History park? Restaurant? Fenced-off relic?
Preservationists scramble to preserve remnant of slavery in Fort Bend County
Houston-area preservationists are scrambling to preserve a rare building from the era of slavery: an antebellum “purgery” in Fort Bend County, part of a plantation’s sugar-making operation, and believed to be the only building of its kind still standing in the United States.
In the next five to seven years, the remains of Arcola Plantation’s sugarhouse and the land they occupy are slated to become part of a new upscale neighborhood in Sienna, the master-planned community until recently known as Sienna Plantation. When the development is finished, the developer will exit Sienna — an exit that includes shedding the sugarhouse site.
“We’re looking for an entity that can take over the buildings,” said Alvin San Miguel, vice president and general manager of Sienna by Johnson Development Corp. “We can donate the 2 to 3 acres that encompass them. But we need an entity that’s able to preserve the structures in perpetuity.”
For a project that may require a complex public-private partnership, five to seven years is a short timeline. Likely partners, such as the Fort Bend Historical Commission and Preservation Houston, say that Sienna hasn’t contacted them.
The site’s existence wasn’t widely known until this fall, when Sienna refused archaeologists’ request to examine it. Now preservationists fear that the purgery will be vandalized — or worse, quietly torn down if no plan emerges in time. They point to the historic Scanlan Mansion, in the south part of Sienna, which was razed without notice in 2017. (The home was built in 1937 by the daughters of Thomas Howe Scanlan, Houston’s mayor from 1870-1873, who was the first to push for blacks on the police force and city council. The sisters called the property Sienna Plantation, after Saint Catherine of Siena, the patron saint of single women.)
No laws protect historic buildings in Sienna. And as the recent demolition of the West Mansion in Pasadena shows, without local legal protections, even buildings on the National Historic Register can be torn down without public notice.
No one involved with the Sienna site believes that opening it to the public would be cheap or easy. It’s not yet clear how much it would
cost to secure the buildings, much less to restore and maintain them.
“The crux is,” said San Miguel, “where does the money come from?”
The slavery problem
For both developers and preservationists, the sugar-making site’s connection to slavery makes its future use a sticky subject.
The purgery, previously known to Fort Bend history buffs as “the sugar barn,” was only recently identified as a rarer, more specialized building. During the sugarcane harvest season, from fall through Christmas, slaves would boil the cane juice, then put the resulting grainy, molasses-y goop into 1,200 pound barrels with holes in their bottoms. Stored in the purgery, the molasses would slowly drain out through the holes, running into special cisterns beneath the floor, leaving the valuable sugar grains behind in the barrels.
After the plantation stopped growing sugar, the purgery was used as a barn, its special floors covered in dirt.
Shorn of the context of slavery, the rustic building — constructed of handmade brick, with oldgrowth cypress posts and beams — could easily be an Instagram-worthy site for destination weddings and events. In Alexandria, La., the Rosalie Sugarmill uses a similar collection of plantation sugar-making buildings to host music festivals, weddings and photo shoots.
But events at plantation sites are fast becoming socially unacceptable. Last week, five websites used to plan weddings, including Pinterest and The Knot, pledged to scrutinize all references to plantations. Though The Knot will still allow plantation sites in its vendor listings, it now bans adjectives such as “elegant” and “charming” to describe places where people were enslaved, beaten and raped.
In October, Sienna’s San Miguel showed the site to a for-profit developer of historic properties. Neal Dikeman is CEO of Old Growth Ventures, which specializes in using tax credits for historic preservation and has done residential projects in Houston’s Freedmen’s Town and the Heights.
The buildings, Dikeman reported, were impressive and in great shape for their age. He suggested that the sugar buildings might be reused as restaurants, shops, residences or party spaces.
“We were excited to see that the owners were serious about ensuring the historic buildings would be preserved,” he wrote enthusiastically.
San Miguel, though, thought it unlikely that Dikeman’s for-profit model would prove a good fit. “We don’t see this as a rentable, leasable space,” he said.
Unsexy maintenance
The site is important not just to Fort Bend’s history, but also to Houston’s, noted David Bush, executive director of Preservation Houston. After Emancipation, many of Fort Bend’s slaves flocked to the city, settling in places such as Freedmen’s Town. “We have to think in broader terms,” Bush said. “Houston’s history doesn’t stop at the city limits or the county line.”
And in fact, the site’s importance may extend well beyond Texas. Bush believes it might be eligible not just for the National Register of Historic Places, but possibly for UNESCO’s World Heritage listings. At present, Texas claims only one World Heritage site, the San Antonio missions, including the Alamo; Big Bend National Park is under consideration.
“The site is interesting for lots of reasons,” says Kevin Glowacki, director of Texas A&M University’s Center for Heritage Conservation, noting its appeal to architects, historians and archaeologists. “Then there’s the larger question involving everyone in the state of Texas,” he said. “How do we understand the pre- and post-Civil War era?”
Bush and Glowacki agree the first step for preserving the site in any form is to assess and document it in a way that meets federal standards. On Wednesday, Preservation Houston contacted Sienna, offering to bring the Texas A&M team to document the site in February.
“It’s certainly the sort of thing we’d like to consider,” said Sienna’s San Miguel. “It’s a good start.”
The next, harder, step would be to figure out a viable long-term plan for the place.
Traditionally, historic plantation sites have focused on the lives of the plantation’s owners and hardly mentioned the enslaved people who built the plantations and did the work that made them possible. In many cases, the slave quarters and industrial buildings, such as sugar houses, have been demolished, leaving only the “big house” where the owners lived.
That’s begun to change in recent decades: Most plantations now at least mention slaves on their tours, and a few, such as the Whitney Plantation in Edgard, La., focus not on the lives of the owners but those of the slaves.
Still, heritage tourism sites of all kinds are struggling these days, and Bush notes that, unlike the Sienna site, historic plantations able to survive on tourist revenue are usually relatively intact. For instance, the privately owned Evergreen Plantation, in Edgard, La., includes 37 buildings, and still produces sugarcane.
In Sienna, the sugarmaking buildings are all that survives of the Arcola Plantation — no big house, no workers’ quarters, and not even all of the sugarmaking operation. “It would be hard to show the whole context,” Bush said.
To make the site a historic park that doesn’t depend solely on tourist revenue will require longterm financial commitments from private funders, government entities, or both, to cover unsexy matters such as maintenance. “Private funders get excited about saving things,” he said. “But generally they don’t want to pump money into keeping something going.”
If no such funding source can be found quickly, Bush said, it’s important at least to protect and secure the site: “Mothball it and fence it off, so at least it survives. Once something is gone, it’s gone.”
‘We have to tell these stories’
Sam Collins, an adviser on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s board of advisers, said the Sienna site would be a good candidate for the trust’s #TellTheFullHistory campaign, launched in February to preserve African American places important to American history.
“We’re trying to expand the narrative, to complete the story of the American experience,” Collins said. “Too often, in the history books, African Americans are relegated to the footnotes, not in the main paragraphs. We need to preserve locations that helped America to become the great country it is — the locations that produced the wealth that built this country. We wouldn’t want to sensationalize the brutality or harshness of slavery. But we don’t want to forget it, either.”
Sugar processing buildings, he noted, were generally designed and built by enslaved experts. Features such as the purgery’s nailless trusses show not just the misery of enslaved people, but also their ingenuity.
Collins envisioned a Sienna site that would attract and excite people. “In 2018, the movie ‘Black Panther’ had people excited about Wakanda, which doesn’t even exist,” he said. “We have real heroes in our community — ancestors who laid the foundation for America’s wealth and power. We have to tell these stories.”
He quoted poet Maya Angelou: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”