The state historical site off Old Oxford Highway in Durham County offers an immersive look into North Carolina’s complex past.
by Courtney Napier | photography by Samantha Everette
In 1776, the Continental Congress declared the colonies’ independence from England, and Virginia merchant turned prominent Orange County businessman Richard Bennehan purchased 1,213 acres of land from a local widow named Judith Stag. A member of North Carolina’s political elite, Bennehan owned 24 humans by 1790, more than anyone else in Orange County. Those incredibly skilled laborers and artisans built the home that still stands in the center of what is now the Stagville Plantation Historical Site.
According to the National Register of Historic Places, the home is an exceptional representation of the architecture of the time: Stagville… is a restrained late Georgian plantation house, with exterior and interior finish combining a stylistically conservative retention of robust Georgian forms of excellent craftsmanship.
The house is situated at the end of a drive that leads from the entrance signage of the historic site on Old Oxford Highway. Across the road, down an even longer drive within the 150-acre historic area, lies the plantation area known as Horton Grove.
Here stand two similar homes. Each displays a far more modest — though no less skilled — version of the craftsmanship seen in the structure now referred to as the Bennehan House. Horton’s Grove is where the enslaved families of Stagville lived, and where the Holden slave quarters still stand over 200 years later. Unlike the cabins and shanties we often see in pictures from the era, the Holden slave quarters are two-story buildings that represent “the pinnacle of slave house development and include shuttered windows, multiple stories, brick chimneys and raised stone foundations,” according to the nomination form for the National Register of Historic Places.
It’s hard not to picture the Bennehan House when standing before the Holden slave quarters: same bones, but stripped of any adornment that might celebrate its skillful design.
What is hard is to envision that as many as four families inhabited this house at the same time, dozens of people squeezed into a space smaller than the one occupied by just one family on the same property.
This is the power of Stagville, where well-preserved structures and straightforward tours invite visitors to contemplate our area’s past as they walk through its forested grounds.
By 1860, the Bennehans’ daughter Rebecca had married Hillsborough lawyer Duncan Cameron, and their family would eventually acquire landholdings larger than the size of San Francisco. They enslaved hundreds of humans who were forced to work the land through physical violence and political disenfranchisement.
According to the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, the Bennehan-Cameron family were unlike typical plantation owners who worked the land alongside the enslaved — they operated a massive industrial complex more like a city than a farm. “Their mutual holdings,” the NCDNCR website says, “included multiple outbuildings, stores, mills, blacksmith shops, tanneries and distilleries and approximately 900 slaves.”
The Bennehan-Cameron family were politicians, university trustees and real estate magnates who used the unpaid labor of blacksmiths, farmers, brick masons, carpenters and skilled domestic workers to run their corporation and maintain their economic abundance.
In 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed one in three North Carolinians from bondage, Union and Confederate soldiers clashed on Stagville’s grounds. Tour guides teach the details of the fall and dissolution of the Stagville Plantation, bringing to life the months following emancipation by weaving well-known historical moments into the personal stories of the laborers facing the impossible choice of remaining at the only place they’ve ever known, or building a new free life elsewhere.
While half of Stagville’s enslaved families fled after emancipation, hundreds stayed behind. Families continued to live and work as sharecroppers at Stagville into the 1970s, two decades after the Bennehan-Camerons sold their last land shares to the Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company. In 1976, Liggett & Myers partnered with the newly formed Historic Stagville Preservation Society of Durham to donate the first 71 acres of land to the state, making the original buildings that remained on the site eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.
There was the intention that the land would become an educational space, yet members of the Stagville Center struggled with how to tell the land’s story, with the earliest efforts centered on the white family’s narrative.
In 1985, the Center hired historian Alice Eley Jones as its new site manager. Stepping into the role, Jones noticed that while the Center was committed to teaching visitors about the institution of slavery, Stagville presented little information about the families that labored on the land for over 100 years. During her tenure, Jones went into Durham and surrounding towns to connect with descendants of the enslaved at Stagville, learn their stories and bring them back to incorporate that research into programming and tours.
One such shift was to create a guided tour of Horton Grove (previously there had only been guided tours of the Bennehan House). Another important addition was sharing the story of Mary Eliza Walker, one of only three enslaved African Americans to successfully escape from the plantation (a narrative Jones later immortalized through an American Girl book series).
In 2003, Stagville launched The Family Tree Project, a genealogy project and exhibition within the Stagville Visitors Center that helped people discover whether their ancestors were among the enslaved people who had worked there. The Family Tree database, along with a document of over 300 pages, contains the names of formerly enslaved individuals and their descendants collected through research and community engagement. Site staff assist descendants and family historians with research, coordinating visits, developing materials for family reunions and digitizing documents and photographs.
In 2019, Durham native Vera Cecelski took over the role of site manager after volunteering as a tour guide for four years. “I have deep North Carolina roots, which include being a descendant of Confederates and slaveholders,” she says.
“But I learned nothing of Stagville in my childhood.” She continues Jones’ legacy of forging meaningful bonds with Stagville’s descendant community and has also focused on expanding Stagville’s programming to encompass the natural spaces surrounding the site’s historic structures. “I want everyone who lives and works in this part of North Carolina to see the history of Stagville as part of their community’s history, part of our shared past,” says Cecelski.
Cecelski has leaned into existing partnerships with local land-based organizations, such as Catawba Trail Farm and Triangle Land Conservancy, to create opportunities for descendants and residents to garden, forage and hike — to connect with the land at will and in freedom. The Horton Grove Nature Preserve, which was created in 2012 by the Triangle Land Conservancy, spans 708 acres of land that overlap with the Historic Stagville site.
The two organizations have worked together to honor the families who inhabited Horton Grove by naming each of the eight hiking trails on the site after them and sharing their stories with visitors. In August 2023, TLC and Historic Stagville hosted members of the Sowell-Shaw family at Horton Grove to unveil a new bench and learning library along the Sowell Trail.
Today, Cecelski and Stagville’s staff and volunteers continue to focus on sharing the site’s complex history, centering the narrative on the people who labored at Stagville and securing the site’s future for generations to come. The Historic Stagville Foundation, established in 1978, is now the nonprofit arm of the Historic Stagville site, organizing fundraisers, volunteer opportunities and community engagement events. Cecelski is also working to reimagine Stagville’s programming and educational offerings, incorporating the land between the historic buildings on the site. Plans include a new $4 million visitor center that will sit on Hortons Grove, a continuation of Jones’ work of centering the experience of the enslaved at Stagville.
Stagville also became an official Site of Conscience in 2020, joining a global collective of historic sites dedicated to sharing and displaying complex histories for the betterment of humankind. “That coalition is an important part of how we frame the work that we do, and also how we connect with and learn from sites that hold other painful and traumatic histories,” says Cecelski.
In June, Stagville will host its 19th annual Juneteenth celebration. Nearly 100 descendants and visitors from across the country make a pilgrimage to Stagville each year to celebrate how far we’ve come since their ancestors left their only home to build a life as free human beings. Festivities include music, storytelling, tours and connection with the Family Tree Project. “We focused this program on inviting folks to hear stories about what emancipation was like on the ground for real people who were living through these first days of freedom,” says Cecelski. In July, Stagville hosts an annual reading of Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, a reflection of the complexities of America’s Declaration of Independence.
Cecelski says that attending events and sharing them with friends is the best way to support Historic Stagville and its work. “It means an incredible amount for our site to have folks come here and bring students from their school, their book club, their faith group — whatever it might be,” she says. “When we tell the full truth of these stories, folks listen. They connect and they engage.”
This article originally appeared in the June 2025 issue of WALTER magazine.