ABSTRACT
Berkeley Plantation is best known as the home to Founding Father Benjamin Harrison V and President William Henry Harrison, and in 1938, the site became one of the first privately owned plantations in Virginia to open to the public. Until recently, however, its museum exhibits and guided tour barely mentioned the site’s long history of enslaved labor. Though Berkeley is typical of a number of family-run southern plantations grappling with the legacy of slavery while fighting to survive financially, the fortuitous choice of the plantation as the setting for a 2019 feature-length Hollywood movie, Harriet, a semi-fictional account of the life of Harriet Tubman, offers an unusual opportunity to consider the formative role that chance, money, and individual agency play in the way history is represented across overlapping platforms.
Using archival sources, cultural landscape analysis, and oral history interviews, this chapter explores how this National Historic Landmark’s narrative evolved to include the history of slavery. The film’s construction of two slave cabins, in concert with broader social discussions about race and representation, catalyzed an interpretive shift at the plantation that eventually included the site’s owners publicly supporting the Black Lives Matter movement in August 2020.
