The house that unlocked a family's history

Fred Miller bought Sharswood for family gatherings, unaware that the Virginia house had once been a plantation where his ancestors were enslaved.

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If I had known there was a 'Miller Plantation,' I maybe could have… put a connection with the last name Miller and that plantation. But I'd never heard of a 'Miller Plantation' or a 'Miller' anything.

The white Gothic Revival house, built in the 1850s by a slave-owning uncle and nephew who shared Miller’s last name, stood near his childhood home in southern Virginia. Miller said he had never heard of a Miller Plantation and did not connect the property to his family when he bought it.

His sister Karen Dixon-Rexroth initially persuaded him to purchase the house. She, cousins Dexter Miller and Sonya Womack-Miranda, and local historian and genealogist Karice Luck-Brimmer then researched Sharswood’s owners and surviving records. Their work uncovered documents showing that the Millers’ ancestors had been enslaved there.

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Something drew me to knowing the history of this place.

The discovery changed how Miller viewed the property. He said the wear on the basement stairs made him imagine his ancestors carrying food into the main house. During a conversation with former coworker Bill Thompson, whose family owned Sharswood for more than a century after buying it in 1917, Dexter Miller also learned where the slave cemetery was located, among trees just beyond Fred Miller’s property line.

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Wow, these are my people.