2017-453-E Arts - Eno Publishers - 2017-18 Arts Grant Agreement

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U 0 0 C co' M m 0 m Slave Houses °m rn N M cn BY JEAN B. ANDERSON D M T P, 0 cn D co cn C7 rn W cD W 4 lave houses make up a small minority of the historic structures still surviving in Hills- borough,but they fill a very important role in American history(see Map 7).They give o voice to those who had no voice, enslaved African Americans.The houses relate to the tra- ditions, music, food, language, and arts that have only recently been incorporated into our written histories,our museums, and our national heritage.These houses can evoke a variety of reactions: regret, perhaps shame, for the system of slavery that is mirrored in their exis- tence; empathy with the people who lived in them; curiosity about the homes of ancestors and of the past generally. Because North Carolina was primarily settled by yeomen farmers,only a third of fami- lies in our state owned slaves;thus fewer slave houses were built than other outbuildings— and fewer remain. In Hillsborough and vicinity, four have been identified, but others are possibly encased within other houses,unrecognized,and their origins lost.It is not surpris- ing that Hillsborough's remaining slave houses are found mostly on the outskirts of town. Those that were once in town probably stood on lots separated from the main houses they served. After the Civil War, when the structures were no longer occupied, the lots they sat on,which had become too valuable to hold,were sold off,the old buildings were then either destroyed or repurposed and new houses constructed on them. Consequently it is on the estates and small plantations outside the town limits,on land less valuable,that the remain- ing examples are more likely to be found. At Burnside, the once-seventy-acre homestead of Paul Carrington Cameron (i8o8-91), 33