When Fred Miller, a 56-12 months-aged Air Force veteran, purchased the white, Gothic Revival-style household with the eco-friendly roof close to his childhood household in southern Virginia, he desired a substantial room to host gatherings for his near prolonged family members. He was not expecting to unlock concealed chapters from his family’s earlier.
Miller did not know it at the time, but his new assets was at the time a plantation. Named Sharswood, it was developed in the 1850s by a slave-owning uncle and nephew who shared his very last identify.
“If I experienced acknowledged there was a ‘Miller Plantation,’ I probably could have… place a connection with the last name Miller and that plantation,” Miller instructed 60 Minutes. “But I would in no way listened to of a ‘Miller Plantation’ or a ‘Miller’ just about anything.”
This Sunday on 60 Minutes, correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewed Fred Miller and customers of his loved ones at Sharswood, talking about what they unearthed about the house and its earlier inhabitants.
Fred Miller’s sister Karen Dixon-Rexroth, who at first confident her more mature brother to obtain the house, and their cousins Dexter Miller and Sonya Womack-Miranda, did most of the study into Sharswood’s previous.
“Something drew me to figuring out the background of this area,” Dixon-Rexroth advised Stahl. “I knew it was an aged place from the 1800s, so I started out from there, as much as searching at the prior entrepreneurs, and also any information that have been out there on the net.”
With time and the assist of Karice Luck-Brimmer, a nearby historian and genealogist, the Millers ended up capable to uncover files that proved that their own ancestors had been the moment enslaved at Sharswood.
“Due to the fact the revelation… I know that when the slaves introduced foods into the key dwelling, they arrived up by means of the basement stairs,” Fred Miller advised 60 Minutes. “And there is certainly a distinct don on the basement stairs from a long time and many years of targeted traffic, of folks strolling up those people stairs, I am imagining, ‘Wow, these are my folks.'”
When the 60 Minutes generating staff of Shari Finkelstein and Braden Cleveland Bergan initially frequented Sharswood to meet the relatives and scout the locale, they were being part of a conversation concerning Dexter Miller and his former coworker Monthly bill Thompson, whose relatives acquired the assets in 1917 and owned it for more than a century. Thompson’s sister bought it to Fred Miller in Could of 2020.
It was throughout this conversation that Miller asked Thompson the a person concern that experienced been on his mind for a very long time.
“I explained, ‘Bill, there is certainly 1 query that is been bothering me: Where is the slave cemetery?’ He reported, ‘Dexter, it really is appropriate above there.’ I claimed, ‘Right about in which?’ He claimed, ‘You see those people trees over there?'”
And with that revelation, as observed in the online video above, the 60 Minutes crew accompanied the Millers to a cluster of trees just outside of Fred’s house line, exactly where for the initial time they saw the possible burial web site of their enslaved ancestors. Quite a few weeks afterwards, Lesley Stahl visited the web site with Fred, who life in California, and his sister Karen.
“It was coronary heart-wrenching’, I will tell you that,” Fred Miller claimed about seeing the cemetery for the very first time. “Just to assume that all these yrs of me wanting to know, and it was appropriate underneath my nose the entire time, appropriate here.”
Fred Miller instructed 60 Minutes he plans to clear up the cemetery and is in the method of developing a non-income foundation to also restore the slave quarters on the home to support teach people interested in the background of slavery. His sister mentioned, for her, Sharswood has turn into a position of profound meaning and connection with the previous.
“I would undoubtedly say throughout this house I can sense a little something in just me when I am going for walks all over, simply doing everything,” Karen Dixon-Rexroth reported. “I know that our ancestors are on the lookout down on us with a smile.”
You can watch Lesley Stahl’s whole report on Sharswood down below.
The online video above was originally published on May perhaps 15, 2022 and was produced by Keith Zubrow and edited by Sarah Shafer Prediger.
