#also my venue was built as a gift to the city in the year 1900 but you better believe I looked into that

[schmergo]

Boring serious post: I don’t know how many of you this applies to, but I live in Northern Virginia and it is much more difficult than I expected to ascertain which local wedding venues are former plantations (or on the site of one, or has another dark history). I suspect this applies to many other states, too.

There’s a stereotype of people in the Deep South getting married on historic plantations, and many local people up here in the progressive NOVA area, which used to be part of the Confederacy but which is rarely considered the ‘true south’ anymore, will say, “I would never attend a wedding held at a plantation!” 

Well... often the person saying that.... actually got married at a former plantation. They just didn’t realize it. Up here, those homes are usually called ‘mansions,’ ‘manors,’ ‘historic houses,’ or even just ‘farms.’ And they are wildly, wildly popular wedding venues. Washingtonian Magazine’s list of the 22 best Virginia wedding venues includes at least 7 that are former plantations with enslaved workers, at least 1 on the grounds of a historic plantation, and those are only the ones I knew off the top of my head from prior research. I didn’t look up the ones I hadn’t read about. Washingtonian is seen as a publication for cosmopolitan types, not people who’d probably condone the weddings held at some of the more infamous plantations in South Carolina and Louisiana that you sometimes hear about.

I didn’t realize until I got engaged how much research goes into finding the exact history of some of these properties. As you might imagine, their websites are extremely vague and often obfuscate elements of their history. They never, ever mention enslaved people, but if the property was a ‘farm’ with a ‘manor house’ from before the 1860′s... you can kinda connect the dots.

They don’t always make it easy to connect those dots. Many of these properties are older than they appear to be because they were renovated in the 20th century. Many don’t seem like they’d be plantations because they don’t have large grounds-- because the area around them has since developed. Some venues aren’t ‘mansions’ and seem rustic and humble, but they actually have a history of being a place where enslaved people worked (for example, a former mill that’s a popular event venue in my area). And some are brand new shiny buildings, but are actually built on the estate of a very large neighboring plantation and run and owned by the same people.

There’s one popular venue called Rosemont. It’s advertised as the home of former senator Harry F. Byrd. If you’re into history like me, you know that Byrd was a big fan of segregation, which is already... not great. But you have to dig deeper into the history to discover that the home was actually from 1811 and was already old when he bought it. The website says that its 200-year-history has been one of Southern hospitality, I feel like a 200-year-history in Virginia often means something else. ALSO on its property is a brand new venue called Rosemont Springs, a rustic barn. They’re advertised as two totally separate venues and people booking the barn venue might not realize that it’s actually on the grounds of the larger plantation.

I don’t see myself as being unusually politically active or particularly conscious about what I consume. But it startles me that this is still so common and popular here, and a topic that I have never heard people discuss here before. These venues are definitely making it harder to research their complicated history in order to seem more palatable to progressive folks.