Standing near a cliff on the Potomac River, Stratford Hall is a two-story brick mansion with heirloom-filled rooms and clustered chimneys. It is celebrated in Virginia history because two signers of the Declaration of Independence lived there and Robert E Lee was born there.
History is claimed by the winners. The losers at Stratford Hall were slaves, convicts, and indentured servants, whose toil made life in the great house possible. Little is left of their history, but a visitor can read the story of their existence by walking down a narrow dirt road connecting the great house to the foot of the cliff on the Potomac.
Thomas Lee (1690-1750) built a wharf on the riverbank where wagons, flatboats, and sailing vessels handled casks of slave-grown tobacco bound for London’s coffee houses. Slaves and mule teams toiled up and down the steep cliff, gouging a dirt road into the earth like a scar.
Today the wharf road is quiet, its bleak history forgotten. Across the mile-wide Potomac the eastern shore dissolves in sunlight. The Potomac flows to the Atlantic Ocean, beyond which lies England, then Africa.
History is a terrible thing to waste.
