Saturday, Could 24, 2025 | 2 a.m.
The biggest remaining antebellum plantation mansion within the South has burned to the bottom.
Hearth crews labored 18 hours late final week attempting to extinguish the hearth that finally engulfed the 53,000-sqare-foot dwelling at Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana. Its structure was iconic, with 22 white columns like these on the White Home. There have been 64 rooms and 365 doorways and home windows. A bar. A restaurant. Pool. Tennis courts. And 40 rooms for in a single day stays.
It was a massively vital vacationer draw, with folks from all world wide visiting yearly. It served as a museum to this nation’s darkish origins. Nottoway’s first proprietor had 155 enslaved folks and owned 6,200 acres of property.
Whereas I received’t cheer its demise like some have, neither will I shed a tear. As a result of I’m from South Carolina and have a house a protracted jog from a “plantation,” and a brief drive from a number of others.
In contrast to Nottoway, they’re plantations in title solely. They aren’t locations the place the enslaved toiled. They’re locations whose names capitalize on this nation’s lack of ability to grapple with its previous.
There are Surfside Plantation and Windsor Plantation and Sago Plantation. Builders named such housing developments “plantation” as a result of that phrase evokes the picture of Southern magnificence like that present in “Gone with the Wind” within the minds of their audience.
That’s what a number of builders and builders advised me when a colleague and I tallied up the variety of “plantations” in South Carolina years in the past. And there weren’t simply housing developments. We discovered about 2,000, together with a financial institution. Most had no historic ties.
What does that need to do with Nottoway? Nothing. And every part.
The fantastic thing about the Nottoway mansion on a 31-acre property, which incorporates majestic centuries-old bushes standing guard like good troopers, was so seductive, it was thought-about a great marriage ceremony venue. That’s not coincidence. It’s design.
The US of America has been skilled in glossing over the evil perpetrated on this soil. The place whippings and rapes routinely occurred, there was additionally magnificence and grandeur, noblesse. The younger {couples} who select to say their vows at such locations concentrate on the aesthetic and ignore the brutality.
Enslavers may rape Black ladies within the morning, work enslaved Black males and Black ladies to close dying within the afternoon, and gown of their best garments and sip tea and entertain company within the night, regaling them with tales that illustrate the ability of the Christian God whereas the Black ladies who have been raped within the morning served these company.
But there aren’t any indicators that say “Sago Focus Camp” or “Surfside Seaside Focus Camp” or “Windsor Focus Camp.” As a result of builders know that “focus camp” evokes solely emotions of horror, disgust, dread, trepidation and fright.
As a result of naming a gated neighborhood a “focus camp” is so unimaginable it feels absurd typing these phrases.
As a result of that’s accurately.
Some locations shouldn’t be remembered for something apart from what they basically have been. That enslaved Black folks endured and survived, and even discovered methods to take care of their sanity and souls, isn’t any motive to decorate up an evil that was with us earlier than this nation’s founding.
A type of Black folks was a girl named Rose Graham Jackson, an ancestor on my mom’s facet who straddled the period of enslavement and freedom.
Locations like Nottoway paved the way in which for Twenty first-century builders who use “plantation” to call residential enclaves, first with alluring structure that distracts from the blood of the enslaved within the soil, then with the addition of resort-like sights.
That’s not coincidence. It’s design.
That’s why it’s onerous to disregard the symbolism of the biggest remaining antebellum plantation mansion burning to the bottom throughout an period wherein instructing this nation’s true racial historical past is being criminalized.
The phobia and unhappiness “plantation” evokes within the minds of many people by no means mattered as a lot because the imaginative and prescient “Gone with the Wind” inculcated within the minds of many others.
But it surely ought to.
Issac Bailey is a McClatchy opinion author in North Carolina and South Carolina.
