Great Barn interior, Stagville Plantation
About this photograph
- Creator
- Dan Kelo
- Date created
- April 17, 2008
- Location
- North Carolina
- License
- This photograph copyright ©2008. Terms of use
Related media
Learn more
- Search LEARN NC for barns, history, North Carolina, plantations, slavery, and Stagville.
In the classroom
- See our collection of articles on visual literacy for ideas on using photographs meaningfully in the classroom.
Interior view of the Great Barn at Stagville Plantation, North Carolina. The Great Barn was built by enslaved people during the summer of 1860 and was originally used to house the plantation’s mules. It is thought to be the largest agricultural building built in North Carolina prior to the Civil War. A variety of sophisticated construction techniques were used in building the barn, including some shipbuilding techniques that would likely have been brought here by the enslaved people purchased from regions closer to the North Carolina coast.
Stagville plantation is located in parts of what are now Orange, Durham, Wake, and Granville counties. Established in 1787 by the Bennehan and Cameron families, Stagville was the largest plantation in North Carolina. In 1860 more than nine hundred enslaved people lived on its thirty thousand acres. Most of them worked in the fields growing crops such as tobacco, wheat, corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes.
