Stagville Colored School Cameron-Grove-School

The Stagville School was a Reconstruction-era school built on the Cameron Plantation family's land (now Historic Stagville SHS). IrememberOurHistory®
By 1924, the Stagville school was the last and longest operating log cabin school in Durham County.
This is the only known photograph, which we believe dates to the 1920s, of the schoolhouse. The school operated until the 1930s.
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This property was once a part of one of the largest plantations in Orange County, now Durham County, North Carolina and was owned by the Bennehan-Cameron Family.
By 1860, over 900 people were enslaved on the 30,000-acre plantation making them among the largest slaveholders in the state of North Carolina by the time of the Civil War.

Photograph source: NC Historic Sites - Archives of NC
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On Juneteenth, Stagville’s past lives on at historic site — and in descendants’ memories
By Akiya Dillon on June 17, 2022

Excerpt of article:

The Union soldiers had come down Old Oxford Road, chasing Confederate soldiers out of Stagville Plantation. They arrived at Stagville’s Horton Grove, which at the time was home to some 900 enslaved people.

“They told my great aunt, ‘Fix us some food,’” Ricky L. Hart says, repeating a story passed down to him in his youth. “So, the soldiers had this long feast. In the end, the soldiers finished eating and drinking coffee, and they were like, ‘Y’all free.’”

That’s how enslaved people at Stagville, one of the largest slave plantations in North Carolina, learned that they had been freed, recalls Hart, 59, a Durham native and fifth-generation Stagville descendent.

On a balmy summer day, as Durham readies for the Juneteenth holiday, Hart discusses what emancipation meant to his relatives 157 years ago.

When they heard that the Union soldiers were coming, some enslaved people threw parties, including at Stagville. Others didn’t know what to make of the news, Hart says.

“Because, for six, seven, eight generations before you, the plantation was all you knew. You didn’t know what freedom was.”

Stagville is an immense property, he notes. Those forty-three square miles would’ve made fleeing a nearly impossible task.

“They didn’t have any concept of how big it was,” Hart says. “If you ran, you only ran for three or four miles. Then you stopped and walked. You still had 40 miles to go. So, you could be walking for weeks and still be on the site.”

And so, the Hart family stayed on after emancipation. Several members arranged share-cropping agreements with the Camerons. This guaranteed food for their families and offered the possibility of land ownership. The family resided in the Hart House—which Hart refers to as “number 13.”

When you arrive at Horton Grove, the Hart House is the first thing that you see. It stands out—the only painted house in the group adorned with a terracotta-colored metal roof. It was a multi-family home. Ricky Hart’s relatives cohabitated in the house in the early twentieth century.

“When you get upstairs, there’s a room to the right, and then there’s one to the left,” Hart says. “My grandfather, Willis and his family lived downstairs for a while. And his brother, Ephraim, lived upstairs with his family. So it’s like you got all these people living there. Your wife and your six children—all in one room.”

Hart’s uncle, Ephraim, was the last to leave the Hart House, departing in 1975 to resettle elsewhere. And long afterward, for ten years, Hart relatives held annual family reunions here. “I still got pictures and sign-in sheets… all kinds of stuff. The staff at Stagville were always glad to have us,” Hart says.

In 1976, the Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company, which owned the land after the Bennehans sold it, donated it to the state. This circumstance birthed Historic Stagville as a North Carolina State Historic Site, where the Hart name comes up again and again in the site’s “Emancipation Tours.”

Before the end of the Civil War, the Bennehan and Cameron families lived here, supervising slave activities and imposing cruel punishments. As the war drew to a close, for many enslaved people, freedom was a life or death wager. On a neighboring plantation, a young girl named Sarah witnessed Confederate soldiers threatening her family members, Cecelski says.

“She said they took each man in the yard, held them at gunpoint and asked them if they wanted to be free,” Cecelski says. “Sarah watched the murders of three of her uncles that day because they dared to tell these soldiers that they wanted their freedom.”

After emancipation, the Cameron family moved on from Stagville. But the name has not disappeared from the area. Towards the end of the tour, a participant asks, “So, a lot of the places in the Triangle with Cameron names come from this family? Like the Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke?” The crowd giggles.

Cameron Indoor Stadium is actually named for a different Cameron family from outside North Carolina, Cecelski says. But the Cameron family that owned the Stagville plantation – that name persists, even as Confederate statues have fallen in Durham and on the UNC Campus.
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From American Battlefield Trust
Civil War | Historic Site
Stagville Plantation and Horton Grove

Excerpt:
After U.S. troops liberated Stagville and surrounding plantations in 1865, many enslaved African Americans took as full advantage of their freedom as they could. They reconnected with family when possible, attended schools for freed people and eventually came to purchase their own land. Most experienced the hardships of the postwar era, including racial violence and the oppressive sharecropping system, often encountered on the plantations where they were once enslaved.

Among those who remained on the plantation following emancipation was Abner Jordan, who was born into slavery in the early 1830s. During an interview with the Works Progress Administration in the late 1930s, Jordan recalled his enslaver, Paul Cameron, owned a “heap” of people at Stagville until their emancipation following the end of the Civil War. Even with his freedom, Jordan admitted he had “never been out of North Carolina eighteen months.”

Reverend Morgan L. Latta, who was born on the plantation in 1853, later recalled going “out in the field as a slave before General Lee surrendered,” but had hoped, “praying for twenty-five or thirty years that we should be free, and God has answered our prayers at His own appointed time; He has bursted the bonds of slavery and set us all free.” After emancipation, Latta taught his fellow freedmen on the plantation and later attended Shaw University. During the last decade of the 19th century, Latta founded a university in his name with the intent of providing Raleigh’s Black community with educational opportunities.

Today, Stagville Plantation and Horton Grove are managed by North Carolina Historic Sites, who, along with descendants, continue to explore and interpret the stories of the enslaved people whose tangible legacy remains on the grounds to this day.
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Resource to learn more from:

The Stagville Memorial Project
MAKING A WAY OUT OF NO WAY - STAGVILLE AND HER DESCENDANTS IN DURHAM

Link: https://www.stagvillememorialproject.org/exhibit