Selling a plantation in 2024
Real estate is such a revealing indicator of America’s relationship with its history, but especially so in the mid-Atlantic region where I live.
I just finished reading Mehrsa Baradaran’s “The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap,” which explains how white elites in each generation since emancipation have pushed schemes to transfer wealth from the Black community to white coffers, a recurring component being denying or dooming Black property ownership — from the sharecropping system right on down to subprime mortgages and the biased appraisal system we still have today.
The system was obviously more violent pre-emancipation, but the dynamic — Black-to-white wealth transfer — not all that different. Black people were property and generated more wealth on the real estate on which they were forced to work. At its most base level, this country exists because a few subsets1 of Englishmen, who were denied access to the limited inventory of real estate where they lived, decided to acquire new (to them) inventory.
What’s fascinating about Virginia, Maryland2 and Delaware is that a lot of the real estate where this centuries-long wealth transfer began still exists. On Zillow. Set the “Year Built” filter to a max of 1865 and, voilà, you will be shown scores of plantation houses currently on the market.
That’s how, on Friday, I found and posted to Threads this property listing near Sharpsburg, Md., an 1818 plantation house currently on the market for $1.2 million.
“Step back in time to a period when manners and elegance permeated society,” it said of site of enslavement of, according to the National Register of Historical Places, at least 56 people. The property was “once a 1,400-acre working estate,” it said without mentioning who was working on it. “The manor house was built atop a man-made rise,” it said, without mentioning which men made the rise, “to reflect the prominence of its owner,” Thomas Buchanan, a local judge. Toward the end, it gushes about “restored historic outbuildings - summer kitchen, spring & domestic houses - the latter a versatile space to enjoy w/friends or perhaps create a cottage/guest house!” There are photos of what appear to be quarters for enslaved people.
The NRHP report confirms that the pictured room attached to the stone summer kitchen likely housed enslaved people, as did a larger outbuilding later converted to a stable. In the Zillow listing, this dwelling-turned-stable now appears to hold an exercise bike and a cooler. There must have been other slave dwellings at one time, “unless these slaves were leased out to other farmers,” the NRHP report says, but there’s no mention of that on Zillow.
Tracking plantation properties and how they are advertised is a long-running fixation of mine. To me, nothing pricks a hole in the “it was so long ago, we’ve moved on” balloon like the meticulous preservation of the spoils of theft. I have spreadsheets for both Virginia and Maryland, where I’m trying to catalogue every plantation house still standing and how it is being used — whether as a museum, wedding venue, country club, private residence — and how they do or, more commonly, do not acknowledge what happened there. These spreadsheets will undoubtedly become a book in the future, but here are some rough observations:
There are so many more of these properties than you think.
As far as I can tell, no one has catalogued all of them. The National Register of Historic Places has a good chunk, but it has become clear to me that there are many privately owned plantations that have been removed from the register or were never added.
As far as I can tell, current plantation owners are under no obligation — via easement, covenant or statute — to respect the remains of enslaved people buried on them or otherwise acknowledge the brutalities that took place there.
Ads for these properties abruptly stopped using the word “plantation” in 2020 and now say “historic farm,” “historic manor”3 or “country estate.”
Anecdotally, I have heard that demand has dried up for a lot of plantation wedding venues. Many of them are on the market and have lingered there for years. (The Sharpsburg plantation appears to have been used for at least one wedding, photos of which I am not linking to here.)
These listings, without exception, epitomize that most American of historical inaccuracies — sanitization. Emphasizing the history they like and ignoring what they don’t.
“Lafayette once stayed here!” “Built by a prominent doctor.” “Rare American chestnut railings.” When enslaved people are alluded to, it is with the absurdly common “rumored to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad,” or the mention of “assorted dependencies and outbuildings” — but who has time to tell a slave cabin from a corn crib.
Lots of large properties have outbuildings, and not all historic outbuildings are former slave quarters. But the more plantations I research for my spreadsheets, the easier they are to spot, and over the years I have spotted likely slave quarters turned into pool houses, home offices, personal gyms, a golf club’s “Antebellum-era guest cottages” and — before they were mostly removed in 2022 — a boatload of Airbnbs.
“Properties that formerly housed the enslaved have no place on Airbnb,” the company said in a statement after an attorney on TikTok publicly called out.
Agreed. But what about the monuments to cruelty next door, many of which were built brick-by brick by enslaved people, and in which enslaved people also suffered daily?
There are exhaustive debates to be had about how to use properties built on and by atrocity, if they should be used at all. Perhaps every one should be turned into a memorial, like the Whitney and McLeod plantations. Perhaps owners should be required to acknowledge the harms done there. Perhaps the descendants of the enslaved there should be given a stake. Maybe all these mansions should all be torn down, architectural flourishes be damned. Maybe we should stop worrying and just let rich people do what they want.
I get that if you go back long enough, just about every place is likely to have been the site of something terrible. Almost all of Washington, D.C. and the surrounding areas in Maryland and Virginia, were once part of some plantation property, including my own non-historic house. It’s completely possible something terrible happened in my backyard and I just don’t know it.
Still, a plantation house is something different, direct and intentional — a shrine to oppression, a thief endlessly bragging to the ones he has robbed. Pretending these shrines arrived on hilltops by magic is a smirk while continuing the robbery.
Religious minorities, sons of the new merchant class, non-firstborn sons of nobles
Maryland doesn’t make the frequent appearances in US History classes that Virginia does, but its history is very similar: First English colonists in 1633, developing into lots of large estates with wealth generated by enslaved labor. Maryland might have joined the Confederacy had the US Army not declared martial law; slavery was not outlawed there until 1864. Despite the leftward lean of its currently electorate, it remains a largely de facto segregated state.
In Maryland at least, the word “manor” hasn’t come out of nowhere, as it was used a lot historically. This is not the case in other slave-holding states.