Nottoway Plantation Fire Sparks Virtual Cookout

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).

For more than 100 days, the Trump administration has systematically erased Black accomplishments and contributions to the U.S., like the Tuskegee Airmen and Harriet Tubman’s heroic efforts on the Underground Railroad. Yet Nottoway sparked a wave of unseasoned sadness about “preserving history,” even if it was renovated into a depraved destination for honeymoons, corporate events, and proms.

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!