Just outside of Danville headed on U.S. 58 west toward Martinsville, the Berry Hill Megasite sits a few miles off the main highway on Berry Hill Road. It promises to be a huge economic driver, as Danville and Pittsylvania County have already invested over $200 million into the development with over 3,500 acres available on 13 different lots for potential companies’ use.
The site is being considered by battery separator company Microporous and was previously shortlisted by Hyundai and Ford. Companies will be able to draw on a workforce from Virginia and North Carolina, as the site sits a few miles above the Rockingham County, North Carolina, border. Additionally, a new bypass being built will allow for easier access to the area.
When the Berry Hill Megasite was in the planning phases, a critical issue arose: The initial site plan would conflict with an area where more than 200 enslaved people were buried. The new and the old were confronting each other. Eventually, an alternate site plan was developed without disturbing the enslaved people’s graves, but it shed light on the past. There was another type of megasite at Berry Hill and the surrounding communities: forced labor camps, also known as plantations, that produced the cash crop of tobacco by enslaved people.
Growing up in Danville, I passed the Berry Hill highway marker on U.S. 58 on the way to church in Cascade every Sunday. I would see the marker, but I never asked what it meant and never thought twice about it, until recently. Reexamining the highway marker, I deciphered a few facts, but I still was not able to understand that Berry Hill was also a plantation upon an initial read.
As the marker states: Berry Hill is situated 5¼ miles to the south on the Dan River. The original portion of the main house was built in 1745 and there have been several additions. The property was used as a hospital for General Nathanael Greene’s army during the spring of 1781, following the Battle of Guilford Court House.
The new Berry Hill has 13 lots for companies to make their home. In the past, neighboring Henry County and Pittsylvania County had more than 13 major plantations, most of them owned by the Hairston family. The Berry Hill community (not to be confused with the Berry Hill plantation in Halifax County) collectively had three plantations: Berry Hill, Oak Hill and Oak Ridge. Except for Oak Ridge, the other plantations were under the jurisdiction of the Hairston family, which controlled more than 45 plantations in four states, including Virginia and North Carolina. Fueling those plantations was the labor force of more than 10,000 enslaved people.
Berry Hill
Built on 1,200 acres in 1745 by Peter Perkins on land his dad left him in his will, the Berry Hill
plantation has become a symbol of a time that has gone with the wind. The house was made
with local lumber and doubled as a hospital in 1781 after the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, and legend has it that the home was originally named Buryhill because of the large number of British soldiers who died and were buried in the area. The name was eventually fashioned to its
current format of Berry Hill.
Berry Hill owner Peter Perkins’ last will in 1818 freed his four favorite enslaved people. In addition to granting them freedom, he also gave them each “one good horse, one cow, one sow, 20 pounds of corn, and my blacksmith tools.” I’m sure that gave the newly freed people a decent start, but it would have been ideal if they also received land.
Ruth and Robert Hairston eventually became the owners of Berry Hill. Ruth’s husband, Robert, ultimately went to Mississippi to run a plantation, leaving Ruth to run the day-to-day of Berry Hill. I wonder if it was uncommon back then for women to lead a plantation, or if it was business as usual. From the enslaved people’s perspective, I wonder if the overseers and field hands had the same amount of fear for her as a woman, if they preferred her versus Robert, if they had more sympathy for her, or if they hated her all the same?
Generations of Hairston and enslaved people worked at Berry Hill. A few paces down the road was another plantation owned by the family, Oak Hill.
Oak Hill
Samuel Hairston built Oak Hill in 1822, nearby Berry Hill. Unlike Berry Hill, Oak Hill was made of brick instead of lumber, also sourced onsite. Samuel Hairston was known as the wealthiest man in Virginia, and one of the wealthiest people in the nation. He possessed land and enslaved people worth an estimated $5 million, equivalent to $131.5 million today. Additionally, he was reputedly the largest slaveholder in the South. His labor force in Virginia and North Carolina totaled 1,700 enslaved people.
The enslaved people at Oak Hill were prohibited from religious activities, so they clandestinely worshipped in the woods. They probably ran into runaways, free Blacks and enslaved people from other plantations, and for a moment in time were able to freely give praise to the greater power they believed in. One of the first things the enslaved people at Oak Hill did when they got their freedom was to build a church, Piney Grove Primitive Baptist. I later came to learn that the small church beside my grandfather’s house that I paid no attention to was Piney Grove Primitive Baptist, hallowed ground for the newly freed African Americans.
In 1868, roughly three years after the Confederacy surrendered, an anonymous note was sent to Oak Hill Plantation owner Samuel Hairston advising him to evict his Black tenants or there would be a massacre, stating the following:
“If you cant move them
We can and everything else.
so take warning while you have
the opportunity.
those vilans that now
live on the plantation shall
be burnt to Death if they
donot move and leave the state.
we are able to carry out
our designs we can do so
and we will do so at an
unexspected time to you
remove them and nothing
will be disturbed otherwise
all will be in … ruin
We are many in number”
Oak Hill didn’t go up in flames until more than 100 years later at the suspected hands of vagrants and drug addicts. I would come to learn later that my ancestor labored at Oak Hill.
Oak Ridge
George Adams owned the Oak Ridge Plantation, just up the street from Berry Hill and Oak Hill. My mother’s maiden name was Adams, and it came down the generations from George. As I’d done with the Berry Hill marker, I passed by Oak Ridge countless times in my life without knowing what it was. I just thought it was a big, nice, older house with a lot of land. I never knew my ancestor labored there.
According to the National Register of Historic Places, the house “is a two-story Greek Revival/Classical Revival frame residence built in the late 1830s or early 1840s and enlarged chiefly in the early twentieth century. The exterior features mostly beaded weatherboard siding, a metal-sheathed hipped roof, a brick foundation and chimneys, and a monumental Doric portico. The five-bay front elevation is dominated by the early twentieth-century portico which has four monumental columns that support a gable roof with a pediment.”
Free African American cabinetmaker and carpenter Thomas Day provided a few pieces of furniture for Oak Ridge. Based out of Milton, North Carolina, just across the border, he came from an established family, was well-educated and primarily dealt with high-end white clientele.
Enslaved people at Oak Ridge cared for 12 cattle, eight milk cows, four horses and 60 pigs, and produced 225 bushels of wheat, 300 bushels of oats and 18,000 pounds of tobacco — the cash crop — annually. This was a huge amount of output but pales in comparison to the neighboring Hairston powerhouse with multiple plantations and thousands of enslaved people.
In 1860, there were 112 enslaved people at Oak Ridge between plantation owner George Adams and his son-in-law, Dr. John Wilson, who married his daughter Emma. One of those 112 enslaved was my great-great-great-grandfather, Flem Adams Sr. (1830-1914), who stood 7 feet tall, wore a size 22 shoe, had to duck to pass through doors and wore people’s worn pants as cutoff shorts.
When Flem got his freedom in 1865, he went to work on the Oak Hill plantation as a sharecropper. I wonder if Flem was evicted from the property after the anonymous note was sent to Samuel Hairston. He would have had to gather his wife, Martha Adams, and three sons, Flem Jr., Daniel and George, and make a way. I wonder if they were temporarily housed with other Blacks, slept in the woods, or were taken in temporarily by Piney Grove Primitive Baptist Church. Sometimes I wonder, what were Flem’s dreams and goals? To be the best farmer? Best husband, dad? To stay alive? To find his unknown parents? When I meet Flem in the hereafter, I’m sure he will tell me all about it.
Berry Hill, Oak Hill and Oak Ridge plantations were major producers of tobacco, which my ancestor Flem learned to cultivate. Years later, Flem’s great-grandson, World War II veteran Calvin Adams Sr., worked as a farmer and cultivated tobacco for profit. Calvin worked as a farmer until he retired in the 1980s, with skills that were passed down generations from Flem. Calvin was able to benefit from the trade Flem was forced to learn. I even helped Calvin, my grandfather, in a small way by picking up tobacco leaves as a 6-year-old, but thank goodness I never had to experience the back-breaking “pullin’ bacca” that my ancestors did. More than 200 Adams family members gathered for our first family reunion post-COVID in August 2022, just a few miles from Berry Hill. We gathered a short walk from Piney Grove Primitive Baptist Church. We are the descendants of Flem Adams Sr.
Looking forward
Times of the past were complex. Not all Black people were victims, and not all white people were victimizers. Free African American cabinet maker and carpenter Thomas Day also owned 14 enslaved people, which was reportedly not uncommon. My hope is that he was as sympathetic as possible to his own race and treated them well. Additionally, some of the Hairston slave owners freed some of their enslaved people before 1865. This typically would not go over well with the rest of the family and showed the complexities of the times in which they lived.
Today, Oak Ridge still looks beautiful, and people live there. However, the Berry Hill property is boarded up and looks condemned. The Oak Hill property is in ruins. There was a time when the properties were beautiful and the industry was ugly. Now these properties are ugly, and hopefully, the industries nearby will be fruitful.
Nowadays, Berry Hill won’t be just known as a historic house, as a hospital for past soldiers, or as a community of forced labor camps for enslaved people. It will be known as an economic engine, a megasite that provides jobs for families and a home for companies. It may be an automotive plant, it may be something else, but thank goodness it won’t be humans working against their will for free. I’m sure the property will become the home to several companies in the next few years. Despite the history, good, bad, ugly or whatever you may classify it as, the future of the new Berry Hill appears to be bright, far brighter than the other Berry Hill. And I’m sure folks from the past, both slave owners and the enslaved, will become proud of what the area will be, unlike the sins of the past.