Returning to Prospect Hill after 165 years

A very unusual reunion will take place this Saturday at an abandoned plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi – the haunting, seldom seen Greek Revival house known as Prospect Hill.

Coming together for the first time will be descendants of the plantation’s original slave owners; of a group of slaves who escaped into the woods after setting fire to the first house on the site, in 1845; of slaves who remained on the plantation until their emancipation during the Civil War; and of freed slaves who immigrated from the plantation to the freed-slave colony in Liberia in the 1840s. As if that weren’t enough to get the conversation going, also attending will be descendants of mixed-race liaisons between Prospect Hill’s former slave owners and slaves in the early 20th century.

For $20, you can be a fly on the wall.

Most of the descendents have never seen the place, nor met each other. They’re coming together for an event being staged by the New Mexico-based Archaeological Conservancy, which in August bought Prospect Hill to stabilize the house in hopes of finding a buyer to restore and preserve it. The 10-room structure, which was included in the Mississippi Heritage Trust’s 2011 list of the state’s 10 most endangered historic properties, is one of the few surviving landmarks of a pivotal chapter in American and Liberian history, and it is in danger of being lost.

The story behind Prospect Hill, which was the subject of my 2004 nonfiction book Mississippi in Africa, begins in the 1830s, when Revolutionary War veteran Isaac Ross sought to ensure a better life for his slaves after he and his sympathetic daughter Margaret Reed were gone. Ross and Reed stipulated in their wills that the plantation be sold and the money used to pay the way for those of its slaves who chose to immigrate to a freed-slave colony established for the purpose by a group known as the American Colonization Society. Their destination: A part of the Liberian colony known as Mississippi in Africa.

Ross and Reed no doubt knew their plan would be controversial, but they could not have known how sweeping the impacts would be. Ultimately, they unwittingly set the stage for a tumultuous court battle over the estate, filed by Ross’s grandson, Isaac Ross Wade, and for the divergence, in the 1840s, of the paths of each of the groups that will be represented at Prospect Hill on November 12.

The Rosses and Wades were divided over the repatriation effort, and the slaves themselves were divided over whether to go or stay; likewise, those who sought to immigrate were divided over whether to take matters into their own hands to overcome the obstacles placed in their path to freedom by Wade.

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Returning to Prospect Hill after 165 years