Were Black Families Still Living in Former Slave Cabins in the 1980s?

At one South Carolina plantation, buildings constructed to house enslaved people remained homes for Black residents well into the 20th century. The place is McLeod Plantation, on James Island outside Charleston. Before emancipation, McLeod was a Sea Island cotton plantation sustained by enslaved Black labor. Then the Civil War transformed the property. When Confederate forces abandoned Charleston in February 1865, the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a Black Union regiment with white officers, occupied McLeod. Black soldiers slept in the same cabins where enslaved people had lived. The main house was used by Union forces as headquarters and as a field hospital. (Charleston County Parks and Recreation) Then came emancipation. Thousands of newly freed people arrived in the area, and the Freedmen’s Bureau operated from McLeod. For a brief moment, the future of the land itself was uncertain. Across the Sea Islands, federal wartime policies created opportunities for freed families to obtain land. But President Andrew Johnson’s restoration policies returned much confiscated and abandoned property to former white owners. McLeod eventually returned to the control of the McLeod family. Yet Black people remained on the property. Former slave dwellings became housing for free Black tenants, descendants of enslaved families, agricultural workers, and later migrant workers. And they remained occupied for generations. A historical archaeological survey of McLeod records that the cabins continued housing Black tenants and, later, migrant farmworkers long after slavery ended. (Charleston Museum) The buildings changed over time. Electricity was eventually added to some. Families made homes inside structures originally built under slavery. And the occupation continued astonishingly late. Historical accounts of McLeod document people living in the former slave cabins into the 1980s and around 1990. (SC Picture Project) Meanwhile, William Ellis “Willie” McLeod, the last member of the McLeod family to occupy the main house, remained there until his death in 1990, at more than 100 years old. (Charleston Visitor Guide) Today, six of those historic cabins survive. McLeod Plantation is now a public historic site devoted heavily to the experiences of the enslaved people, freedpeople, and generations of African Americans who lived there. (Charleston County Parks and Recreation) Slavery ended in 1865. The buildings slavery created did not. At McLeod, Black families were still making homes inside that physical legacy more than a century later. #McLeodPlantation #BlackHistory #GullahGeechee #Charleston #Reconstruction #FreedmensBureau #Slavery #AmericanHistory #HistoryTok #blackhistoryfacts