A slave cabin now sits in the the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The cabin was built during slavery, in about 1853. People were still living in it until 1981. It represents generations of history.
The cabin is on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Museum curator Nancy Bercaw spoke about its importance, “Objects hold meaning within them, and, as far as we’re concerned, that meaning really comes from the family. So, we did oral histories with three different generations. So we first interviewed the elders, and then we interviewed the next generation, and then we interviewed a 15-year-old, Joshua. And we really wanted people to reflect on the cabin and what it meant to them from these different perspectives. And those will actually be archived and stored as part of our collection so that a curator 100 years from now can actually know the stories of what this cabin actually meant to the people who lived in it.”
Isabell Meggett Lucas, 86, grew up in this cabin. She spoke about how conditions used to be.
“Well, we all go to bed, we all sleep together. So many in the bed. My daddy and momma had one room and some of the kids get in the bed with them. My sister and them they all fall in the bed with my mom and dad,” she said.
Her sister-in-law also talked about living in a cabin.
“Because everybody got their own house now, bathroom, back then there was no bathroom, no bathtub, no electricity. And I would say… people survived without that. But now, you can’t survive without that this time of day,” said Emily Meggett.
The cabin, oldest of its kind, was found after a search that took years.
The cabin was carefully deconstructed and moved from where it stood in South Carolina to its current museum location in Washington, D.C.
