Burn, Baby, Burn! Biggest Slavery-Era Mansion Burns To The Ground, Social Media Assumes Ancestors Annihilated Estate To Antebellum Ash
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Bossip Staff
Published on
May 19, 2025
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The Nottoway mansion, the largest and oldest remaining plantation house in the U.S., burned to the ground, and the descendants of the enslaved are celebrating the fall of this sadistic big house-turned-resort.
Source: Arterra
The White Castle, La., plantation was built in 1859 by the back-breaking labor of enslaved people. News One reports the romanticized hall of horrors was engulfed in flames starting Thursday, May 15. First responders put out the initial fire, but it reignited elsewhere in the 64-room house.
Even though the property sits near the banks of the Mississippi river, firefighters didn’t have enough water to stop the ravenous flames. By about 10 p.m. the roof collapsed, leaving the 53,000-square-foot building reduced to rubble.
“Nottoway was not only the largest remaining antebellum mansion in the South but also a symbol of both the grandeur and the deep complexities of our region’s past. While its early history is undeniably tied to a time of great injustice, over the last several decades it evolved into a place of reflection, education, and dialogue,” Daigle wrote.
“Since the 1980s, it has welcomed visitors from around the world who came to appreciate its architecture and confront the legacies of its era. It stood as both a cautionary monument and a testament to the importance of preserving history—even the painful parts—so that future generations can learn and grow from it,” he continued.
Mind you, neither Daigle’s statement nor the Nottoway website mentions a single word about the enslaved people who built the property.
Check out more details about Nottoway’s history and the reactions to it going up in smoke after the flip.
How Nottoway Erased Its Own History Long Before The Fire
The roof! The roof! The roof is on fire! We don’t need no water because colonizer tears shed over this monument to human suffering should have been enough to put out the flames. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the fire (except the fragile feelings of the ghouls who planned to party there).
Let’s get into some of the alleged “deep complexities” lost in the fire. The plantation website advertises a luxury destination where you, too, can live out fantastic Massa cosplay for the right price. The property could still become a meaningful museum dedicated to reckoning with the real past of slavery like the Whitney Plantation. However, it appears to solely function as a tourist hotspot for those who feel born to send lynching postcards, but were forced to settle for exchanging vows at a mass grave.
The history page on the Nottoway website only features one thing: trees. Oak trees dating back as old as the house bear names of the original enslaver’s children and plaques about each one of them. How much “Strange Fruit” did they bear in more than a century? Some know the brutality on cotton plantations, but producing sugar like at Nottoway was uniquely deadly and dangerous.
Life, Suffering & Death On Sugar Plantations
By the time Nottoway was built in the 1860s, “Louisiana planters were producing a quarter of the world’s cane-sugar supply,” according to The New York Times. “New Orleans became the Walmart of people-selling. The number of enslaved labor crews doubled on sugar plantations…These were some of the most skilled laborers, doing some of the most dangerous agricultural and industrial work in the United States.”
It’s hard to imagine conditions worse than Roots, but Solomon Northup documented the details of being kidnapped into slavery on a Louisiana sugar plantation in 12 Years A Slave. As horrible as the cotton industry was, sugar production posed an even greater “constant threat of boiling hot kettles, open furnaces and grinding rollers.”
In sugar empires like Domino, the body-crushing work continued 24/7. Exhausted workers often endured torture as punishment, lost limbs to grinding rollers, or they burned to death in boiling sugar. As tons of white crystals rolled out, new Black victims rolled in to make more. Historian Michael Tadman noted that Louisiana sugar parishes had “deaths exceeding births.” With a life expectancy to drop dead after about seven years (like their Carribbean counterparts on sugar plantations), these forced workers received even less nutrition than they typically would on cotton plantations.
Yet on social media, past visitors to Notttoway noted only one small plaque acknowledges the more than 150 enslaved people who worked the land. Even then, it reportedly reduces their tragic lives to the “happy slaves” myth.
Check out the viral reactions to the Nottoway plantation fire after the jump!
Ancestors Assemble! The Nottoway Fire Sends Social Media Into Simmering Shambles
Racists have burned and bombed Black churches, schools, homes and the people inside for centuries. Meanwhile, they tell Black communities still dealing with exploitation and mistreatment to this day to get over it! Well, now, they can take their own alabaster advice!
Since all signs point to Nottoway only existing in 2025 to further profit from pain, social media users are turning the fire into a virtual cookout. And it’s long overdue! Check out some reactions below.
