Making Meaning at Historic Places (2025-2026)

Historic landscapes are increasingly seen as places that deserve active interpretation, with community members helping shape how their histories are told. This approach applies both to well-known historic sites—such as state-run monuments and historic houses—and to places whose histories are being reclaimed or newly recognized, including neglected African American burial grounds. Many of these efforts frame interpretation through themes of social and environmental justice, as well as repair and reconciliation.

During the 2025–2026 academic year, this project focused on Catawba Trail Farm, a site owned and operated by Urban Community AgriNomics (UCAN), a nonprofit that addresses food insecurity in Durham through community gardening. While the farm now serves the community, the land was once known as Snow Hill Plantation and was part of the Cameron family’s vast Stagville plantation. UCAN does not operate Catawba Trail Farm as a traditional historic site. Instead, its leaders are interested in reclaiming and honoring the history of the enslaved people who once lived and worked there, while using the land today for community benefit.

Over the course of the year, the project team carried out original historical research using both secondary sources and archival materials. Some team members wrote research papers and conducted oral history interviews with UCAN founders and with people who had lived at the site when it was still run as a farm. Other team members read and discussed scholarship on key issues in public history, along with works on the history of Piedmont North Carolina and slavery in the broader context of U.S. history. 

As a group, the team explored topics such as resistance among enslaved people at Stagville, gender dynamics reflected in nineteenth‑century Cameron family wills, and runaway slave advertisements connected to the plantation. They also experimented with using AI to transcribe digitized plantation-era records. Those transcriptions were then organized into datasets and used to prototype relational databases.

Timing

Fall 2025 – Spring 2026

Team Outputs

North Carolina Lives and Legacies (Team website)

Making Meaning at Historic Places (Poster presentation at the Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase, April 15, 2026)

Student-authored research papers

Oral history interviews

Digitized plantation records and database prototype