Unveiling a New Chapter in Robertson County
In February 2024, the Robertson County History Museum opened a new permanent exhibit titled African Americans Building New Lives After 1865. This exhibit, which Humanities Tennessee partially funded through an Opportunity Grant, accompanies the museum’s existing Wessyngton Plantation exhibit. It expands the story of the plantation by exploring the lives of formerly enslaved Black workers, the choices they made, and the communities they built after the Civil War.
The former Wessyngton Plantation is located about 10 miles west of the museum and was originally owned by the family of Joseph Washington. From 1793 to 1853, this family purchased or received 142 enslaved people who farmed the tobacco fields, cured hams for resale, and kept the plantation running. At its peak in 1860, the plantation encompassed 13,000 acres and 274 enslaved individuals.
The Book
John F. Baker, Jr., a descendant of enslaved workers on the Wessyngton Plantation, spent decades researching his family’s history. Baker grew up in Springfield, Tennessee, which is the seat of Robertson County. In seventh grade, he was struck by a photograph in his Your Tennessee social studies textbook that opened the chapter titled “Black Tennesseans.” His maternal grandmother saw the same picture in the town newspaper when she was visiting and informed Baker that two of the individuals were his great-great-grandparents.
This discovery sparked three decades of research into his family’s past. Baker met with Joseph Washington’s descendants, read the plantation records held at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, interviewed more than 20 children and grandchildren of former enslaved Wessyngton workers, and coordinated the Wessyngton DNA project. The result of this meticulous research was the book The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation: Stories of My Family’s Journey to Freedom, which Atria Books published in 2009.
The Temporary Exhibition
In 2014, the Tennessee State Museum produced a temporary exhibit titled Slaves and Slaveholders of Wessyngton Plantation, which Humanities Tennessee partially funded through a general grant. Using the information Baker uncovered in his research, the museum team, with Baker serving as primary consultant, curated an exhibit that explored dynamics on the Wessyngton plantation and traced the radically different lives of the slaveholders and the enslaved. The exhibit used a dual-storytelling approach to balance the coverage of both groups.
This exhibit used details of life at the Wessyngton Plantation as a lens through which to explore political, social, economic, and cultural aspects of slavery in Tennessee. Curators aimed to explain nineteenth-century mindsets that allowed slavery to exist and to show the agency enslaved people had before, during, and immediately after the Civil War.
The exhibit won a 2015 Award of Merit from the American Association of State and Local History. It also traveled to fifteen additional venues around the state as a banner exhibit.
The Permanent Exhibit
In 2019, Janet Palmore, Robertson County History Museum’s Director, began to work with Baker, who serves on the museum’s Board of Directors, on their new permanent exhibit. When Palmore started at the museum, there was a diorama and a few interpretive panels about the plantation. However, there was not any interpretation about the formerly enslaved workers’ lives after emancipation.
Palmore notes that while their new exhibit does pull on some of the same research as the Tennessee State Museum exhibit, it elaborates more fully on life after the war with sections on the Freedman’s Bureau, churches, music, migration, businesses, education, and land ownership.
A striking element of the exhibit, and one that resonates with visitors, are the large family trees Baker traced and continues to maintain. Each year, all of Robertson County’s fifth grade students visit the museum. Palmore said that this year “one group came through and were looking at the family tree and one of them actually found her great-grandmother. And another [student] from a second group found their great-grandfather.” Similar to how a photograph sparked Baker’s quest, the museum staff use these displays as a tool to “encourage [students] to do genealogy and find out their family history.”
Continuing to Share the History
In the future, Palmore envisions these stories reaching people outside of the museum. She recently received a grant from a local business to create a portable version of the exhibit that can go through the school system, to nursing homes, and potentially to descendants’ out-of-town family reunions. This version has all the same panels as the permanent exhibit and will allow the descendants’ stories to reach beyond the museum. “Anyone who wants to check it out, we’ll ship it to them,” she said.
Both of the Humanities Tennessee’s grant-supported exhibits on this topic have helped create a more complete narrative of Robertson County in particular and of Tennessee more broadly. By enabling more residents to see where they fit into their community’s stories, we can envision how we all fit into a more connected future.