The Nottoway plantation house burned down this week. It was built in 1858 for John Hampden Randolph, who by 1860 “owned 155 slaves and 6,200 acres, of which 1,200 were under cultivation” (National Register Nomination Form, 1979). His business, other than purchasing people, was raising sugar cane. So the building, which had 64 rooms, seven staircases, and 6 galleries, surely was built by enslaved people and surely was also staffed by enslaved people.
However, when the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Louisiana Historic Sites Survey said nothing of these facts. After Reading the nomination form, we know more about the architect and Randolph than them. However, they did report that the Randolph family continued to own the estate until 1889, when they sold it for $100,000, which is $3.4 million in value today. I also read on the National Park Service Wikipedia page that the Randolph family kept most of their workers as slaves even after the Emancipation Proclamation and continued to use them for labor after the Civil War with next to no pay. These facts illustrate some of what was happening during Reconstruction.
While social medial is wild with the destruction, some are calling out the loss of history and architecture. However, the Nottoway Resort, a place for plantation balls and fancy weddings, never addressed the history of enslavement by the Randolph family.
A good contrast with this edifice to cruelty would be George Washington’s Mt. Vernon, which has made the people Washington enslaved part of the interpretation of the estate. It doesn’t make the fact go away and it does not erase the contributions of these people to the history of the estate and it helps us remember the context of how the US was begun.
Another good contrast are the Nazi concentration camps in Europe. Auschwitz, for example, reminds us of the horrors of fascist Germany and this death camp, which was used to detain and then murder 1.1 million people, mostly Jewish, is an important landmark. It illustrates this cruel chapter of world history.
Historic sites will have negative aspects in their past, some worse than others. The point of Historic Preservation should not be to only glorify a subset of the human population. Rather, it should seek to preserve the best examples of architecture and their historical associations to honor the full story of the building and the people and events associated with it. The Nottoway resort should have done this as should have the Louisiana Historic Sites Survey. As a nation, most of what we have lost in the Nottoway fire is a chance to commemorate the unethical and heartbreaking history of the enslavement of people simply because of their skin color.
Another positive example of addressing a distressing past is the University of Virginia, who along with a number of other universities, has very openly addressed their history of using labor by enslaved people. I mention UVA primarily because it is among the top schools for Historic Preservation in the US.
All historic sites should address their past and all aspects of that past. It is similar to what Barack Obama called a teachable moment. The National Park Service reminds us of this. “Our nation’s history has many facets, and historic preservation helps tell these stories. Sometimes historic preservation involves celebrating events, people, places, and ideas that we are proud of; other times it involves recognizing moments in our history that can be painful or uncomfortable to remember.”
And the good ending to this post is that there are plantations sites doing important interpretation for the public. One is the Whitney Institute, a non-profit whose mission is to educate the public about the history and legacies of slavery using the Whitney Plantation Historic District as the example.
Note
Thanks go to David McCartney for pointing out the Whitney Institute.
Sources
Chelsea Brasted, “Nation’s largest remaining antebellum plantation burns to the ground” https://www.axios.com/local/new-orleans/2025/05/16/nottoway-plantation-burns-antebellum-louisiana, 2025
Kandiss Edwards, “As Nottoway Plantation Burns, The Ancestors, And Social Media Rejoice,” BlackEnterprise.com, 2025 https://www.blackenterprise.com/nottoway-plantation-burns-resort-fire/
National Park Service, “Nottoway Plantation,” Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nottoway_Plantation [includes links to the NRHP Nomination Forms]
_________, “What is Historic Preservation? https://www.nps.gov/subjects/historicpreservation/what-is-historic-preservation.htm
President’s Commission on Slavery and the University, University of Virginia https://slavery.virginia.edu/
Photo credit: Elisa Rolle, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21199317
On Diverse Arts and Sciences 