Pasts Lost: The Wye House Plantation as a Place of Haunting

Abstract

ABSTRACT Much of what we know about the Wye House Plantation in Talbot County, Maryland in the nineteenth century comes from the writings of Frederick Douglass, who was enslaved there. His descriptions of the landscape serve as a starting point for thinking about the past experiences of the enslaved people within this place. The terror and violence that the landscape represented in slavery conjures up not only the events of the past, but also the ways that trauma echoes throughout generations. Using Douglass’ autobiographies, archaeology, landscape studies, the works of Toni Morrison, and ideas about the hauntings of place, there are ways to think about this plantation as a landscape of irreparable loss, but also of return and resolution.