History Matters: Enslaved dwellings in the First State

By Abigail Lee

Published July 2, 2026 at 8:40 PM EDT

Ross Mansion Vice President Pat Sigler points to the fields at the plantation, standing before Delaware’s only remaining dwelling built for enslaved people.

Ross Mansion in Seaford is home to Delaware’s lone remaining dwelling that was once inhabited by enslaved people.

The number of these dwellings nationwide is dwindling in part because they were made with shoddy materials and in part because there has been little effort to preserve them until recent years.

But historians say these spaces are incredibly valuable as they provide a window into enslaved people’s inner lives, which is often neglected or difficult to learn about.

In this edition of History Matters, Delaware Public Media’s Abigail Lee traveled to Ross Mansion and the John Dickinson Plantation in Dover to see these spaces and speak with experts on the lasting significance of them.

Learning lessons from remaining dwellings of enslaved people

In August 1781, a group of British Tories raided one of the Founding Fathers’ houses – what we now know as the John Dickinson Plantation – about five miles south of Dover.

They were looking for Dickinson, but all they found were his trunks and some of his belongings.

Dickinson and his family were not on the property. But there were enslaved people present as the Tories ransacked the house, as the plantation’s site supervisor Gloria Henry recounted.

“They opened up the trunks, they ransacked the house, they took all the liquor in the house,” Henry said. “Imagine that… They took anything of value – surveying instruments, anything that they thought was of value. They even took Violet – who was an enslaved woman who took care of John's daughter, Sally – they took her shoes and her silver shoe buckles. And they loaded it up on one of John's own carts, and they carted it off down to the river and then escaped that way.”

A young actress plays the role of an enslaved girl at the John Dickinson Plantation’s big house.

Violet Brown is the reason we know about this raid. She relayed the events to the sheriff, who wrote a letter to Dickinson, and that letter eventually fell into the hands of the historians at the John Dickinson Plantation.

“We give credit to Violet for helping us discover the African Burial Ground in 2021, which is about a half a mile from the front of the house and straight down by the river,” Henry said.

The raid is just one piece of a larger story. Across the nation, the few surviving homes originally inhabited by enslaved people are becoming central to how historians study slavery, preservation and memory.

Henry and her team discovered the site after reading another account describing a funeral and burial for an enslaved person on the property. Using the letter, the Dickinson Plantation team theorized the burial site could be seen from the big house.

A space to learn from

University of Delaware Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Kathryn Benjamin Golden considers unwritten and non-documentary records to be meaningful spaces for research.

“Landscapes, buildings, architecture, wilderness spaces that enslaved people gave meaning to and helped shape and that were part of their world,” Benjamin Golden said. “And I think both sets of records are equally as important if we want to tell a fuller story about this period of enslavement and early foundational history of the United States, of Delaware, wherever slavery touched.”

At the Dickinson Plantation, Gloria Henry showed us a lush garden she and her colleagues had planted using historical inventories from the plantation. It sat beside a recreated cabin based on common dwellings for enslaved people in the 19th century.

“It's a wooden structure,” Henry described. “The foundation was originally based on buried tree stumps, and then eventually switched over to bricks. The floor is a hard packed dirt floor, and once you go in, you'll see very basic furnishings, like a bed, a table, a chest – well, two chests – and a cupboard.”

The room was about the size of a small studio apartment, just big enough to squeeze in a twin bed, a table and a few chairs. Upstairs was the loft, where children could sleep on pallets.

In the summers, Henry said, the doors would be left open to let a breeze roll through and cool the house.

“In the winter time, you would have a fire in your fireplace. But that does not heat up the entire room, so you're going to be cold.”

The recreated enslaved people’s dwelling at the John Dickinson Plantation is decorated with the bare necessities, using supplies and furniture that would have been available to the enslaved people at the time.

Staff at the plantation wanted to give people the opportunity to learn about enslavement more tangibly by being able to walk into a space that allowed them to better imagine what life was like for the majority of the people who lived on Dickinson’s land.

“Most people would have fit into this category,” Henry said. “We like to have that romantic version of history, and that if we lived 100 years, 200 something years ago, that we'd be living in the mansion. That is not true. Most people, sorry, a majority of Kent Countians are living similar to this.”

The first building guests see when visiting the Dickinson Plantation is a white panelled building that acts as the visitor center. Inside, there are rooms filled with informational signs and mannequins dressed in time-accurate costumes.

The stories told at the Dickinson Plantation often center on the people who worked on the property. That matches the museum’s mission as well as the state’s.

Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs Director Suzanne Savery said her contemporaries weren’t talking about enslavement very much when she entered the field 30 years ago.

“You were just talking about, ‘here's this big house, and this is what happened here,’” Savery said. “... Yes, we're going to talk about those who worked at this site, and that there was enslavement at this site, and people were uncomfortable talking about it because that wasn't a positive part of history, and history isn't all positive.”

Founding father John Dickinson’s mansion looms behind the recreated dwelling for enslaved people on his property.

Henry said in her work, she doesn’t care to focus on people's comfort.

“As I used to tell everyone, if you're talking about enslavement, it's an uncomfortable subject,” Henry said. “If you are not uncomfortable talking about it and you're not uncomfortable hearing it, then someone's doing something wrong because it is an uncomfortable subject. And you should be uncomfortable hearing it.”

Educational spaces are no stranger to conflict when it comes to the Civil War. The Lost Cause narrative has left its footprint in American classrooms, from textbooks to tours on plantations.

The Lost Cause: A narrative that lives on

Confederate supporters in the post-Civil War era created a story to explain how they lost the war and reshaped the nature of the fight.

A common phrase used by Lost Cause supporters is that the Civil War was about “states’ rights,” not slavery, and that slavery was a beneficial endeavor for all parties involved.

Joseph McGill grew up in South Carolina going to schools that he says “sold him a comfortable story.”

“I was under the impression that my enslaved ancestors were happy to be enslaved, that the enslavers were benevolent people,” McGill said. “But no one taught me that 12 of our former presidents enslaved people, 41 of our signers of the Declaration of Independence enslaved people, 25 signers of the Constitution enslaved people, 30 of our former Supreme Court justices enslaved people.”

McGill is the founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, a mission to educate the public and support the preservation of dwellings for enslaved people.

He has slept in dozens of dwellings across the U.S., including the replica at the Dickinson Plantation. And despite efforts and projects like McGill’s, the Lost Cause continues to be perpetuated in some spaces. And that’s not limited to the Deep South.

Ross Mansion in Seaford is home to Delaware’s only known original dwelling for enslaved people. Its vice president Pat Sigler is part of the Seaford Historical Society’s Executive Board. She and a colleague led Delaware Public Media’s Abigail Lee on a tour of the mansion and dwelling for the enslaved.

The dwelling for the enslaved at Ross Mansion is open to the public but littered with spinning wheels, an electric fan, and a butter churner. It’s unlikely the wheels or churner would have been kept in these dwellings when they were lived in.

“They must have been, well – as I say, they were valuable, honestly. So they were treated fairly well for an enslaved person,” Sigler said.

When asked what “fairly well” meant, Sigler said the enslaved people were well fed.

“They didn't run away, so they must have been – I don't know if satisfied is the word, but felt safe here versus out in the world, so to speak,” Sigler said. “When slavery was still in place, we have not far from here an Underground Railroad location that helped slaves get to the north. And the fact that his slaves did not take advantage of that, I think, says something for their life here, that it couldn't have been too miserable.”

When asked if it was possible the conditions were too miserable or punitive to imagine such a decision, Sigler said she didn’t think so.

“No, because I think they would have found a way to run away,” Sigler responded. “As you know, the next farm over, two of theirs apparently ran away, and so I don't think so, it's not like they locked them in at night or anything like that.

Sigler also claimed the enslaved people at the Ross Plantation were given hearty meals.

“I don’t know how to prove that, but the fact that they were expected to do work, they had to feed them a decent meal because otherwise they would get sick,” Sigler said. “So, I personally think that I don't see any evidence in our records, nor in the housing that we have, that they were mistreated, so to speak.”

There’s a sociological concept tied to practices of rewriting history according to UD’s Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Kathryn Benjamin Golden. Symbolic annihilation describes the practice of erasing, censoring, silencing or omitting whole versions of the past.

She said the concept is especially prevalent on plantations that serve as tourist destinations, parks and wedding venues.

“They are beautiful places that are upkept, manicured with the Grecian columns and the architectural splendor that that represents and reminds people of this lost cause before the Civil War,” Benjamin Golden said. “… But without thinking about what that meant and how it was dependent upon enslaved labor and the violence therein, physical corporal violence, but also now narrative violence in terms of the omission that is ongoing.”

Ross Mansion hosted a wedding the week of their staff’s interview with Delaware Public Media.

Sigler said she thinks plantations – including Ross Mansion – are often used as weddings because they’re located on beautiful properties.

“The mansion itself is beautiful on the outside, and it makes great photographs. We've had all, basically all ethnicities organize weddings there, so the only thing I can suggest is they honestly don't think about it.”

A strangled, surveilled life at the Ross Mansion and plantation

The dwelling at the Ross Plantation was discovered by Claudia Melson, then-President of the Seaford Historical Society in 1992. While it was found in the woods near the mansion, research has proven it originally stood right beside the governor’s estate.

Ross Mansion docent Margaret Alexander holds an image of the dwelling for the enslaved when it was under construction during its restoration process. “This is the other side of the story. [The mansion is] where the family lived, but this is where the ones who actually built the place lived, and people like to see the contrast,” Alexander said.

That was not common practice. Usually, dwellings for the enslaved were built a ways away from the mansions.

Ross Mansion docent Margaret Alexander said another historian had a guess as to why Delaware’s former Gov. William Ross built the dwelling so close to home.

“He said he could look out the window,” Alexander explained. “It was a matter of control. This is their work yard out here, so he could look out the window and see if they were, quote, working or not.”

The concept of a home for enslaved people was complex, according to Benjamin Golden. Auctions and sales threatened homes that were already dismal to live in to begin with.

In the case of the enslaved people at the Ross plantation, the constant surveillance on top of the living conditions led to a loss of culture.

“... where in the South, the ones that were far away, you know, no master was around,” Alexander said. “They could do their own thing.”

There were limited possibilities for comfort, especially since homes were tenuous and depended on remaining at one plantation.

Dwellings as haphazard homes

“Places that enslaved people lived are those that were both built to contain them and keep them captive… but they're also the places that enslaved people created and recreated for their own purposes and designs and their own ideas about their future,” Benjamin Golden said.

Many of these dwellings fell into disrepair or disintegrated completely, leaving much of enslaved people’s domestic lives in shadows.

The historians at the Dickinson plantation don’t even know where enslaved people lived or in what fashion, despite having records of at least 14 enslaved people living on the property. The recreated dwelling is based on other plantations – and disappearances of homes like these are very common due to their lack of structural integrity.

“They were not terribly well built,” Savery said. “… It was certainly less expensive to build a building out of wood than to, you know, you have to make the bricks and take the time.”

Savery and Benjamin Golden said the fragile nature of these structures is by design.

“It also speaks to what spaces are prioritized in terms of preservation, and what spaces remain valued or not,” Benjamin Golden said. “... These slave cabins, they've withered away. They've been destroyed, and no one really has cared. Their value has been in question.

Sharing dwellings with members of the public

Henry at the Dickinson Plantation said she sees it as her and her colleague’s role to meet people where they are and foster conversations about these spaces and the enslaved people they sheltered.

“When people say, ‘well, that was the sign of the times, enslavement,’ there were also abolitionists,” Henry said. “And they were the signs of the times, too. We have to get out of this feeling that this is the norm because not everyone owned enslaved people.”

Henry added sharing a more holistic narrative is crucial to the Dickinson Plantation team’s mission, which is why they’re planning to install audio exhibits in the dwelling.

“Our latest project is to tell the stories of Dinah, tell the stories of Nathan and Abigail, and tell the story of Violet Brown,” Henry said. “… So when people come here, it's a solar post, so all you have to do is press a button, and you'll be able to look inside the log dwelling, and hear the stories of the people.”

Those efforts extend even to the plantation’s marketing. Where the main photo of the mansion used to be head-on, Henry said the default photo she uses now online is of the log dwelling.

The Dickinson’s family home looms behind the dwelling in the photo, extending an ominous effect.

Benjamin Golden said she commends the John Dickinson Plantation team.

“These new efforts to tell a fuller story of, again, the totality of the people that made those spaces important, I think, is linked to the rise of more people of color and more historically and traditionally marginalized groups and presently marginalized groups getting involved with and asserting that there's more to say here about this place.”

A recreated portrait of Delaware’s former Gov. William Ross surveys one of the sitting rooms in his home.

The team at Ross Mansion said they see value in sharing the few details of enslaved life they have access to. It’s why the dwelling is still included in school field trips and tours, Ross Mansion docent Alexander said.

“See, Governor Ross valued his horses and his cows more than he did human life, so some of them lived in the barns with animals,” Alexander said. “… This is the other side of the story. That's where the family lived, but this is where the ones who actually built the place lived, and people like to see the contrast.”

For historians, preservationists and descendants alike, exploring and centering these dwellings spotlights marginalized experiences.

The Slave Dwelling Project’s McGill called these dwellings tangible pieces of history that need to be preserved so they can contribute to an evolving understanding of the nation’s complex history.

“The dwellings there will help people to realize that some of the stuff they learned about slavery – the happy slave, the benevolent slave owner – these buildings, these existing buildings counter that.”