60 min: USAF Vet buys plantation house ancestors were enslaved at.

[Whatthe_Firetruck]

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/sharswood-air-force-veteran-plantation-ancestors-reclaiming-history-60-minutes-2022-05-15/#app

Based on this WaPo story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/01/22/virginia-plantation-slavery-owners-history/

Pittsylvania County, Virginia.

Just off the side of the road sat a grand white house called Sharswood. Silently holding secrets from the past, waiting for a new owner to uncover them. Sounds like the opening line of a southern gothic novel, but this story is about a real family, and a real house, this country's history, and a man who found himself at the center of far more than he had bargained for.

The man is Fred Miller, a 56-year-old Air Force veteran who was looking to buy property in his Virginia hometown for his large extended family's frequent get-togethers. He had never heard the name Sharswood, and yet this old house would lead him on a journey of discovery, with surprises and revelations that seem both impossible and inevitable all at once.

These are the gentle hills of Pittsylvania County, Virginia -- quiet, rural farm country near the North Carolina border that once produced more tobacco than any county in the state.

Fred Miller: Hey, we're gonna gather up in this room here mainly..

Fred Miller grew up here in a close family that likes getting together regularly for birthdays, fish fry's, and as his cousin Adam Miller told us, just about anything.

He knew nothing of his family history, or how it all tied back to this very property, until after he bought the place. Of course, his great grandmother's parents never lived in the well-maintained main house, but in the now crumbling slave's quarters in the back...

As I read this, I could only think that if teachers told their students about this history today they'd be accused of teaching CRT.

[a kennedy]

1. Saw this and was absolutely blown away......😳 😳 😳

[luvs2sing]

2. One of the most fascinating stories I've seen on 60 Minutes.

Just wonderful.

Trivial aside..Fred certainly bears a strong resemblance to Denzel Washington, IMO.

[electric_blue68]

3. Wow... It's one serious thing...

to buy a slave owners' house as an African-American.

It's even a whole 'nother level to find out some of your ancestors were held there!

😮

[3auld6phart]

4. What

a fascinating sad but with a happy ending story.
Thank you.

[Arkansas Granny]

5. A friend of mine, a black woman, told me about this. She was

so excited by the way the history of the property had come full circle, so to speak. This family had unwittingly discovered their own history.

After watching "Finding Your Roots" with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, I have come to realize that the family history of many, if not most, black families is very hard to trace beyond the civil war. They hit a wall of anonymity where men and women were owned and valued like livestock.

[Wounded Bear]

6. History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme...

Reminds me of the Civil War and the McLean house. The first major battle of the Civil War Eastern Theater happened around Manasses Junction, commonly called the Battle of Bull Run after a stream that runs through the area. One of the local farms was owned by Wilmer McLean and was used as a headquarters by a Confederate general and was actually damaged by cannon fire.

McLean would move away after that, trying to get away from the war, which at the time was centered largely in Northern Virginia. He moved to the far south of Virginia, to the small village of Appomattox Court House. His parlor was where Lee met with Grant to sign the surrender documents that many mark as the end of the conflict.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmer_McLean

The cycles of time.

Can't watch the Miller story right now, as I'm breaking for a baseball game, but it interesting how such stories bend back on themselves.