Fantastic programming coming up from Johnston County Museum of History! I’ve featured the Boyette cabin here and have just learned there may be a direct Wilson County link. (More to come on that.) Don’t miss the opportunity to hear Joseph McGill Jr. of The Slave Dwelling Project speak!
Hat tip to Beth Nevarez for sharing this flyer.
No slave dwellings are known to remain standing in Wilson County. However, just south of the line down in Johnston County, there is this:
Boyette slave dwelling now.
The Boyette slave dwelling was built at an indeterminate time in the early 1800s by George Boyette or his son Larkin G. Boyette, who jointly reported eight slaves in the 1850 census. As described in a nomination form submitted to the National Register of Historic Places, the house is a “small, one room log dwelling built of hewn and pit sawn planks held together by full dovetail notches and dowels” with a “stick and mud chimney set at the western gable end.” Once exceedingly common in the antebellum eastern North Carolina landscape, the highly flammable wooden chimneys were generally replaced with stone or brick structures in all but the poorest dwellings — including slave houses. The shelter provided for enslaved people in Wilson County would have been very similar.
And circa 1979.
Please click the link to the nomination form for details on the construction of this unique remnant of African-American history.