Robert Bellinger was driving down Ashley River Road in Charleston, S.C., enjoying the landscape of live oak trees and Spanish moss, when it dawned on him exactly where he was headed and why.
“It just hit me,” Bellinger recalled of his drive in November 2016. “I thought, ‘I’m headed to a family reunion on a plantation where my ancestors were enslaved.’”
Bellinger, a historian and researcher from Boston, was on his way to Middleton Place, a former rice plantation in the Ashley River Historic Corridor. Today, Middleton Place is a national historic landmark and museum, and it is home to the oldest landscaped gardens in the United States.
Bellinger learned about his family’s connection to Middleton Place decades before deciding to make the trip. In 1983, his cousin Mamie Garvin Fields, then 90 years old, published “Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir,” which recounts the family’s generational connections to the low country, including stories about Fields’ enslaved grandfather. His own family research helped Bellinger find ancestors at Middleton dating back to 1790.
He also learned that Middleton Place hosted descendant reunions every few years, gathering both Black and White descendants for a weekend of on-site research presentations, history lectures and informal dialogues. With some trepidation, he decided to attend.
“Just three days before, we had a presidential election, the results of which I was not too crazy about,” Bellinger said. “I was saying to myself, now why am I heading to a plantation in this climate?”
The past two decades have seen a shift among plantation museums across the south. Previously, the majority of tours focused on the architecture of the main house, the landscapes and the economics of slavery. But today, a growing number of these sites are making efforts to confront slavery head-on, emphasizing the narratives of the enslaved and often requesting the help of their descendants.
At Middleton Place, it began with Earl Middleton, a noted civil rights leader and Tuskegee Airman from Orangeburg, S.C., who in 1997 became the first Black descendant asked to join Middleton Place’s board of trustees. Earl Middleton’s grandfather, Abram, was enslaved there until the end of the Civil War. After emancipation, newly freed Black families needed a surname to be counted as citizens by the government; some families adopted the surname of their former masters, making today’s search for descendants easier for historians.