These pictures are over a year old as of my posting them. I have held onto them for that long seeing what might become of the property, but it appears it’s slated for development and some work has started now. I don’t know how much longer these structures will survive.
Be that as it may, I’m keeping the detailed history and location to myself for now. There’s still a slight hope something might survive.
What I will say is that this property is very old, with original settlement of it being in the late 1700’s. Before the Civil War it was also a working plantation with a slave population. Those slaves built the main house. Some of those slaves may be buried on the land as well but searches haven’t been able to locate their graves thus far. Several attempts have been made through the years to have the property added to the National Register of Historic Places but for some reason, they have never succeeded. As things are, this site is endangered, and despite parts of it being over 200 years old, it may not last much longer.
I hope to possibly find my way back to this place again soon to check one or two more places in the overgrowth where graves might be, but the massive size of the property and it’s current inaccessibility might make that difficult.
During the last search with several other people we found only one stone that looked like it might have been a grave marker at one time.
It was on the edge of a formerly cultivated field, and it makes me wonder if someone in the recent past might have plowed under what little proof of enslaved graves there may have been.
It’s rare for a structure, a property this old to still exist as it does. It’s a shame that nothing was ever done to save it. There aren’t many antebellum plantations left in this part of the state, and preserving this one would be a way not only to tell the story of the people who owned the property, but the enslaved people who built, maintained, and were likely buried on it.
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