When Tammika Thompson first heard about the fire at Louisiana’s Nottoway Plantation on May 15, she felt a surge of energy in her body as she recognized why the name was so familiar.
Her father’s family traces its roots to White Castle, where the plantation is based, and she believes some of her ancestors were enslaved there.
“It’s personal for me,” Thompson said. “There’s literally a heat I feel.”
She wasn’t the only one with a strong reaction. As images of the inferno and its aftermath circulated, some took to social media to bemoan the loss while others celebrated its destruction.
The plantation, roughly 25 miles from Baton Rouge, was billed as the largest antebellum home still standing in the American South. And like so many other symbols of its era, it has become a Rorschach test for how residents grapple with the region’s history. The fire there has revived a conversation about how properties born from slavery should be viewed — and how they should function today.
Nottoway, a former sugar plantation, has been criticized for whitewashing the past. It is promoted as a 40-room “resort” with an outdoor pool and ideal for weddings. A history page on its website describes the names and sizes of century-old oak trees on the property named after the children of John Hampden Randolph, for whom the plantation was built, but fails to mention the history of the roughly 155 people who were enslaved there.
“These are places where people bled, people sweated to build something that they could never actually have a piece of,” said Eugene Lee-Johnson, a political science assistant professor at Southern University, who attended a senior prom at Nottoway in 2009, when the property was under different ownership. “Plantations are basically graveyards as well.”
Nottoway’s current owner, William Dan Dyess, an attorney who only recently purchased the property, declined to comment for this article.
He told the New York Post that the fire appeared to be electrical. Though he acknowledged the plantation’s complicated history, he distanced himself from its legacy. “We need to move forward on a positive note and we are not going to dwell on past racial injustice,” he said.
Some plantations take a fundamentally different approach. For Ashley Rogers, executive director of the Whitney Plantation, a nonprofit museum in Wallace, Louisiana, confronting past injustice is a core part of her job. A memorial at the Whitney museum recognizes the hundreds of people who were once enslaved there by name. Its tour guides describe the punishments slaves faced for trying to escape, for instance, or reading. With very rare exceptions, it doesn’t allow weddings on its grounds.
Rogers said she wasn’t familiar with Nottoway’s operations but said it was important to offer plantation visitors a clear view of slavery. “If you are telling a story on a plantation that does not center the Black experience,” she said, “you’re not telling the truth of the plantation.”
It isn’t always easy. In March, President Donald Trump largely dismantled the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which provided the Whitney Plantation with two grants. One, in partnership with the University of New Orleans and other institutions, helped fund an exhibit about resistance on plantations; the other helped pay for programming, including a virtual tour and a Juneteenth celebration.
Though most of that funding had already been paid out, Rogers is concerned that the administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion programs could preclude future grants. She recently decided not to apply for a $750,000 National Park Service grant for restoration work, in part because she assumed it would be off-limits.
A spokesperson for the Institute of Museum and Library Services said that the cuts were triggered by a push to shrink federal bureaucracy and weren’t targeted at the Whitney Plantation. A spokesperson for the National Park Service said it would be “too speculative” to discuss future funding.
Back in Iberville Parish, the Nottoway plantation may get a second life. Dyess told the New York Post that he hopes to rebuild. And certainly, there are those who would welcome its return.
One woman wrote on social media that she “first fell in love” with the plantation during a fourth grade field trip and would go on to spend her 20th wedding anniversary there.
A Black woman who said she had worked as a tour guide at Nottoway wrote on Facebook that a visitor once asked how she felt about working there. “I give these tours and let people see my face here to show that we have survived and thrived despite America’s inhumanity to us,” she said.
The post went on to defend Nottoway’s existence. “Especially now, when history is being whitewashed to exclude people like me,” she wrote, “we still need to have these places stand.”
But some are more critical of Nottoway.
Andrea Livesey, a historian based in England who studies slavery, visited the plantation in 2019 when it was under the previous ownership. She said her tour guide wore period dress and rarely mentioned slavery. “It‘s almost this ‘Gone With the Wind’ style narrative,” she said. “I would describe it as an Old South theme park in the way that it was set up.”
Thompson, whose family is from White Castle, questioned the owner’s plans to rebuild.
“Why re-erect a symbol of something that hurt so many people?” she said. If it is rebuilt, she said she hopes it will pay homage to those who toiled there.
Historians say plantations can be teaching tools, but that depends on how they’re run.
Jo Banner, a co-founder of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit organization that focuses on eradicating the legacies of slavery, said families like her own who trace their lineage to enslaved people aren’t always involved in the operations of the sites.
Alongside her twin sister, Joy, she acquired two pre-Civil War properties, including the Woodland Plantation in St. John the Baptist Parish. In 1811, a slave revolt, believed to be one of the largest in the country’s history, started at the plantation. The sisters plan to make the site into a museum that will tell its full history.
“We’re not here to promote these sites as wedding venues,” Banner said. “It’s not about the recreation; it’s about what they mean to our history and our future.”
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