Unplowed Ground: Reclaiming the Agricultural Legacy of Black Farmers and Homesteaders in American History

A Landscape Shaped by Invisible Hands

Walk the agricultural heritage trails of the American South, the post-Reconstruction homestead counties of Oklahoma, or the river delta farming communities of the Mississippi lowlands, and you will encounter a persistent silence. The interpretive markers describe the labor of settlement, the ingenuity of early cultivation, the hardship of building something from raw ground. What they rarely describe, with any specificity or depth, are the Black men and women whose hands performed an enormous share of that labor — and who, in many cases, owned and operated farms of their own, building a parallel agricultural world that mainstream heritage narratives have consistently failed to acknowledge.

This is not a peripheral omission. At the close of Reconstruction in 1877, African American farmers owned approximately 2 million acres of land across the South. By 1910, Black land ownership in the United States had reached its historical peak, with some 14 to 16 million acres held by nearly 1 million Black farm operators. The decades that followed brought systematic dispossession — through discriminatory lending, fraudulent legal proceedings, racially targeted violence, and the deliberate exclusion of Black farmers from federal agricultural support programs — but the farms themselves, and the history they embody, did not disappear. They have simply been left out of the story that heritage tourism has chosen to tell.

Properties That Carry Their Own Testimony

In the Tidewater region of Virginia, a modest but carefully preserved farmstead associated with a free Black family that acquired land in the 1840s has recently been nominated for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The property includes a dwelling house, a smokehouse, and the remnants of a kitchen garden that documentary evidence suggests was continuously cultivated for more than a century. Local historians working with the family's descendants have assembled an oral history archive that contextualizes the physical landscape in ways that no architectural survey alone could accomplish.

Further west, in the former Oklahoma Territory — where the Homestead Act of 1866 opened land to freedmen on terms nominally equal to those offered white settlers — a network of all-Black agricultural townships once supported thriving farm economies. Communities such as Boley and Langston grew out of this homesteading movement, and the farmsteads that surrounded them represent a chapter of American agricultural history that is, at last, beginning to receive scholarly and preservationist attention. The Oklahoma Historical Society has partnered with Historically Black Colleges and Universities and with descendant communities to conduct systematic surveys of surviving structures in these areas.

In the Mississippi Delta, the story is complicated by the legacy of sharecropping — a system that bound Black farm laborers to the land without granting them ownership. Yet even within that constrained framework, some families accumulated enough resources over time to transition from tenancy to ownership, and the properties they built are architecturally and historically significant. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History has undertaken oral history collection projects in several Delta counties, gathering testimony from elderly residents whose recollections of working farm life in the mid-twentieth century constitute an irreplaceable documentary record.

Why These Stories Were Set Aside

The absence of Black agricultural heritage from mainstream tourism and historic preservation is not accidental. It reflects a series of institutional choices, made across many decades, about which histories were worth funding, which properties were worth nominating for landmark status, and whose descendants were invited into the room when preservation priorities were set.

The National Register of Historic Places, for all its breadth, has historically skewed toward properties associated with political, architectural, or military significance — categories that, by their nature, favored the documented histories of white landowners and institutions. Agricultural properties in general have been underrepresented; Black agricultural properties doubly so. The criteria for significance were not inherently exclusionary, but their application was shaped by the assumptions and blind spots of the professionals who administered them.

There is also the matter of documentation. Systematic record-keeping about Black property ownership was inconsistently maintained, and in some jurisdictions actively suppressed. Deeds were lost, altered, or never properly recorded. The paper trail that preservation historians depend upon is thinner for these properties, requiring a greater reliance on oral history, community memory, and the physical evidence of the landscape itself — evidence that is increasingly vulnerable as structures deteriorate and elderly witnesses pass on.

The Work of Reclamation

The organizations and individuals engaged in recovering this history are working against time, but they are also working with growing institutional support. The National Trust for Historic Preservation's African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, established in 2017, has directed millions of dollars toward the preservation of sites associated with Black history, including agricultural properties. The fund has supported survey work, structural stabilization, and the development of heritage tourism programming at sites that had previously received no preservation investment.

At the community level, the work often begins with listening. Oral history projects conducted by local historical societies, university extension programs, and descendant organizations are producing archives that will outlast the individuals who contributed to them. In Georgia's Black Belt counties, a collaborative project between a regional land trust and a network of Black church congregations has documented the agricultural histories of families whose land has been in continuous ownership since Reconstruction — properties that carry profound significance precisely because they survived the dispossession that claimed so many others.

Heritage tourism, when it engages authentically with these histories, has the capacity to do more than generate revenue. It creates a public acknowledgment of significance — a declaration, written into the landscape itself, that these farms and the people who built them are part of the American agricultural story in ways that matter and that deserve to be remembered.

Returning to the Ground

There is something fitting about the fact that the recovery of Black agricultural heritage requires returning, again and again, to the land itself. The fields, the fence lines, the orientation of a farmstead toward water or road — these physical facts carry memory in ways that documents sometimes cannot. For the descendants of families who farmed these acres under conditions of extraordinary difficulty and with extraordinary resourcefulness, the land is not merely a historical artifact. It is a form of testimony.

The work of documenting and preserving that testimony is, at its core, the work of honest history — the kind of reckoning with the full complexity of the American rural past that heritage tourism, at its best, is uniquely positioned to facilitate. The ground has always known what was planted in it. The task now is to make sure the rest of us do too.