NC Freedom Road Sites

Mendenhall Plantation in present-day Jamestown, NC. Image courtesy of Google Maps' user-generated content by Dave Y.

Explore “Freedom Road Sites” related to Black Liberation across North Carolina through the African American Heritage Commission’s digital archives, or make plans to view these historic sites for when life goes back to semi-normal, like the Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony in the Outer Banks, Orange Street Landing in Wilmington, or the Mendenhall Plantation in Jamestown.

The latter site, now renamed Mendenhall Homeplace (pictured above) visualizes the violent yet complicated history NC has with Black civil rights: Although Jamestown—ancestral lands of the native Keyauwee—was a known “slave-Plantation town,” it later became a known “stop” on the Underground Railroad.

The Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island (pictured below) gave newly freed African Americans a temporary place of their own before Andrew Jackson’s 1865 "Amnesty Proclamation."  The Fort Raleigh National Historic Site claims on the National Park Service website:

“The colony continued to grow as more freedmen sought "safe haven". A local census in 1864 reported that 2,212 Black freedmen resided on the island. A church and several schools with seven teachers were established, as well as a sawmill operation. The next year, the superintendent reported 561 houses had been built and the population had increased to 3,901.”

View the Freedom Roads Sites digital map here.

Explore more AAHC Digital Resources and Documents here.

Read about the AAHC Green Book Project here.

Freedmen’s Schools photographed c. 1864. Image courtesy of the National Park Service.

First “Freedmen’s Village” on Hilton Head Island c. 1864. Image courtesy of the National Park Service.