maybe i look to a cloud and i look at how at this site the discussion doesn't just end on with the end of civil war with emancipation they actually look more long term their slave cabins were lived in until nineteen ninety it black tenants so they really can act slavery to longer term struggles that have their roots in slavery so the conversation doesn't just end you know with emancipation they look more a longitudinal lee at the story of charleston civil rights in incarceration in onward so the idea of the name of your project being research does recover hopeful purpose behind your eyes so one of the things they leave

dead with the visitor survey data is that a few months after we did our field work as we went back to their management and owners to discuss is your interest and particularly for two out of the three regions visitors are interested in slavery they want to hear about it and so our hope was that these plantation managers would really say oh we don't have to be afraid to talk about slavery that it's going to ruin somebody's staycation they want to hear about it and they wanna think about these histories potter is an associate professor of geography at georgia southern university he's also a member of the tourism reset team promoting equity in the tourism industry as harry potter just mentioned one of the

plantations of research team studied with the whitney plantation in louisiana it sits on the state's historic river road which runs along the winding mississippi river between new orleans and baton rouge down river road are thirteen restore plantations open to the public but the whitney is the only one that's completely dedicated to the history of slavery and enslaved people our producer charlie shelton gorman traveled to we need to learn more it's as you walk along the grounds of the whitney plantation you're guaranteed to hear two things a steady buzz of summer cicadas and the china evan or iron bell visitors are encouraged to ring the bell ones in memory of the people who endured slavery on the plantation i think that our memorial focuses here above our focus on enslavement ashley rogers has been the executive director of wendy says the plantation open as a museum in late twenty fourteen the memorial focus is what makes it so unique because we don't

have a lot of spaces in this country where it is acceptable to i'll remember and to mourn the history of enslavement of people who were enslaved and that is where we sent her her visit and we really want people to not only learn but also reflect as the only plantation and the wheezing and others devoted entirely to slavery rogers says the whitney has a duty to educate its visitors without sugar coating history the reason why plantations are here is to enslave people i mean at that rate so if you do it to war and slavery is optional on the tour as some of them are was in that kind of funny because slavery was definitely not optional in a plantation is the entire reason the plantation exists and also something that i talk about when i talked to interpreters and things is that even if we think numerically about who lived on the plantation magicians are blacks basis the

majority of people who experience life on plantations were black and so if all we're talking about the way people who lived on the plantation we are really missing the majority of life experience on the plantation why the plantation sits on two hundred and fifty acres of land in the small town of wallace on the west bank of the mississippi river enjoying banner grew up in wallace and as the descendants of enslaved folks are with me now she's the museum's director of communications she says for descendants like herself the popular plantation sights on river road are oftentimes contentious symbols i'm from his area and it seems are in the foreground on the longest river road in this part of our lives and in there always there and because of that i think that we as a community have a complicated relationship with plantations you know these are very painful reminders and it was difficult when you see plantations and they

are continuing to get economic benefit and you know and they literally you know it's in the middle of the sentence and we're not receiving any of those economic benefits in addition to her job or whitney banner is also active in the community she regularly attends parish council meetings and is the president of a community focus group about plantations exclusive of the community you know an exclusive of what is happening and the president and i were told that oil plantations and all the sides would feel an obligation to the descendents along i'm proud to be a descendant hearing and you know i know sometimes people have more of a strange reaction to it but i certainly when i'm here and i'm proud to tell the story of whitney because it is the story of my family it is a story of my community but i think that make me is one of the plantations in or maybe the oil plantation and the community feels is at least you know paying acknowledgement to the system

i'm in a way that they feel should be acknowledged today with me is well known a long river road but that wasn't the case the day it opened five years ago and ours out there really made the songs of people who will come in four people came to a lost looking for the war plantation but i kept them there to take the deal john cummings is the founder of winnie he's a former attorney from new orleans he bought the property back in nineteen ninety nine from the petro chemical company that plan to build a factory on the land after coming to read more about the history of slavery and the plantation he get to work turning it into a museum is what happened we got it immediately mottola know we really don't most people operate on the same regime of ready aim fire and we operate in an already find a name and see if we demanding goodness we didn't just go back and change it he spent fifteen years and ten million dollars

creating what's there today when he has come a long way since four people showed up on opening day they expect more than a hundred thousand visitors by the end of this year it's just the road warning that the people who go there go back and tell everybody and then they come and so we're doing here representing the facts of slavery unvarnished sometime are not pleasant but we think it's important that people come to see them because these facts were deliberately withheld from them in their education i asked cummings what it's like for him walking around with me and what really stands out on the grounds this church and wales it's the church but it was originally an anti yo it was built the men and women who had been freed from slavery fully to use

it's a very old church was built by the formerly enslaved people when they're hundred and purchased the land at fifty two parcels of land and in that document it says that the purchaser the land was for the purpose of building the anti yolk baptist church and its anti capital a and t i hate and cap oh i ok so it's it's in their multiple times we know that's not a mistake and something really interesting quite beautiful lighting tires that these formerly enslaved people names their congregation anti yolk and a yoke being a symbol of oppression and slavery that for them was only three years in the past two or three as we stayed inside the church rogers told me about it first conquered ants and

eighteen sixties how they had to pull all their money and resources together to buy the land and build the church and paulina louisiana now formerly enslaved people build churches like this to unite their families and communities i think that's something you can feel in a space like yes and i love to think about what would those first worship services have felt like for those formerly enslaved people who had had to pray and in secret who had had too high you know their familial our community connections because of the structure of slavery but what it felt like to be free in a space like this scattered drop the church for more than a dozen life size statues of children women to give an imagined faced the kids who were enslaved at the plantation as we walk across the grounds rogers told me of other ways visitors are encouraged to remember those who endured slavery at winning for example at the beginning of the two where everybody gets a card profiling a different person

selling museums do that and they do it in a way where it's like then you find out what happened to your personal like you are that person for the day and that's not our intent we never tell people often it's based in it so they're walking ago today we were like i mean we're really wanted that those tags to be a way for you to keep a person with you keep a memory of a person with a bristle at the idea of trying to make people imagine they are enslaved people nobody alive today can imagine what it was like to be an enslaved person who is taken from africa enforced across the atlantic in the middle passage and slate to write this is even to the extent that there's modern day slavery fundamentally different things we just can't understand that that way and i don't wanna put a visitor in that space ms rogers showed me the rest of the plantation a summer thunderstorm was brewing in the distance but before the rain swept and she showed me inside one more building services an original slave cabin which still has cyprus planks you can see that there is

no insulation here it's a very very simple style of construction it would've been called it would've been high the rain came in i mean usually you know during slavery cabins like this attitude of her family's would've lived in a cabin of a size so you have basically a room and a half for a whole family how many people live in the cabin depends on the size of your family saudi an example so there is a woman on this plantation her name was france was and she had her first child at the age of thirteen she continued to have children she had five children by the time she was twenty three but i mean that one's fine here in the front row with a bad or just powered on for it would be her the sleeping quarters of living quarters the dining corridors the cooking corridors for fans fires and whoever else she's living with which could be to the order of five more people the storm soon arrived with a steady downpour so we retreated back to the welcome center

inside the building goes along wall that's filled with notes from visitors are counting their experience and the museum like a big public guest book but rodgers and android banner say even though when he grapples with a tough topic their courage to see how the site changes those who visit you know we talk about slavery in public interpretation one visit it that is that the words that we have as visitors to describe her experience don't always fit with what we learned so when you're learning about the history of trauma and tragedy it's hard to say that you had a good visit or that you're happy with that impulse is they're afraid so i was sick of his ears really reach out to me that i'm glad that they have an impactful that said i'm glad that they have a meaningful visit i encourage anyone who has a historical side our home or attraction where slavery or difficult topic is involving i would encourage him to

embrace it because people want the truth in the appreciate nature which will literally in a steel charlie tell me more about what you saw in the whitney plantation well there's a lot to take in a windy but what really interested me was how the plantation has organized its space and house difference to most other plantations so most other plantations sightsee the main house or the big house that the house where the white family lives as the focal points to organize the rest of the space around but when he does something very different and that uses its main building as the church thats been relocated so a visitor will first go through the welcome center and read more about the history of slavery in louisiana and on the tour starts in the church were folks watch a video before beginning to walk around the grounds and hears what ashley rogers said about wendy's use of space and how compares their plantation sides for a very very long time in

this country we have to create a day saying of plantation tourism and plantation tourism is touring a home i'm so visitors are confused about plantation is i find this all the time you can hear people get here and they go where's the plantation and we're like you're on the plantation is they don't understand they think a plantation is the house rogers actually talk to me more about how the white slave owning family is not discussed much in the two words actually under the hide or family and when they are mentioned in the two words and granted it does vary slightly too or bite your but roger said they're mostly referenced in wendy's history when they conducted some business transaction or some business decision that directly affected the people who once lived at whitney so they're presented in the plantations history mostly when it affects the slave folks at the plantation did you have any says all about how patients and visitors responded to the way that stuff was being presented at the whitney yeah it's interesting to look

at the wall in the welcome center that's filled with those notes from people talking about their experience that way ni hao to say when i was there i got caught in that thunderstorm and while i was seeking shelter in the welcome center there are still lots of people who we're walking around the plantation to try to squeeze out the last bits of the two or so and there's a lot of white umbrellas courtesy when he came diving around the space that i was very powerful people really going out of their way to get as much as they could out of this experience but of course not every quotation has been repurposed into a museum like whitney as we mentioned earlier in the show some plantations actually used for private events and i actually traveled to northeastern north carolina to warren county to visit one of these plantations that has been repurposed into a private event space and i wanted to learn more about how this plantation is incorporating besides history into the experience for

visitors this is just this is trish peters says the owner of lincoln was a plantation where she hosts private events like weddings banquets and family reunions peters has also with their sons she and her husband bought the property of a hundred ten acres back in the early two thousands the house spokesman a mean old houses have that magic they speak you they embrace you and this house in brightest day and before peters came along wake of the woods was passed down through the davis family for generations and has gone eighteen twenty nine was a puppy and think about four thousand acres that came onto its everywhere around you looked the state is proper and back then the daves plantation was by no

means the only one in warren county in the mid eighteen hundreds you'd see cotton and tobacco plantations as far as the eye could see before the civil war warren county was one of the wealthiest counties in the state but by the turn of the twentieth century the county's economy started to crack and despite attempts to revitalize the region today warren county remains one of the poorest in north carolina but peter says recently more people have started to come into the area to historic sword homes in the wake of the woods stands out as a window into the past we have the region's staples the ritual carriage houses we have a slight quarter stolen property and everything was just kept for the prison history on i mean we're on the national register of stock holmes wearing north carolina considered one of the premier is because we have some of the sensibilities i think if someone's going to take upon the responsibility and the

privilege of taking on historical home your goal is really to restore it initially peter says she wasn't planning to host an event she just wanted to live at the plantation that is after she finished all the remodeling when they bought the place no we have lived there for about a decade and things were in rough shape there was no heat or air conditioning and plaster was falling off the walls but peter's new the courthouse and the surrounding property had potential we did nasa and restorations along every cottage every building able to do it so i've made accommodation every place i went at a noticeably little cottage uncovers make another definitely better this is lovely better matter how it's built that are you know so we create things soon after she finished people started asking peters she could have some items so she decided to open up the property to ten events year one

if you look across the south you'll find many more plantations turn and then space is somewhere to wake of the woods north carolina for instance there are more than fifteen sites that have plantation in their title that served as a private venues the hall walking around the property you you feel the history here although it obviously does weddings you'd have to discuss your bands and things like that but you're still surrounded by what this property was say it is even with the kind of their resorts feel that we've kind of added to it but hopefully we've done it in a tasteful manner that respects because you know this has been common well isn't that same guy that you walked through the main house peters told me about the difference in which he's refurbished we have one of the original but miles from when the houses the girls because everything came off plantation on the floors of what if everything came off the plantation clinic in the brics then he ventured

outside and roamed around the grounds as soon as we stepped out of the main house we came across a row of old buildings each painted white with a sign identifying its role on the plantation here with the rebels more cuts on the original works at johnson true that the regional well the three hundredth as we continued to walk peters pointed to a building off in the distance or across the field are invisible self cabin which the last remaining on slave quarters on the property was his role he was just a worker for the davis family and he was a huge slate and then after the armed civil war he was a free man this to work for the day since and that was his home we didn't look and final source cabin because peter says it's just used for storage but she did show me inside a building called the summer kitchen filled with original artifacts from the eating hundreds the guests are encouraged to explore then we stepped inside a little cabin called clementines

costs the prequel oh politician concerned with housekeeper's of the day this isn't in the twenties where she was after american arm and say this is her little hats if you can imagine this has a second story on that right now he says the economy is usually the top so there was in looking onto that follows the staircase that came up in those kind of sleeping loft the bathroom was a kitchen so that had a little gas today clementines cottages that has a quaint getaway for guests complete with a pristine bathroom comfortable queen bed and even a small collection of dvds it's similar to the rest of the properties country resort to static it has a faint echo of history that muffles by the luxury of modern amenities is that of the small stove clementine used to cook meals now a team he sits in the

corner meanwhile the wooden planks of uncle saul's cabin now hold the tools required for a plantation venue to run in the stage even though these spaces look very different compared to when clementine and uncle saul occupied them peter says it's still important to include them away to the words you know he's facing extremely important mean they were members of this family owned and is i totally destroyed by local salt they were very kind owners i guess i hate that word but anyway they were kind of there's just part of southern history but even if the davis's were as peter says kind owners some people say it's inappropriate host a celebration like a wedding a place that has a history of slavery i asked peters here's how she sees that you only have african american weddings there and mostly for locals from one county that come

so i guess i'm a northerner so that history doesn't really affect the first i thought and i don't sound flick of the color you know people are people to me so the only time i'd ever had any real kind of backlash i have to say was i was a guest at a wedding in connecticut and i was accosted by these young people african american white and saying how can you own a plantation in my view called a plantation i said well that was the name of it that's when it was cobbled together with conditions a team twenty now you mean what i try to stage elaine may come down off alarms about it both resentment and so while davis's were

slave owners some of the forefathers of our country so therefore part of our history cooper is three to flee terrible horrible but jump over history so i just didn't say history and doesn't reflect upon your own the plantation at the farm oh yes he was all kinds of letters well the generation family uses farmer is one more reminder of how weak the woods has tried to integrate some aspects of the houses history and the present it's a history peter says she feels responsible how do you let people come to your home and i'll say well it doesn't really bother me because the house should be lifted you know i think that especially one that says hanson

and so rich and heritage and history like the words that she should see it i think in my approach is that i think of myself as a custodian and not an owner mean i did travel myself but i'm really a custodian of that and my job is to maintain it has historical integrity and to hopefully pass it on to someone else earlier here was we started this story on an article came out why should post they're surveying people who had visited plantations and there's a lot of

resentment that they were spinning their vacation dollars to go see something pretty stout it pleasant or patriotic going to present some stuff and feeling as if they were hijacked in some ways you have to talk about slavery and so i wonder to what extent we think that places that are dependent upon tourism are capable of telling the story that may not be what people looking for during their leisure time to rethink its intrinsic of the courses exactly when we should tell the story i think that there are a number of different corners of the old slave south that depends quite mightily on tourist dollars mean it is there's a need to keep certain places relevant a lot of rural areas in particular that might have a large plantations i'll rely on people going on for instance ghost tours of old plantation house isn't the time i'll see your book about that or you know seeing the native american plantations in the novelty of that

and you know and i think there are a lot of different ways in which again when done tastefully or thoughtfully can you feel like less about hijackings in somebody's vacation just because so much of the geography really puts you in that space right and that's you know these places all of these kinds of places where the tiny mountain furniture or my cello or these other plantations we've been talking about in this episode they have a real parrot to them as places any people put themselves as tourists of one kind or another into those faces because of that power and some people who go in and want to touch on something pretty as part of that power maybe they'd they might feel hijacked if there's something there that isn't pretty but i guess if you're going understand that space and do justice to the power that spacing out what whatever reason brings people there it's the places of it that matters and so i i

think in one way or another the challenge is to be true to that place in a way that does the facets of it justice and in a way that makes it clear that you cannot understand one point without the other you know it makes me think of my cello who was even arrested and i definitely went to sing on a cello many times but with everything about my cello is jefferson constructed it as a plantation so that he didn't have to see in slave labor it's underneath his house it's out of sight of his house so you know in a sense we still are doing sometimes some version of that today when voters on the house and we don't focus on anything else that surround the places like my cello and montpelier are really doing extensive and i think really creative work and actually the whitney plantation as well about how to weave those stories together so that you actually can't see one without also acknowledging the distance another

that i remembered and it would just last week and kind of happened upon a nickel in my pocket right now when nobody cares coins anymore and has turned over and you know again it's not the first time a very cynical i'm a grown man but i was aware there's a plantation house on our money here but the cello is on the nickel it's not clear to capture slavery of the contradictions of capitalism and you know human bondage right is there to capture the great man that was thomas jefferson emily think a lot about kind of national iconography and how things like the plantation house can just totally to your point a way use it as their there and built upon a certain kind of extraction bonded actually conceal their history like the national iconography isn't there talk about the gritty and bloody part is actually very tough to be a unifying things including the actual image of monticello on our currency but it makes me wonder too about other

kinds of national symbols and in the work they do it again thinking about plantations like no arlington national cemetery right i mean that's obviously an extraordinarily important and certainly intentionally solemn site but i remember you know many shows ago and when i learned to really preparing that that was in fact also re released fuentes you wish i had not know my whole life and so again i think there was a way in which national unity around a former plantation space was created without any of the back story of the god intended about how that particular place came to be and what it was like to really live there i know all of us have workers various sides to try to live up to their potential of work for some these plantation homes in virginia and i know that people have to wrestle with what this leads to a thirty percent decline in our visitation that aim at the site at risk is that something we should even think about eddie izzard asking about how what we do to wrestle with slavery and yet still have visitation at the site you know it is an obvious

thing to say but it's hardly put slavery in our history in a way that people will still want to see it and that's where you are now right i mean that's the question that can't be avoided and they were struggling with which is it's here it's us it's really are so how do we get that to be recognized and talked about it i think that maybe these places a building under point to joanna about the power of place this place is maybe the best way to get people thinking about slavery which is not the abstract right here is a plate as someone held a perpetual bondage from here is the house where they had to raise children and hear their names and maybe here's a picture it may be that his former best chances for people to actually think about slavery in a more compelling way i'm making a human you know a lot of these plantations like montpelier my cello our bubble when see threes nonprofits with boards that are designed to tell the story forever others are businesses that are tied to the particular plans of a family should people know which is

which were for the loser well that would be made that you know the act of slavery was profitable the history of slavery ought not be and that there are reasons to think about the sizes always needing to have some measure of public support so that the history can be told in ways that is grounded and conscientious and not necessarily worried about turning off your average tourist or they imagine a tourist to be real looker to be concerned and so you know there there is a national treasure in this history and i think to the extent that we have a variety of people more interested in preserving it that's wonderful but i also would be you know silly not to know is that we have an economic consideration that can sometimes make it harder for people to take them seriously as it needs to be but once you do a test that you can keep the conversation going it let us know you thought of the episode you'll find a sad

factory for sending email to continue well so on facebook and when everything that killed these special thanks this week to the studios bottom out at virginia's unity support provided by the anonymous donor josephine robert or no memorial foundation the johns hopkins university and a national endowment for the committee findings conclusions are recommendations not necessarily represent those of a national guard unit additional support provided by the tomato cultivating fresh ideas in the arts committees but brian balogh is professor of history at the university it is a professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the university of richmond john freeman is professor of

history and american studies at yale university but nathan connolly is associate professor of history of the johns hopkins university it