Widely claimed to be the first museum in America to solely address slavery, the Whitney Plantation is a plantation estate, museum and memorial outside New Orleans, on Louisiana's famed River Road. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the plantation was home to the Haydel family, and their enslaved workers. The site was bought in 2000 by a retired lawyer, John Cummings, who funded the renovation and redevelopment of the site, which opened to the public as a museum in 2014. On arrival, visitors must join a guided tour to see the majority of the site, but the museum is open to all.
On the property visitors will find a range of exhibits, including the Mansion House, slave quarters, a blacksmith's shop and a Baptist church. There is also a 'Wall of Honour' which features the names of all those enslaved at the plantation, as taken from the site's archives. In addition, there is a sculpture installation created by American artist Woodrow Nash called 'The Children of Whitney,' that seeks to remind visitors that slavery affected children as well as adults.
The site houses a significant collection of artefacts too. These range from plantation tools and house furniture. There is even the largest collection of sugar kettles in the whole of Louisiana. Much of this collection has been purchased at auctions around the USA, in a bid to redisplay the site as it was during the antebellum period. There are three archaeological sites which also contribute collections of material linked to the lives of the enslaved themselves. All of this provides visitors with a unique perspective of plantation life, and helps to break down the ignorance still surrounding histories of American enslavement.
In the churchyard of St John the Baptist Church, Bishop’s Castle, is an unnamed grave, dedicated to 'I.D., a Native of Africa', who died in 1801. Nothing is known for sure about the individual remembered by this gravestone, but the inscription is one used frequently by abolitionist sympathisers: 'God hath made of one blood all nations of men'. With connections to English Heritage’s ‘Sites of Memory’ project, in 2007 researchers attempted to find out more about the occupant of the grave. Partners in the project included Bishop's Castle Heritage Resource Centre, the parish Church of St John the Baptist and the Community College in Bishop's Castle. The research leaflet was revised and reprinted in 2015, as new evidence came to light about a local family, the Oakeleys, who had an interest in a plantation in Jamaica. Bishop's Castle Heritage Research Centre volunteers continue their research into the identity of ‘ID’ and the reasons they came to Bishop's Castle.
An exhibition developed by Cromarty Courthouse Museum in the Scottish Highlands recording the role of Highland Scots in the slave trade and slave plantations of the Caribbean and South America and, in particular, British Guiana. The striking illustrations were by John McNaught. The exhibition told individual stories of Scottish merchants, plantation owners and their slaves, such as a slave called Inverness, bought, sold, exploited and hunted as a runaway by Scots in Demerara. It also looked at the freed slaves who found a place in Scottish society. Connected to this project was the placing of a plaque in the former Royal Northern Infirmary (now the executive office of the University of the Highlands and Islands). It remains one of the few acknowledgements of the use of profits from the slave plantations to fund charitable public institutions, and the only known one in Gaelic.