An old Virginia plantation, a new owner and a family legacy unveiled

“They would say, ‘This is grown folks’ business.’ And that’s how some of the history was lost.”Teaching America's truth: How slavery is taught in America's schoolsAnother cousin, Marian Keyes, who taught first in segregated schools and later in integrated schools from 1959 to 1990, said that for a long time there was little teaching about slavery in Pittsylvania County.“We weren’t really allowed to even talk about it back then,” said Keyes, who turns 90 this year and lives in Chatham. “We weren’t even allowed to do much about the Civil War and all of that kind of stuff, really.”Even outside of school, when she was growing up, Keyes said, the subject of slavery was avoided.“I just thought everything was normal,” she said, “because that was the way of life.”But the unspoken history left a gulf.It wasn’t until after Fredrick Miller bought Sharswood in May 2020 that its past started coming into focus. That’s when his sister, Karen Dixon-Rexroth and their cousins Sonya Womack-Miranda and Dexter Miller doubled down on researching their family history.What neither Fredrick Miller nor his sister knew at the time was that the property had once been a 2,000-acre plantation, whose owners before and during the Civil War were Charles Edwin Miller and Nathaniel Crenshaw Miller.Miller.Fredrick Miller and so many members of his extended family were born and grew up in the shadow of Sharswood — and perhaps it was a clue to a deeper connection. Between the many documents that the descendants of Sarah Miller have obtained, the fragments of family oral history they’ve sewn together and the proximity of the family to the plantation, they are certain that Violet and David Miller were among those enslaved at Sharswood.More clues continue to emerge. It also left him thinking about family history and the absence of that history for many people like him.“You’ve got to know where you come from,” he said in a phone interview from his California home. From then on, they said, it probably served as a kitchen and laundry for the main house and a living space for some who were enslaved at Sharswood.Standing 50 feet from the 16-by-32-foot cabin in which her ancestors may have worked or lived, Womack-Miranda, 53, said the discovery of the connection has been life-altering.“When I walk around here, I imagine my ancestors walking on the same ground, the same dirt,” she said. And so it’s unfortunate, because I think that we could have definitely progressed a lot further had we dealt with that stuff early on and dealt with it the right way.”While they do not ignore the pain and privation suffered by their forebears, many in the family say the lessons they are taking from this reconnection, from this reclaiming, is that history is not fixed in place; it is always being written.“I just imagine my ancestors walking here and how they may have felt inside that life has to be better than this,” Dixon-Rexroth said. “It was just such a good feeling to talk to them about that place, and that’s something we’d been lacking.”He still thinks about if he had not bought Sharswood and how the past almost slipped through the family’s fingers.“That history would have definitely been lost,” he said.