On August 11, 1865, an anxious Paul Cameron wrote in a letter to his father-in-law, “My old slaves seem resolved to hold on to me or to my lands.”
The wealthy North Carolina planter was determined to give them neither. In the months after the Civil War ended, a new reality emerged, anathema to his seigneurial sensibilities: having to negotiate with formerly enslaved workers whom he’d owned only months before.
The freedpeople who stayed on his plantation showed predictable signs of dissatisfaction. Cameron had enlisted a federal officer to tell them that they had absolutely no rights to the land they’d tended in captivity. When some laborers refused to work on Cameron’s terms, they faced eviction or cuts to their rations.
More than 150 years later, Delphine Sellars and her sister, Lucille Patterson, first set foot on one of the Cameron family plantations in Durham, called Snow Hill, knowing little about that dark history. Instead, Sellars cared about who owned the acreage in the present: Triangle Land Conservancy (TLC), a nonprofit that protects natural resources, which had agreed to consider letting the sisters use the land.
That day in 2016, the property sat in disarray. Massive trees were strewn about like a giant’s abandoned pickup sticks. The only road in and out became a car-stalling mud bath after rain. A two-story stable and other outbuildings stood dangerously dilapidated or encircled by brambles.
Sellars didn’t mind—she was envisioning what the onetime plantation, founded in the late 1700s and operated well into the twentieth century, could be. A former social worker who had headed Durham County’s extension office, Sellars had spent nearly a decade managing programs that helped home gardeners and farmers grow sustainable produce. Now she imagined a farm, where people could raise their own food and she could establish an incubator for new and future farmers through the nonprofit UCAN, short for Urban Community AgriNomics, which the sisters had recently launched to encourage gardening and fight food insecurity. “I was giddy,” Sellars, who is sixty-nine, recalls. “It was gorgeous.”
Patterson—Sellars’s younger sibling by two years—saw something quite different: a nearly insurmountable cleanup job. “I looked at Delphine and said, ‘Have you bumped your head?’” UCAN had less than $300 in the bank. But they agreed on one point: They wanted land. And they’d have to persuade TLC to help them secure it.