A Place Called “Reavisland”

Initially owned by Virginia-born merchant Richard Bennehan (1743-1825), the Stagville Plantation lands were first acquired in 1776 with the core of the land purchased in 1787. The land was first owned by Judith Stagg, a widower of the land, who owned several acres and a tavern on site. Known as the largest plantation in North Carolina, Stagville’s acreage spans sections of what are now known as Orange, Durham, Wake and Granville counties. The Stagville site operated a tavern which acted as a social epicenter in which local farmers met to discuss current events and exchange information.[1] Judith Stagg, the widower of the property, sold roughly sixty acres of land to Richard Bennehan, which later grew even larger when Bennehan and his wife Mary occupied 3,914 acres and 42 slaves of “working” age. 

Richard and Mary Bennehan’s two children, Rebecca and Thomas, cultivated the land throughout their young adulthood, and in 1803 Rebecca married Duncan Cameron. Duncan, an established lawyer in Hillsborough North Carolina, merged land and his enslaved community with his father/brother-in-law duo Richard and Thomas Bennehan. Both Bennehan and Cameron soon ran the plantation as a financial courtship. In addition to running the combined plantations, the Bennehans and Camerons also ran the Stagville store, a mercantile business in Wake County known as the “Fish Dam Store,” a mill and store in Person County, and mills along the Eno River.[2]

After the passing of Thomas Bennehan in 1847, with no heir to deed the expansive land, Bennehan passed the entire Stagville Plantation on to the Cameron family under the ownership of Duncan and Rebecca's son, Paul. By the 1850s, Paul Cameron was one of the wealthiest men in the state, owning nine hundred slaves and thirty thousand acres of land, requiring construction of new slave cabins at Horton Grove a few miles away. Each cabin had wooden floors instead of the common dirt floors and brick siding for insulation, was two-stories high, and contained four rooms. Not only did the slave cabins offer better housing for Paul Cameron’s slaves, but by providing the enslaved community with better housing, Cameron attempted to limit disease in the slave quarters and protect his investments.[3]

While in the midst of the Civil War, Stagville remained intact. April 1865 marked the emancipation and the coming of new day for the enslaved living on the Stagville Plantation. With housing already intact, many of the former slaves remained to farm the land as sharecroppers and hired workers. When Paul Cameron died during Reconstruction, his last will & testament divided the plantation land among his children. Paul Camerons’  will and testament states, "I also give and devise to John W. Graham, as trustee aforesaid, for his son George M. Graham, all the lands known and called as the `Leathers,' `Briggs,' `Reavis' and `Southerland,' on the south side of Eno, and on the Raleigh and Roxboro and the Hillsboro and Fish Dam roads, and all now in Durham County, and all title deeds registered in Orange, and containing between 1,500 and 1,700 acres — to George and his heirs an inheritance in fee simple when he comes of age”.[4] This information become extremely impactful to the Revis (Reavis) family as the land deeded exposes the first time Reavis is mentioned as a possible link to the family surname.

Passage above reads: "I also give and devise to John W. Graham, as trustee aforesaid, for his son George M. Graham, all the lands known and called as the `Leathers,' `Briggs,' `Reavis' and `Southerland,' on the south side of Eno, and on the Raleigh and Roxboro and the Hillsboro and Fish Dam roads, and all now in Durham County, and all title deeds registered in Orange, and containing between 1,500 and 1,700 acres — to George and his heirs an inheritance in fee simple when he comes of age”

[1] Jean Bradley Anderson, Piedmont Plantation: The Bennehan-Cameron Family and Lands in North Carolina (Durham, NC: Historic Preservation Society of Durham, 1985), 9. Guion Griffis Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937), 95.

[2] Welcome to Historic Stagville. (2015). Retrieved August 29, 2020, from https://www.stagville.org/history/the-camerons/

[3] Anderson, Piedmont Plantation, 57; “Historic Stagville Training Manual,” 31, 105.

[4] Peebles v. Graham, 39 S.E. 25, 128 N.C. 222 (N.C. 1901)

 

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A Man, with a Name: Reavis to Reparations