Sleeping in Slave Cabins: Joe McGill and the Slave Dwelling Project

Historic sites across the South have long told the stories of their grand houses and left out the buildings where enslaved people lived, cooked and worked. Joe McGill set out to change that — by sleeping in those buildings. In episode 125 of the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast, he talked with Jason Church of the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT) about the Slave Dwelling Project.

How it started

When McGill started the project, about ten years before the interview, he worked for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, visiting sites — many from before the Civil War — for work and on his own. What those sites talked about was their architecturally important buildings. Missing were the places where enslaved people slept, cooked and worked in the carriage houses: nothing, he says, about the people he descends from.

He had also been a Civil War reenactor for at least fifteen years, so he knew the pleasure of visiting historic places and sometimes sleeping at them. Somebody, he decided, had to do something about the silence — and that somebody was him.

The chance came at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens in South Carolina, where he was on a team monitoring carpenters as they restored the slave cabins (he later went to work there full-time). Once the cabins were done, he asked to spend a night in one. The site liked the idea, and he reasoned that others might too.

He got a list of sites from the state historic preservation office and started making calls. It was an unusual, awkward request — but most places said yes, and there were enough yeses to go ahead.

A project that outgrew its founder

McGill meant to stay in South Carolina, which was as far as his limited resources could take him. But the media covered his first night at Magnolia, NPR ran a story a few sleepovers later, and other states started calling. Traveling to Alabama and Louisiana for the National Trust, he would add a night in a slave dwelling to the trip, and contacts there began finding sites for him.

By the time of the interview, the project was a nonprofit organization with the checks and balances that go with that, and had reached twenty-five states and the District of Columbia.

Slave cabins at Magnolia Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park. NCPTT, NPS

Slavery beyond the plantation

McGill says he once thought as many people still do: that slavery belonged on Southern plantations. Keeping it there, he argues, misses urban slavery and slavery in the North. The South's agricultural economy, built on taking all it could from the land, made slavery more extensive there, but there were plantations in the North too; enslaved people in the North were more often body servants and the like.

The dwellings that survive near a "big house," he notes, were often built of better materials than field hands' quarters — not because the people in them were treated better, but because the owners wanted buildings beside their fine houses to look good. They were about appearances, and status.

Sleeping alone again

His first three sleepovers were solitary. The COVID-19 pandemic put him back there, not by choice. So the project turned to technology: a Zoom call before each sleepover, which allows real conversation, and a Facebook Live broadcast during it, where he talks and answers questions from viewers. People can see and hear the place through him while staying distanced. But it loses the face-to-face, campfire feel he values, and the plan is to return to in-person gatherings as soon as the science allows — while being ready to go online again if it doesn't.

A history kicked down the road

McGill points to 1787, when the Constitution was being considered in Philadelphia, then the capital. Southern delegates demanded twenty more years of importing people to enslave, because their economy depended on it. That was a chance to end chattel slavery, he argues, and it was put off — and put off again. Even after emancipation came convict labor, the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings and white citizens' councils, all aimed at taking away African Americans' rights. He cites the Tulsa massacre and Rosewood, and notes that lists of people who were lynched include many thriving businessmen, targeted because they competed successfully with white people.

People who say "get over it," he argues, don't understand that "it" is not only slavery but everything that followed: whenever African Americans pursued their happiness, a law or a group took it away and put them back at zero.

Why interpretation matters

Visitors to his tours at Magnolia now ask him to connect that history to the present — to the death of George Floyd, and to monuments coming down. McGill's view is that the country is still living with slavery's legacy because historic sites told a distorted history for so long. Many people say they have never visited a plantation, he observes, yet they have been to Mount Vernon or Montpelier — which are plantations. Some visitors still arrive wanting the sugar-coated, "Gone with the Wind" version. But the number of sites telling the real story is growing, and the number glorifying the past is shrinking. That, he says, is progress.

His bluntest advice: anyone who leaves a plantation tour thinking slavery was a good thing should ask for a refund. At Magnolia, where visitors pay extra for the tour they choose, the cabin tour — From Slavery to Freedom — is the one fewest people take, which he sees as a sign of a larger American reluctance to leave a comfortable story and face the wrongs done to Native people and enslaved Africans on the way to national greatness. He closes by urging people to be open to that history, and warning that resisting the country's changing makeup divides Americans rather than forming "a more perfect union."

More: Preservation Technology Podcast articles and the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.

Sources

Based on "Podcast 125: Interpreting History with the Slave Dwelling Project," the Preservation Technology Podcast, National Park Service, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training — an interview by Jason Church with Joe McGill, whose words are paraphrased here; rewritten in hubnx's own words.