The country is embarking on a celebration of its 250th anniversary, and right here in the Cape Fear region, there is a piece of history that’s emblematic of this nation’s complicated and nuanced story: The Black Rock House, located near Riegelwood in what is now Columbus County, is a simple yet elegant two-story Greek Revival home, set on a sprawling lawn, with a property that stretches roughly a mile to the Cape Fear River. Built in 1845, Black Rock is also known as the Allen-Love House, named for two of the families who built and later occupied it.
It’s a storied place, and it’s intersected the history and lives of many families: Earnestine Keaton whose ancestors were enslaved here, later came to thrive as free people and community leaders after the Civil War, Jim Moore, whose family owned plantations here, and Everett Lewis, the latest owner of the house, who has been digging into its complicated history.
Keaton wants her ancestors who lived and worked there to be commemorated, and part of the story she wanted told was the story of those who owned them. She also wants people to know that her family transcended that hardship through resilience. They now serve in local government. Her cousins and her brother helped run the Town of Sandyfield near Black Rock Plantation.
We’ll take you through stories that touch on the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, Post-Reconstruction, and into the 20th and 21st centuries. These stories are woven through one house at Black Rock.
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The Keaton family are longtime residents of Sandyfield near the Black Rock House. It’s a town of over 400 people, but not by much, that neighbors East Arcadia.
We first told their story on WHQR’s Coastline a few years ago and introduced Earnestine Keaton, who is the resident historian of the Keaton tribe. Sandyfield is about three square miles, with around 450 people, and is historically African American. The population is still 63% Black, including many families that, like the Keatons, have lived there for generations.
Much of it is open land with time-worn general stores and miscellaneous commercial buildings at every other stoplight; a mid-20th-century paper mill is the town’s nucleus. According to Earnestine, much of Sandyfield’s old-town rural charm is still intact.
For her, it harkens back to the days when music from the nearby piccolo joint would echo through the town, making Earnestine and other youth her age rush to finish their chores, whether they were scrubbing floors or working in the tobacco fields, so they could join in on the fun. Despite growing up in rural southeastern North Carolina during Jim Crow, Earnestine says she didn’t think too much about her race, living in a community that was and still is predominantly Black.
She says, after Emancipation, her ancestors stayed and worked on Black Rock Plantation and throughout the Reconstruction period to the present, the Keaton family legacy has been woven into the fabric of this town, as members of their family would work in the paper mill, in the fertilizer industry and come to own some land for themselves, based on her research and the oral history handed down through the generations.
Her ancestors were owned by a wealthy planter and lawyer, D.D. Allen, from 1843 to 1865, the end of the American Civil War.
Once they were freed, they took on the last name of one of the plantation’s earlier owners, John Grange. Earnestine recently learned more about this history from her friend Eulis Willis, the recently retired mayor of the historically Black Town of Navassa, and a fellow history buff.
“One of the things that I had was an 1870 agricultural census, and this listed all former slaves that were on these different plantations, right? I made a copy of that thing and gave it to Earnestine. So she took that and looked at that Black Rock Plantation,” he said.
Ever since Keaton found this piece of her family’s legacy, she’s been on a journey to uncover more. That’s what led her to the front steps of Black Rock Plantation, where she stood for the first time, some years ago, next to her sister Cecile Bryant, observing the otherworldliness of Black Rock, a place that transcends time.
“This doesn’t belong here. This is of another time. And I was drawn to this house, and ‘Cile took the picture of me looking up at it, and she said, ‘You look like you are trying to figure out, why are you coming here?” Keaton said.
To answer that question, we’ll have to go to the beginning, before the American Revolution, and some of the first white families to settle in the area.
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One important thread is the powerful Moore family, who owned much of the land around Black Rock. Jim Moore, a modern-day descendant, visited the plantation house with WHQR and Earnestine Keaton earlier this year.
Jim Moore read the placard placed on Black Rock: “This property has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Department of the Interior.”
The House sits on the Bladen and Columbus county line. Moore is the owner of James E. Moore Insurance Company, and, full disclosure, they’re a WHQR underwriter. But that’s not why he’s included in this story. And over the past several years, his daughter has taken over the business, giving him time to explore his ancestry.
“I grew up in Wilmington, lived all my life there, except for about nine or 10 years, [I was] in Chapel Hill and at the Air Force, and really didn’t know anything about my ancestors until maybe five years ago. And somehow picked up ancestry, started playing and said, ‘Well, this is interesting,’ Moore said.
His research took him back to before the Revolutionary War.
“I am the great, great-grandson of Nathaniel Moore. He’s my sixth great-grandfather,” he said.
And Jim says that because the Moores were such a powerful family at that time, they did intermarry.
“Nathaniel is my great-grandfather, as is Maurice. So how does that happen? Their great-grandchildren married each other,” he said.
Nathaniel Moore bought up tons of land around the Cape Fear region at the start of America’s beginning and started many plantations in the area.
James Moore was the father of Nathaniel, as well as Maurice, and the infamous ‘King’ Roger Moore.
One of the reasons they called him ‘King’ was the way he ran his plantation at Orton.
According to NCpedia, it was because of his "grand manner, and his reputation as a generous host." However, the same website listed that Moore enslaved more than 250 people and owned nearly 60,000 acres of land.
The Moores were originally planters from Charleston, South Carolina, and, as Jim says, some of their ancestors were from Barbados; they, too, were planters there. Jim says he’s been trying to locate the exact coordinates of the land grants his ancestors received from Britain.
“There are only three or four points of reference to find these plantations. These are the grants. And one is Indian Creek, which Nathaniel Moore’s main property, which is Black Rock later, started right at the mouth of Indian Creek into the river,” he said. “If you read the descriptions of the property, it’ll say, beginning at a gum tree here at the mouth of Indian Creek, go 82 poles in this direction up the river. And a pole, I think, is 16 feet, if I remember correctly.”
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Everett Lewis is the current owner of the Black Rock House and lives mainly in California, teaching film production at the University of Southern California.
He bought the house 15 years ago. His family is from Brunswick County, and they also go back to around the time of the country’s founding. Lewis wanted to return to southeastern North Carolina to connect with his family.
“A little over 15 years ago, I realized my family was aging out, and that if I wanted to participate in the lives of these people, I would have to make an effort to do that. So I decided to start spending summers and holidays here, and then I noticed that people were dying, and so I decided to come back as much as I could, because I did like my extended family quite a bit,” Lewis said.
He was originally interested in an older home in Fayetteville, but he thought the sellers were asking too much for the condition it was in. He then drove by Black Rock and saw that it was for sale.
“All I could see was just a part of the roof and the cornice, and the cornice of the exterior is what caught my eye, because the detailing was, most of the houses on that road are from the early 20th century, and this house was not, you can tell from the details, it was a much older house,” he said.
Lewis then realized what he had found was a completely preserved 19th-century house.
“When I got the house, I didn’t know what it was going to turn into. None of this information was…there was no information. People who owned it didn’t know anything about it,” he said.
Lewis has conducted significant research on the house and its evolving history, including the Moore family.
“The Moores took everything. The Moores and their relatives took all of the Cape Fear River, all the way up as far as Black Rock. Because when people talk about the Cape Fear, you imagine it’s just that stretch from Southport to Wilmington,” he said. “Back in the day, it was the stretch from Southport to Fayetteville. That’s the Cape Fear River. And so there were 100 plantations between Smithville, Southport, and Fayetteville, all doing naval stores, which was a huge industry.”
So Lewis has had to do his research, which included the Moores and also the Howe family. Robert Howe, the famous general who served alongside George Washington in the Revolutionary War, was also a justice of the peace and represented Bladen County in the Colonial General Assembly before North Carolina became a state.
“Howe was in charge of George Washington's army in Savannah. They lost Savannah, so he went back to being aide-de-camp after a period of hiding out; in any case, he lived around here after the war. His family’s place was Howe Point, which is now Sunny Point," Lewis said.
The Moore family married the Howes and the Grange family, two more family names intertwined with the Black Rock story.
Jim talks about how the Howe line is intertwined with that of the Moores.
“Nathaniel came here and got the land grant. He married Sarah Grange. His sister married Robert’s father, Job Howe. They were all from Charleston, and Job came up here. Nathaniel deeded that land to Job in 1735. He got it in about 1728, 1729, so he wasn’t here long,” he said.
By owning the house and exploring its story, Lewis has met fellow travelers with a vested interest in preserving its history.
“I met Jim because of the house. I met Earnestine because of the house. That’s amazing, really. That’s why we preserve things, right? For these discussions, for these experiences, for the humans involved, because otherwise, what is really the point?” Lewis said.
And that’s brought Earnestine and Jim together. They’re standing in front of Black Rock, and Earnestine says, “Black Rock is his legacy, it’s mine as well, because this is Black Rock Plantation House, and Nathaniel Moore had the first one. This is a continuation of Jim’s lineage legacy. This is the only place that he can touch.”
Jim responded, “Of this, that’s for sure.”
For Jim, that means confronting some ugly legacies. He says he thinks that Nathaniel, his direct descendant, was less power-hungry than his brothers, Roger and Maurice, but he still has to contemplate their roles as enslavers.
“I’ve had this question in my mind forever. Can Nathaniel, or anybody else who owns someone else, be a good person? I mean, we understand we get trapped in our environments. That’s what was going on back then,” he said.
For Earnestine, that meant exploring the history and resilience of her ancestors before and after the Civil War. It is, on the one hand, part of the historical tragedy of chattel slavery, but it’s also different from many narratives of the plantation era in the ways that the Keatons’ ancestors had a kind of leeway and autonomy that’s rarely represented in stories from the Antebellum Era.
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Historical documents suggest that in the century before Black Rock was built, the Moores needed enslaved people to help clear the land they were settling.
Cecile Bryant notes that they may also have helped remove some native peoples from the area.
The sad reality underlying the entire American story is that they were the first people to inhabit the area. It often goes unmentioned that they were mistreated, pushed off their ancestral lands, and even killed.
“They [the Moores] had to wipe the Indians out. I’m sorry, but after that, they bought the slaves in. So they bought skilled slaves from Barbados or whatever else,” Bryant said.
Jim shares Cecile’s assessment of what happened.
"At some point, the people up here wanted their help in dealing with the Indians, because they were having squabbles and everything. So they came up for that reason, and the Indians got pushed out as they did, and sold them as slaves, so they came up here, mainly Maurice did that and moved up north for a while and wound up coming back here and settling and building Brunswick Town, and what became Orton and York,” Moore said.
Cecile shares her sister’s passion for the family’s history, and together, the Keaton sisters have been a big part of Jim’s quest to learn about Black Rock.
“Well, the best thing that has come out of this for me is I feel like these two ladies are lost cousins. Our ancestors had common experiences. They were in this together, and now we’re here, and we can talk about it, study it, and learn from it, whatever. And I think we are all kind of in the same boat, wanting to really understand,” Moore said.
Cecile believes their earliest ancestors in the region came from Sierra Leone through the Caribbean, where they planted rice.
“So that means that there was a connection between the Moores and all of this in Barbados. So I think that’s how a lot of the slaves got skilled over in this area, like in Brunswick County, you find a lot of skilled people. They’re not college people, they’re not whatever, they are just skilled labor. They’re brick masons, they’re carpenters,” Bryant said.
But another extremely profitable industry was the naval stores industry. The pine trees that covered the area were turned into tar pitch and turpentine, which were used to waterproof and maintain the sailing ships entering the port along the Cape Fear River. Lewis said he learned that at one point, Brunswick County’s naval stores helped support the entire British Empire.
“These things were used on ships, wooden sailing ships, which is why Britain liked Brunswick County from the beginning, because it had a giant maritime empire, and Brunswick County supplied as much as 50% of these products for the entire world,” he said.
But the industry also played a role in the particular, somewhat unique experience the Keaton ancestors had.
“The center of all of this is the naval stores industry, what these plantations were and how they functioned, really. And the short version is, if you’re harvesting pine trees, you have to have a lot of [land], and you have to have people to do it, but you can’t watch them,” Lewis said. “The people doing the work have an enormous amount of autonomy. They’re responsible for as many as 1,000 trees, and each week they have to check [them]. And if you have 20 guys in the woods, they have to be in different sections, doing their own thing.”
And Lewis says in his research that there was a whole culture built around naval stores and the harvesting of pine trees. He’s gleaned some of this from a visitor’s journal from the early 19th century.
“And the guy writing the journal says, ‘Passing through the woods, I hear yodeling all day, and it’s all the African Americans working.’ (He didn’t use the word African Americans.) So that’s part of the lost world, right, hearing how men, these men, communicated to themselves in the woods and let each one know where they were. But he said the yodeling went on and on and on as you went along this road through Brunswick County. You heard it everywhere,” he said.
As we mentioned before, Earnestine describes her ancestors as having an uncommon level of leeway and even certain freedoms that you don’t often hear about in stories about enslaved people.
“I think they started their own way of running their plantation, their slaves, I would say that they had autonomy, starting from Nathaniel Moore, going down, they were all family, and as the area was divided up and given to other members of the same family, they adopted the same philosophy,” Keaton said.
Black Rock had six documented slave quarters. According to Lewis, some locals, like Earnestine, believed it to be more, but they were likely torn down by the end of the 1900s, and it’s not exactly clear where they were located.
Earnestine believes that they may have been built along Weyman’s Creek, a mile-long walk from the actual plantation, since work in the lumber and turpentine industry required quick access to a water source for the transport of goods. Again, despite the oppressive conditions of slavery, people found a way to have a little agency and even start a little community.
“They had to have their workers out by the creeks and the branches. So you had along Weyman’s Creek, you had slave houses here, and then maybe it was a little room for a little garden or something, but it wasn’t everybody bunched together. So you’re beginning to make a community. But when you talk about Sandyfield, this is it. It came from these slave houses that were there from the colonial days,” Keaton said.
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Dr. Joshua Strayhorn is a postdoctoral fellow at the Richards Civil War Era Center at Pennsylvania State University. He’s mainly a historian of 19th- to 20th-century African American history. He grew up in New Bern and still visits family there. Strayhorn said the Keatons’ ancestral account is indeed plausible.
“You have skilled artisans and also to the turpentine industry, a sort of workforce or labor type that requires you to be away from surveillance for extended periods of time. It seems to me that some people could use that opportunity to either escape or to live semi-autonomous lives,” he said.
Another way it differed was that Earnestine’s ancestors were allowed to marry.
“It created a certain amount of stability for slaves as a family, to have my great-grandmother know that she got married in 1846, she was enslaved. She knew when she got married. When I looked at the registry of freed people’s marriages, I saw 13 women declare their marriages in 1866 in New Hanover County, and that was part of Pender County then, but they were able to say they were married on such and such a date,” Keaton said.
Strayhorn said that marriages in the legal contractual sense would have been very rare at that time.
“Generally speaking, enslaved people weren’t able to enter contracts, and marriage was one of those contracts that they were barred from,” he said.
But it’s plausible that Keaton's ancestors held marriage ceremonies as well-documented and meaningful as any others, and later, after the Civil War, records retroactively recorded the dates of those marriages.
“I had heard the grandchildren of former slaves say the day after they was going around, and they didn’t have to go far because, like I said, this kinship network, if you were a man and you were in Black Rock, Grange Farm, or the Lloyd Plantation, you knew where your wife was, and you go to her and you stay with her, because she at the house,” she said.
Earnestine says that during the Antebellum period, the culture in Columbus County was different from that in Wilmington proper.
“We got the ones that wanted to be laid back. They came up the North West Branch and decided that we don’t want all that hustle and bustle from Wilmington or whatever. ‘We’re gonna create our own place here, and we’re gonna make our own rules, and if we want to go down to the county, we’ll go. But otherwise we can do anything we want here.’ And I just have that feeling that it’s like that all over, as far as rural areas are concerned,” Keaton said.
Strayhorn said the Keatons likely have a special story. Earnestine’s claim was that enslaved people found a degree of freedom and autonomy thanks to their skills and the favorable economic conditions of, for example, the naval store industry. It’s a story of resilience and survival, but it doesn’t negate the era's horrors. Strayhorn said slavery was still slavery.
“It could very much be that, and that could very much be their ancestors’ remembrances, but people were still chattel. They could still be mortgaged, all those sorts of things, too. So I think you can make space for them, because they do have a very unique story. Because I’ve never actually heard of people in that way, both inherit the land but also maintain it for that long a period of time,” Strayhorn said.
And there is a story Lewis has researched: an enslaved man named Sam helped run the plantation after the death of D.D. Allen, whose family name is often associated with Black Rock. When Allen passed away, his widow, Calista, and Sam continued to run things.
“Sam was in charge of probably a workshop at Black Rock, which made the barrels, which were then taken down to the dock, which used to be on the Cape Fear, the property used to go all the way to the Cape Fear,” Lewis said. “And then a steamboat, because there used to be regular steamboats up and down between Wilmington and Fayetteville, they put out a flag, and the guy on the steamboat would pull over and pick up the barrels of rosin and take them down to Wilmington.”
Despite the dehumanizing conditions of the time, Sam found a way to have some real agency.
Strayhorn says he wants the public to know about an online history project that talks about this issue. It’s called ‘Just Beyond the River, a Black Public Humanities Initiative,’ and it was funded by the African American Heritage Foundation of southeastern NC and the American Council of Learned Societies.
These scholars write about the naval stores around Brunswick County and capture the rub that what they had equated with real autonomy and power.
They write, ”There is some debate concerning the major slave economies of the region, with different scholars arguing for the importance of rice cultivation or naval stores. This has impacted the way scholars have discussed the autonomy or violence of slave life. Some scholars suggest that laboring in the forest for naval store production allowed slaves autonomy and time away from their masters, but it also situated them alongside potentially more violent white overseers.”
The scholars continue, “Lastly, there has been discussion of the relative autonomy of slave life in Wilmington, where some slaves are known to have had their own residences and participated in the market trade. Despite this, Wilmington was a space of public punishment and displays of violence. White authorities also tried to curtail the practices of slaves and free people of color in Wilmington through regulations designed to prevent slaves from holding accommodation trading items such as gunpowder, making noise, or simply being idle altogether.”
There is another exceptional part of the Keaton family history that Earnestine points to: historical research showing that while many of her ancestors were enslaved, others were part of the community of free Black people around East Arcadia in Bladen County, near Black Rock.
“Before, like maybe from 1790 on, people were attracted to Bladen County. You know, free people coming. And we never had that in Sandyfield. For some reason, it seemed to stop right there and didn’t go any further. Bladen County had loads of free people, like 430 something people,” Keaton said.
In Earnestine’s oral history, those living around Black Rock were immediately freed after Wilmington was captured by the Union Army.
“I remember talking to a granddaughter of a former slave from the plantation there, and she said that the day that Wilmington fell and they were free, he asked them to stay on, and they did,” she said.
And Black Rock has a place in marking the end of the Civil War. Union General William Sherman’s lieutenants might have stayed there when they were on his infamous March to the Sea.
“A huge crowd of people walked from Fayetteville to Wilmington, and there weren’t a lot of houses on the road back in the day, so they probably spent the night. Captain [John] Winslow probably commandeered the house to spend the night with this rabble of people,” Lewis said.
Strayhorn notes that Wilmington was the last bastion of the Confederacy.
“Wilmington wouldn’t be taken until the winter of 1864 into 1865, so in that case, free people used that opportunity to claim freedoms, engage in politics in ways that they, many of them, hadn’t before, and also claim land,” he said. “Sherman’s March to the Sea is one of the famous examples of liberation in this area, and his Special Field Order 15 actually gave slaves abandoned lands that they encountered as they were moving throughout the South. This would later be overturned by [President] Andrew Johnson, but this moment that you have Emancipation is really a moment where people are imagining what freedom could look like for them.”
Earnestine’s family acquired land about five years after the Civil War, and in 2026, many of the Keatons, as we will learn later in the story, have stayed in the Town of Sandyfield near where Black Rock still stands.
Strayhorn says that this was plausible, but notes that for formerly enslaved people across eastern North Carolina, acquiring land wasn’t the easiest thing to do.
“For families, it was an opportunity to claim land, to build on either legacies developed before the war, or to start anew, whether it’s finding family members or reengaging with old plantation masters on different terms. Sometimes this was not a happy or this was not a this was not always a harmonious reunion, because many owners would be taken aback by free people’s articulations of this newfound freedom that they had, and often would be hostile to them, and they would need the either Freedmen’s Bureau or the army that was there to adjudicate some of the things that were going on, grievances that they had with their former masters after the war was over,” Strayhorn said.
The Freedmen’s Bureau was a federal agency established in 1865 that helped formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. Its work in overseeing confiscated or abandoned lands was more or less over by 1868 under then-President Andrew Johnson.
Earnestine and Cecile are proud that they can trace their ancestry back before the Civil War and that most of their families still remain. Strayhorn said that their ancestors owning the land fairly quickly after the war could be one reason they stayed.
“So what I was finding is that in certain situations where people were able to acquire land, they were much less likely to leave the state versus when people were sort of landless in that way,” Strayhorn said.
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After the Allens, Black Rock was owned by the Loves. Thus, the Allen-Love House, as it is sometimes called. The Love family married into the Allen family, and the house was passed down to John Brown and Clara Allen Love, then to Lura Love, who was born in 1876 and lived into her 80s.
Julia Peterson is Lura Love’s second cousin, and, like many families who settled in this area around Black Rock, they started in Charleston and Wilmington before moving out to Columbus and Bladen counties.
“I can verifiably trace [my family] to 1776 in the New Hanover County area. We’ve heard that two Love brothers arrived in Wilmington from London in 1750 via Charleston. Oral history from my dad, who was born in 1919, he says that Dr. William J. Love, who was a physician during the Civil War in Wilmington, suggested that it would be a good idea for people to move farther out from the coast because of the threat of yellow fever, and obviously, our little part did,” Peterson said.
Julia still has land close to where Lura lived. She says she’s not sure why Black Rock didn’t stay in the family after Lura Love died in 1959.
“It’s a little bit of a mystery to me why none of the Loves either inherited or purchased her property,” she said.
Julia has Lura’s diaries, has been reading them, and has discovered that Lura was working locally for the American Red Cross Nurse Corps. And Lura mainly lived alone; she was a poet, a lyricist, and an educator. And from Everett Lewis’s research, Lura Love was also a suffragette.
“So it was decided to leave the property to the daughter, whose name I think was Caroline Love. And Caroline passed it through her family, and when Miss Lura took over, it seemed that nobody else wanted to take it on, living in Philadelphia at the time because she was a suffragist and she was also a musician,” he said.
According to Lewis, Lura tutored some of the Black families who lived around Black Rock, continued her songwriting at the house, and hosted colleagues from up north.
“One week a year, her publishers would come and stay at Black Rock, and she would play all the music for them, hang out, and eat who knows what. Whenever I’m digging for planting, there are always oyster shells I dig up,” he said.
Julia is still on the hunt for information about Lura Love and hopes to continue as Jim Moore and Earnestine Keaton did, serving as her family’s researcher.
“It’s just a way for me to figure out what I missed in the past, and to pass things on, oral storytelling, because that never happens anymore. So I’ve been chosen to be that person,” she said.
After Lura, the property was owned by a family called the Owens, and then Everett Lewis bought it.
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For Earnestine Keaton’s family, they’re not just surviving but thriving and asserting power through local governance of the Town of Sandyfield, something unimaginable in the Antebellum Era.
Garry Keaton, her cousin, has been the mayor of Sandyfield for over 15 years. Her brother, Randolph, is a town council member.
After high school, Garry Keaton enlisted in the Air Force, served for 20 years, then retired and moved back home. His dad worked at International Paper.
“I always had the desire to come back home. My parents were here,” he said.
Garry says the townspeople are mostly family.
“I would say that 75% of the residents of Sandyfield literally know one another, and probably about that same percentage are connected, either biologically connected, or they’re married to someone,” he said.
A little over three decades ago, the town incorporated, giving residents some say in the area’s development and future.
“It was really that the citizens wanted to have some control as to what came in, what kind of industry, what the growth looked like, and all of the developing things that happen in a small town when you’re not incorporated,” he said.
Prior to incorporation, Garry says decisions were made for them, and now they can say no to certain developments in the town. Recently, officials from Bladen County requested that the drainage system for their newly built campground extend into Sandyfield.
“But they wanted to put some of the drain fields in Columbus County, which was in the Town of Sandyfield, so we had a public hearing. We listened to whatever our residents wanted. And the residents said, ‘No, we don’t want this.’ So the town board decided that we don’t want this in our town,” he said.
Garry understood that the development went through the proper protocols, but it still wasn’t something the residents wanted.
“It’s a closed system, it’s safe, it has to be. It’s regulated by the state. So all of those things are okay. All of those things are fine. But it’s still that perception that this is not what I want next to my house. This is not what I want in my community,” Keaton said.
Still, there are some things beyond their control. When Sandyfield was incorporated, a hog farm was entirely cut out of the town’s boundaries.
“When the map was drawn for Sandyfield, that part, and it would have made sense, for that area [to be included] had that hog farm not been there. It was actually that parcel of land that was cut out. So literally, it’s right next door. It butts up to Sandyfield, but when they drew the town line and excluded the hog farm,” Keaton said.
Earnestine talks about the hog farm being near Black Rock. It abuts the property, and we smelled it when we visited there in early January.
‘I hate the idea of somebody coming into your space, and they don’t live in it, and they are spraying a hog poop, whenever they get ready, and you've got to come out, but we’re I guess, maybe the wind takes it this way,” she said.
And while these are the realities of the town, Garry says there isn’t too much of a hustle and bustle around Sandyfield. Their next exciting project is a walking path.
“Some of the things that we are actually working on, we just received a grant for a walking trail, so that’s going to allow our seniors and younger people an opportunity to exercise in a safe place,” he said.
Garry says he wants more economic opportunity in the town. He says most have to travel to work in Whiteville, Wilmington, or Elizabethtown.
“I wish there were more diversity. I wish there were more opportunities, but the area is still growing. International Paper just did some recent hiring, from what I can understand,” he said.
And for him and his family members, Earnestine and Cecile, it’s always about helping and empowering the people who live in your community. They’ve been doing it for a long time.
“We try to look out for each other. We try to do neighborly things, whether it’s growing a garden and giving some of your fresh vegetables to a neighbor, or giving them a ride to a doctor’s appointment,” he said.
And Garry says he’s a product of all the people who have come before him.
“I hear people say a lot of times now that when the Lord wants to bless you, he doesn’t send you things, he sends you people, and those people are what’s been the biggest blessing in my life, so now that I’m back and I’m connected to those people,” he said.
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Despite their differences and histories, Black Rock has bonded Jim Moore, Everett Lewis, Earnestine Keaton, Gary Keaton, Cecile Bryant, and Julia Peterson. They are all bound to the land surrounding Black Rock. They are all sharing in its memories, its history, and its people.
We rode with Jim and Earnestine to Weyman Creek, which used to be on the Black Rock property. The entrance was closed, but we stood there for a while at the opening of a quiet, wooded pathway, taking in the moment and reveling in the possibility that we were standing on the same ground as the Keaton family’s enslaved ancestors. But one place we knew that to be true was at Black Rock plantation, the place that ties these families together across generations. In front of the Black Rock House, Earnestine talked about the first time she met Everett.
“We came to visit him one day, the new owner and I told Everett, I said, ‘Everett, we came today, we thought you were going to be sitting on the porch with your black swallowtail coat and drinking mint juleps.’ Oh, he thought that was so funny,” she said.
When we put it to Lewis, he thought it was hilarious that she had a vision of Gone with the Wind.
“I mean, oh my God, it was so much more interesting than Gone With the Wind, by the way, because Gone With the Wind is entirely a product of Hollywood," he said. "It’s not about fancy clothes, by the way, and mint juleps?”
One can see why she expected a character right out of the mid-19th century. Greek-style columns lined the front porch of the Black Rock House with twin chimneys flanking the broad building, modest compared to today’s McMansions. It was quite striking in its day, though there is a dark side to that grandeur.
For many, the lone White House, set against the vast green field, symbolizes an ugly period in our country’s history.
Lewis has contemplated this, too.
“Can you change the past? No. Can the past change you? Maybe, if you're open to understanding the past and your relationship to it. That's the essential difference, and also the essential level of understanding you need to approach the past. That's the beauty of the past. It's not something to cover up, it's something to negotiate, right?" he said. "And so Earnestine does it in her way. I do it in my way. As the history of that house has unfolded, it's a very loaded, complex history. And who knew? I came into it because I liked the architecture, and I still do, but it's become a much more interesting place. It just keeps unpacking. I learn more stuff all the time. And I don't even mean to, it just happens.”
For Keaton, this place represents one of the most American stories ever told.
“I saw how the slave owner and the slaves, their descendants, were right in the same place, doing things that elevated them and their family,” she said.
Standing near the banks of Weyman Creek, Earnestine holds up a copy of the tax assessment she received from her friend Eulis Willis, from over 150 years ago, which inspired her to search for her own history after years of wondering why she was so attached to Black Rock. Earnestine now feels like she finally has the answer to that question, having found her family in the pages of history.
“Am I in the right place where you’re here? You know, this is what I would want to know or not, not to doubt myself, but to tell them that I had felt, I felt their presence from the time I was at the Black Rock Plantation House,” she continues, “I didn’t know at the time, but for some reason I was drawn to it. And then I had the tax assessment schedule, and granddaddy, I saw you on there, and I saw your mama, Caroline, on there, and I knew that I had found you.”
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This year marks the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. Black Rock plays a part in that history, bringing together the story of our nation, one that included colonialism and slavery, but also brought out the hope of the American Dream and the courage to plant roots and to keep them growing.
A special thank you to Earnestine Keaton, Gary Keaton, Cecile Bryant, Jim Moore, Julia Peterson, Eulis Willis, Everett Lewis, and Dr. Joshua Strayhorn.
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