Ashes to Ashes: The Fall of Nottoway Plantation and the End of Profit from Our Pain

The burning down of Nottoway Plantation—the largest remaining antebellum mansion in the South—is not a tragedy to us. It is a release. A final reckoning. For too long, places like Nottoway stood as proud relics of white supremacy, cloaked in romantic myths about "Southern heritage" while built on the backs, bodies, and blood of enslaved Black people. This is not nostalgia—it is trauma. And now, with the plantation gone, we reclaim our story.

Timeline of Slavery at Nottoway Plantation

⚫️ Early 1840s: Acquisition of Land

  ⚫️ John Hampden Randolph, a wealthy white sugar planter, begins acquiring land along the Mississippi River in White Castle, Louisiana.

  ⚫️ Enslaved Africans are brought in to clear the land, dig ditches, and prepare the sugar cane fields.

  ⚫️ No records from their mouths survive—only inventories listing them as property.

⚫️ 1855–1859: Construction of the Mansion

  ⚫️ Randolph builds the Nottoway Mansion—53,000 square feet, 64 rooms—using the forced labor of over 155 enslaved people.

  ⚫️ Enslaved men quarry, cut, and haul materials; enslaved women serve as seamstresses, laundresses, cooks, and domestic laborers.

  ⚫️ Children are raised to be workers. No play, no peace—only servitude.

⚫️ 1860: Height of Enslavement

  ⚫️ Nottoway is operating at full capacity. Randolph owns over 150 enslaved people, many of whom never see freedom.

  ⚫️ The plantation produces vast amounts of sugar cane—a cash crop that lines the pockets of the Randolph family but leaves Black bodies broken and buried in unmarked graves.

⚫️ 1861–1865: Civil War and Continued Exploitation

  ⚫️ Even during the Civil War, Randolph defies Union orders and continues using enslaved labor to sustain the plantation.

  ⚫️ Despite Emancipation in 1863, many Black workers remain trapped through sharecropping and coerced labor systems after the war.

⚫️ Post-Civil War to Early 20th Century

  ⚫️ The plantation transitions into a symbol of "Southern elegance." Meanwhile, the descendants of the enslaved face Jim Crow laws, violence, and systemic poverty.

  ⚫️ No reparations. No restitution. Just silence and erasure.

 Legacy of Oppression

⚫️ For decades, Nottoway operated as a wedding venue, tourist attraction, and “Gone with the Wind”-style escape.

⚫️ Visitors paid to sip mint juleps under chandeliers while Black suffering was sanitized or ignored.

⚫️ The narrative centered Randolph’s wealth, not the lives stolen to build it.

⚫️ There were no monuments to the enslaved. No names on the wall. No graves tended. Just profit.

The Burn and What It Means

When Nottoway burned, the sky filled with the smoke of a false history. To us, it was a liberation—a final act of poetic justice. The bricks may have crumbled, but what fell was something deeper:

The illusion that plantations can be preserved without honoring the enslaved.

We are not grieving.

We are remembering.

We are honoring those who were bought, beaten, bred, and buried.

What Should Rise From the Ashes

Let Nottoway stay in ruins.

If anything is rebuilt, it should not be another shrine to white wealth. It should be a memorial to Black resistance, Black survival, and Black truth.

⚫️ A space that lists the names of every enslaved person known to have lived and died there.

⚫️ A museum that tells the story from our side, the truth side.

⚫️ A foundation that funds education, reparations, and healing.

Let this be the last generation that has to walk through the halls of plantations built on our ancestors’ backs and hear nothing but silence.

We do not mourn the ashes. We rise from them.

Christopher Seymore 

“ Ashes to Ashes: The Fall of Nottoway Plantation and the End of Profit from Our Pain” 

African American Self Reparations 

Think Tank Founder

Descendant U. S. Slavery

Chaplain 

U. S. Politician