New focus on Stagville

DURHAM -- Once upon a time in Durham County, there was an old plantation. It extended from east of the Flat River almost to West Point on the Eno, and from the vicinity of Bahama on the northwest past the Neuse River into Wake County on the southeast -- 30,000 acres, worked by more than 900 slaves, owned by a family prominent and powerful in the state of North Carolina.

The original big house, 216 years old, still stands on the crest of a hill. A slave quarters, built in 1850, survives in remarkably good condition. A monumental barn, 132 feet long, constructed by slave artisans on the eve of the War Between the States, stands sound as the day it was built. For 27 years, they've been protected by the state and open to the public.

You'd hardly know it.

"Something I hear on a daily basis is, 'I've lived all my life in Durham and never heard of Stagville,'" said Jennifer Farley, who became director of Historic Stagville State Historic Site on May 1. "So one of my big jobs is to change that.

"The history here is huge."

That history reaches back before the Revolutionary War, and involves tobacco, cotton, horses, rich folks, characters, the University of North Carolina, Raleigh, Durham, Hillsborough, the BBC, the Great Trading Path, Indian villages, white pioneers -- even Daniel Boone -- historic preservation and government bureacracy, among other matters.

"This ground kind of oozes artifacts," said Farley, who was formerly the assistant manager at Durham's Duke Homestead.

Thirty years ago, historic Stagville was far from Historic. The Bennehan House, its 1787 manor home, was ramshackle and overgrown. Its salvation was the first project and first success of the Historic Preservation Society of Durham, which saw the 71 acres of the property, including the historic buildings, conveyed by Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co. to the state in 1976.

It was a big deal at the time, but since then Stagville slipped into deepening anonymity. While other historic places in Durham, which came into public hands around the same time -- the state sites Bennet Place and Duke Homestead and the city's West Point Park -- have been developed as interpretive centers with considerable public interest and patronage, Stagville languished in bureaucratic limbo.

Now the limbo is over and a new regime has arrived: Things will be better?

"I just really felt rejuvenated," said Myra Markham, a former Preservation Society president and Stagville supporter from the start. "It really gave me a lot of hope."

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Of course, Stagville has seen new regimes arrive before. Past directors Juliana Hoekstra, Ken McFarland and John B. Flowers have brought personal passion and professional credentials to the job, but had to exercise them within certain realities -- perhaps most notably, that of the state budget, in which the allocation for historic sites has decreased every year since 1991.

One Raleigh administrator, Farley recalled, said that the state had cut fat and cut muscle and now was cutting bone. And that was five years ago.

Since fiscal year 2000-'01, said Historic Sites Administrator Jim McPherson, his division's appropriation has fallen 19 percent.

"Of course, that's being seen in a number of different ways," said McPherson, a Bahama native and former manager at Duke Homestead. "Shorter operating hours at a number of historic sites, deferred maintenance -- not being able to replace HVAC systems and not being able to fix roofs."

Stagville's Bennehan House got a new roof three years ago. For a while now, though, it's been in crying need of a paint job, but that was stymied by having to first get rid of a bee colony that had taken residence behind the siding. For her 71-acre responsibility, Farley's budget covers three hours of grass-mowing each week.

"The grass gets high," she said.

Grass-cutting may be interrupted by higher-order chores, such as giving tours. At the moment, Farley's is the only name on Stagville's payroll, though she does anticipate hiring a receptionist/assistant before long. The Stagville Associates support organization dissolved itself in 2001, but the Historic Stagville Foundation pitches in aid and money as it is able, and in recent months some public interest has revived.

"I've got people crawling out of the woodwork wanting to help," said Farley.

Moreover, there are visible signs that things are changing. Three groups of visitors passed through the Bennehan House in a 20-minute period one recent Saturday afternoon. Before Farley arrived, the site was closed on weekends.

"We needed for a long time to be open Saturdays," said Markham. "We just couldn't seem to make that happen in the past."

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Stagville's particluar problems are, in part, a function of its particular recent history. While it has been a recognized historic site since 1973 and a state property since 1976, it has only been a State Historic Site for two years.

"Probably as historic a place as any in the South," Stagville was described in a 1927 newspaper feature, "yet almost forgotten since the passing of those who saw it prosper." That sad status changed in 1973, when a state survey of potential historic sites discovered at the Bennehan House workmanship and material worthy of a colonial-era squire. As a result, later that year it was entered on the National Register of Historic Places.

Register or no, the Bennehan House remained overgrown with honeysuckle, cluttered with broken glass, discarded farm implements and dust. In 1974, however, Durham's Preservation Society was formed. Founder Margaret Haywood, annoyed by negative image being promulgated about Durham, determined to demonstrate that Durham had an antebellum pedigree. Stagville became a cause.

Since 1954, Stagville had been owned and farmed by Liggett & Myers. After a year of gentle persuasion, Liggett announced it was making the property "available" for the Society to restore; and to celebrate, the Society threw a well-attended open house on Oct. 25, 1975. The question remained, however, just what to do with its new "availability."

After another year of gentle persuasion, the state accepted Stagville from Liggett and, from the Preservation Society, the nice problem of what to do with the place. The state, recognizing that historic preservation was becoming a hot commodity, decided to use Stagville as an educational resource to teach the skills and techniques required to properly reclaim and maintain old buildings.

On March 29, 1977, after a $400,000 fix-up, Stagville opened to the public as the Center for Preservation Technology. Gov. Jim Hunt was on hand to claim it as another North Carolina first. John Flowers, Stagville's charter director (who was also largely to thank for having downtown Durham registered as a National Historic District), declared it would put Durham on the map as a place to learn how to preserve the past.

It took almost two years for problems to develop. In early 1980, Flowers was given the title "chief research historian" for Stagville, but his office was moved from Durham to Raleigh. State Archives and History Director Larry Tise said the move was part of an expansion scheme for Stagville; Flowers declined to comment.

"It's a touchy situation," Flowers said at the time.

Contacted last week by e-mail, Flowers -- now a vice president at Augusta State University in Georgia -- wrote that Stagville fell victim to the Department of Cultural Resources' internal politics.

"When I was there," he wrote, "Stagville was definitely under [the Division of] Historic Sites, and should not have been. The head of Historic Sites then was a fellow who neither understood nor cared about Stagville."

Individuals in Durham who had labored to save Stagville, such as Margaret Haywood and Peaches McPherson of the Preservation Society, lobbied then-Secretary of Cultural Resources Sara Hodgkin to take the site under her administration. At the time, due to other internal concerns and personnel concerns, she did not. Later, however, the move was made and Stagville remained lodged in the Secretary's care until 2001.

"A teaching center, which is what Stagville was then, really was a fish out of water," Flowers wrote. "And though all the best minds knew it was the way to go, did not know exactly where to put it."

Flowers' move and the state's expansion plans also miffed the Stagville Corp., the private support organization in Durham that only learned about them three weeks after they were put into effect.

Feelings were mollified by state officials' hint they would keep in better touch in the future. Over the next few years, Stagville gained a local site manager -- first Cruse, then McFarland -- Flowers departed for Georgia and Stagville's instructional role grew along with a Durham Tech program in preservation technology. Public events, such as lectures and an annual Christmas open house, went on and visitors were encouraged, but teaching took precedence over tourism and Stagville remained a workweek operation.

And so it continued, even after preservation coordinator John Fugelso left town in the 1980s. His program ended and, with it, Stagville's.

"Then," said Markham, "the state didn't know what to do with it."

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Historian Alice Eley Jones began conducting research and organizing public programs on black history at Stagville in the mid-1980s.

"My first impression of the site," she wrote in response to an e-mail inquiry last week, "was that of a Corvette site with Chevette leadership."

Hampered by the steady decline of state money, a problematic administration through the Archives and History director's office, and the effects of time on its original supporter core, Stagville's profile as one of Durham's gems edged down.

There were lectures and living-history events from time to time; in 1999, a BBC crew stopped off to shoot some footage for a documentary program on money; but around town, preservationists and visitors directed themselves more toward the tobacco district and downtown. Out of sight, seven miles from town on a country road, Stagville was also out of mind.

When Hoekstra followed McFarland as Stagville's director in 1999, keeping up with "the most basic of basics [was] a tremendous responsibility." As she talked, the Bennehan House was topped with a blue plastic tarpaulin to keep out the rain. Progress, she said, would be "a painfully slow process."

That was before the state's budget crisis appeared in 2001. But that same year brought reorganization in the strapped Division of Archives and History. Along with several other sites that had led varied and distinct careers -- such as Tryon Palace in New Bern, the USS North Carolina in Wilmington, the State Capitol in Raleigh and the Roanoke Festival Park in Manteo -- Stagville was incorporated into the Historic Sites office.

Stagville, like all the other sites, was still broke, but now at least its director had colleagues nearby with resources to share, meager as they may have been, and for the first time enjoyed a network of professional support.

Meantime, an influx of new blood invigorated private support and, while the Christmas Open House fell by the wayside, there was a Family Fun Day last April to mark Stagville's 25th anniversary as a state property. A long-awaited order went out for a set of interpretive signs so visitors will be able to read about what they look at.

With Stagville's fortunes beginning to look up, Hoekstra departed for a preservation post in Raleigh and Farley, the assistant boss at Duke Homestead, got the Stagville promotion.

"To come in," said Markham, "with all her youth and ideas and energy and experience.

"I'm just so impressed with her."

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One morning this month, Farley was talking about her plans for Stagville while printing out promotional packets for the school programs she's devised, and excusing herself to welcome a tour group and start the orientation slide show. Presently, the offices are on the Bennehan House's second floor; soon, she intends to move them to the site's seldom-used Education Building, down the hill and in the woods a couple hundred feet away.

That will free up the Bennehan House to be refurnished throughout to its early-1800s self, she said. Meantime, she wants to furnish one of the slave houses at Horton Grove, about a mile north, as it would have been when it was in use.

Most of all, she means to "bring the site to life."

Opening on Saturdays was a first step; the interpretive signs, with texts and pictures, will be a second. Already, she had enlisted some of the Junior Interpreters who dress in period costume and play the parts of residents at Duke Homestead to come out and adapt their roles to Stagville, and has Stagville's own program in the works. A Heritage Garden Club has signed on to build period kitchen gardens at the Bennehan House and the Horton Grove quarters.

The school programs, three sets appropriate for kindergarten and fourth- and eighth-grade curricula, are another step.

"Before," she said, "it's not been really child-friendly. ... Nobody knows about Stagville, and nothing has been offered before aimed at children. There are fun ways to learn about the same history."

And then, there are "interpretive events." Farley's first big one is a revived Christmas open house.

"The question for me was," she said, "how to make it different from Duke Homestead and Bennett Place. Well, we've got the slave houses. We're going to have 'Christmas in the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters.' "

Stagville's affair is to run noon to 8 p.m. on Dec. 13, with the event unfolding as the day would have from midday into evening. At the Bennehan House, she plans to decorate and observe the holiday in a manner "very British, because that's how it would have been, with plum pudding and eggnog." At the slave village, people will be going through daily motions, but also celebrating with games and music, and finally a dance after dark.

"I've not heard of any other site that has this kind of capacity," she said, "to show that the slave community was its own community, and had its own culture."

Farley's enthusiasm is infectious, and her ideas are sound -- they're the sort of things that have worked well in many other places, from Colonial Williamsburg to Duke Homestead. One may wonder why they have been so long in coming to Stagville, but that, for now, is history -- in Stagville's case, just a little more.

"The history of this site is amazing," Farley said.

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From a tavern on a pre-colonial trading route between the James River and the Savannah, Stagville grew to be the biggest plantation complex in North Carolina and had the largest slave population. Stagville's owners, the Bennehans and Camerons, were powerful men in early North Carolina and, while George Washington never made it, Daniel Boone is thought to have slept there and had one of his Kentucky expeditions outfitted from a local merchant.

Camerons helped start UNC and lay out the city of Raleigh. After the Civil War, former slaves from Stagville became some of the first black landowners in the little town of Durham, while others lived on as hired hands and sharecroppers. A Cameron-bred horse strutted through Havana during the U.S. Army's victory march in the Spanish-American War, and the novelist Thomas Dixon -- on whose racist novel "The Clansman" the classic 1915 movie "Birth of a Nation" was based -- found inspiration for his notions of the Old South from acquaintance with the Camerons and their property.

The modest Bennehan House affords a very different impression of antebellum planterhood than those conveyed by the palatial homes of old Virginia, while the Horton Grove quarters offer an opportunity to present rural Southern life from 1750 through slavery and the Great Depression, and the monumental Great Barn is a testimonial to the abilities of black builders.

"The slave craftsmen who lived here were capable of making beautiful things," said Farley.

Passion and optimism must be tempered by experience, though.

"If we could just get it painted! And get the signs up!" Myra Markham said. "We've been working on those things how many years? Every board meeting, we would ask, The status of the signs? Of the house painting?"

Still, Markham feels reinvigorated. McPherson said he's "very optimistic in spite of the state budget." And Alice Eley Jones said,

"Jennifer is a Corvette in progress."

The Herald-Sun/Kevin Seifert

This spring, 28-year-old Jennifer Farley left her position as an assistant manager at Duke Homestead to become director at Stagville.