Foundations

            “Slavery stole the identity of most African Americans in this country. … It’s a wonderful experience to know who our distant ancestors are and to be able to tie it to a physical location.”                                                              Deardra Green-Campbell

Until one of the last days in December 2017, if you happened to be driving down Purefoy Road just off of Rogers Road in north Chapel Hill and you looked very closely, you might have caught a glimpse through the tangled vines of an old dilapidated house. Though you would have seen no plaques or signs, some of the long-time locals would have been able to tell you the story of the place, the Hogan-Rogers House, built in 1843 by Thomas Hogan, a farmer and a slaveholder. Though local preservationists have called Hogan a “middle class” farmer, the fact that he owned more than forty slaves at the time he built the house made him one of the largest landowners in the area. Excavations of the house suggest that many of them must have lived in the basement.

            The house was purchased from the Hogan family by Sam Rogers, Jr., at the turn of the century. Rogers, a son of slaves and one of a few African American farmers in the area, lived there until the Depression forced him to give it up about a century after it was built.

            When the house was demolished in 2017, the floorboards and basement were left intact. It’s possible to stand on the remains of the main floor view, peer down the old staircase, and look into what was once the basement, with very low ceilings and dirt floors. If you look through the small basement window at the back of the house, window, you’d see what once was a working hearth where slaves would have cooked.

            More important than the story of the house is the story of the people who lived in it and those who can trace their histories to the people who lived in it more than 150 years ago. Thanks to Deardre Green-Campbell, we now know a lot more than we did a few years ago.

Deardra Green-Campbell (left), likely a direct descendant of Harriet Hogan, a slave, and slave-owner, William Hogan (right; pictured here in the mid-to-late 1800s), a son of Thomas Lloyd Hogan, the builder and original owner of the house.

            Deardra wanted to confirm what she somehow suspected: that she is a Hogan, a descendant of a Hogan family member and an enslaved person called Harriet. She was able to get a DNA sample from a Hogan descendant living in Brooklyn, and we now know that her hunch was correct.

            What does her discovery mean for the rest of us? That question needs to be answered on a personal level– and that’s why it’s so important to preserve the remaining traces of this house. If some trace or footprint of the house is preserved, it will remain a living testimony to the past–one that focuses on the integral part slavery played in the local economy and in the lives of the people who lived there. The accompanying story of the lineage of the descendants exposes the myth of the genteel slave owner whose slaves lived relatively comfortable lives since slave women without means to resist lived with the constant threat of sexual violence at the hands of the slave owners. The existence of these foundations allows for the opportunity to tell the truth about the history of Chapel Hill, a history like that of most towns in the South. 

            Too often in the South, the opportunities to tell truthful public history are instead seen as occasions to perpetrate many of the lies that are told here about slavery and the Confederacy. Throughout the South, plantations have been marketed as tourist destinations and wedding venues. Tours feature the slave owners’ homes—the porcelain dishes, antique furniture and lavish décor so visitors can imagine the opulent lives of the white families that lived there. Visitors are often told that slaves were treated well and that slave owners were fair and even kind. Until recently, visitors to the Stagville plantation just outside Durham were told these sorts of fictions. But today, tour guides tell a different, more truthful story. When we arrived for our tour in late summer 2020, the guide passed out the brochure giving an overview of “Historic Stagville.” It explains: “The land you are standing on was part of one of the largest plantations in the state of North Carolina. The Bennehan-Cameron family owned the land and became massively wealthy from enslaving people here. Enslaved Africans and African Americans labored here, and continually resisted slavery through family, faith, community, and cultural traditions.” Important to telling the whole story is the focus not only on the greed and brutality of the slave owners but on the various forms of resistance on the part of enslaved people, in particular, the importance of maintaining a sense of community in spite of violent efforts to subvert this. 

            In Louisiana, just north of New Orleans, historians and lots of ordinary people had a similar vision when they turned an old plantation site into a museum, which, unlike the state’s many other preserved plantations, focuses on the lives and legacies of the slaves who lived there (whitneyplantation.com).  Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, urged visitors: “Go on in. You have to go inside. When you walk in that space you can’t deny what happened to these people. You can feel it, touch it, smell it.” The voices of young visitors suggest even more clearly why truthful public history can be life-changing: “After reading books upon books about plantation life, [the founders of the museum] decided that what was missing on River Road was the God’s-honest-truth about slavery.” And, “I learned a lot of things that my school doesn’t teach us. I think it’s important that more young black people come to visit and learn about their history.” One visitor put it simply: “I am changed.”

            This is exactly the sort of change that the Black Lives Matter has been calling for. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in Spring 2020, the director of North Carolina Historic Sights, Michelle Lanier, addressed the connection between the continued tolerance of racist violence and the need to tell “the God’s-honest-truth.” In an open letter, she identifies clearly the roles of those who have the power to shape public understandings of history, first, warning against the violent act of erasing the history of a group of people through silence and, second, calling on all: “to amplify the silenced narratives and declare, with specificity and care, the lives of traditionally marginalized peoples.” (https://historicsites.nc.gov/resources/open-letter-these-times-black-lives-and-historic-sites) The South—this entire country—is littered with traces of our violent, racist past. Unless we uncover the traces, tell the stories, and expose the erasures, we cannot truthfully claim that justice has been done.

            When we want to find out about what it means to be an American, a Southerner, a North Carolinian or Mississippian or Atlantan or Chapel Hillians, and if we want to really talk about racism and poverty and injustice, this is where we have to take the discussion: back to the plantation house and the people who lived and were forced to live in it. We have got to stop romanticizing the Southern belle, the plantation house, the Confederate flag, monuments to those who fought for the “Lost Cause,” and the Confederacy itself. Plantations should be memorial sites, not tourist traps.

            If the footprint of the old Hogan-Rogers house, with the basement exposed, is allowed to remain as a testimony to this chapter of Chapel Hill’s past, many more people will be changed by what they discover. The foundations can continue to tell the story of the house and its people for centuries to come. And we will be honoring Harriet who would want her story and her people’s stories, to be told.

            According to local African American history, it has always taken a village to raise a roof. And in the spirit of this tradition, parishioners at St. Paul’s AME church pooled resources to purchase the land. Just days after the house was razed, someone had placed a bench and a brick pathway just a few hundred yards from the home site. The individual bricks reveal that a new chapter of the house is about to begin and that the stories of the women, men, and children who lived in its dark depths finally will be brought to light for future generations.

Note: In October 2023, the Chapel Hill city council approved St.Paul’s AME’s plans to build a 350-unit apartment development on the land that had once been the site of the Hogan plantation. Construction of St. Paul’s Village is set to begin in Summer of 2024.