You're reading a free preview of NOTICE News+.

Our Sunday Deep Dives go out every week to the members who keep us fiercely independent. They don’t just get the full story—they make it possible. Support real journalism—join today. 

🚒 What happened

On Thursday night, Nottoway Plantation, a historic plantation in White Castle, Louisiana, became engulfed in flames around 10 p.m.

• No injuries were reported, but by morning, the 64-room mansion was rubble.

Authorities have not yet determined the cause of the fire.

SOME BACKGROUND: The plantation was controversial—it had been rebranded as a "resort" complete with a 300-seat restaurant and wedding venue.

• Critics say it turned a site of slavery into a backdrop for weddings and tourism while ignoring the brutality that built it.

Viral footage quickly spread across social media, showing the flames consuming what many called a symbol of whitewashed history.

THE RESPONSE: Black Americans and their allies online responded with a sense of catharsis and poetic justice.

One post read: "If you don't understand why Black Americans are celebrating the symbolic dismantling of this monument to bondage and generational oppression — well, today, we simply don't care."

• Meanwhile, some white residents and former employees expressed grief, calling the loss "sad" and "tragic."

But when Nottoway went up in flames, it didn’t just destroy a structure. It torched a fantasy—a carefully maintained myth about Southern gentility that’s always depended on forgetting who paid the price for it.

For many, it was a long-overdue reckoning.

📖 A dark past

Nottoway Plantation was built in 1858 by John Hampden Randolph, a sugar baron whose wealth came directly from the forced labor of enslaved Black people.

• The mansion was massive, even by plantation standards. The 50,000 square foot estate had over 64 rooms and was situated on the Mississippi River.

It was a monument to excess—built on exploitation.

• By the start of the Civil War, Randolph held 155 human beings in bondage on the property.

FAST FORWARD: In 1980, Nottoway was added to the National Register of Historic Places—not to honor those who suffered there, but to preserve the architecture of the enslaver class.

In the decades that followed, the plantation underwent a rebranding that turned it from a site of torture and trauma into a destination for Southern-themed romance.

Recast as the "Nottoway Resort," it hosted weddings, offered plantation tours, and operated a massive restaurant and event space.

Marketing materials described it as "elegant" and "historic," with barely a mention of slavery.

• The history page of the venue’s website names every oak tree on the property—but not a single enslaved person who lived, worked, and died there.

It profited off a glorified version of white supremacy, selling a fantasy of the Old South that erased its human cost.

ZOOM OUT: Nottoway isn’t an anomaly—it’s part of a booming industry that profits from whitewashing slavery.

Across the South, plantation tourism draws millions of visitors a year. This isn’t just about one plantation, it’s about a whole industry—and a dangerous ideology.

• These tours often downplay or entirely omit the brutality enslaved people faced on those very grounds.

Guests sip mint juleps and pose for wedding photos where human beings were once enslaved, tortured, raped, sold, and buried without dignity. Docents often talk about antiques and drapes more than human suffering.

And—business is booming.

• Boone Hall, the plantation where Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds got married in 2012, still hosts hundreds of weddings per year.

Imagine getting married at Auschwitz—except like these plantations, it’s normalized and marketed as charming.

🤯 How we got here

The Nottoway myth didn’t come from nowhere. It was built brick by brick by generations of white, typically ruling-class Southerners who worked hard to rewrite history in their favor.

Take this line from a middle school textbook published in 1954 and used in Southern schools for decades:

That’s not just wildly and offensively inaccurate—it’s propaganda.

• It’s part of the “Lost Cause,” a coordinated propaganda effort started after the Civil War to cast the Confederacy as noble, and slavery as benign.

It’s one of the most notoriously effective efforts to rewrite history—done by the “losing” side.

LEADING THE EFFORT: Behind the campaign was the disgusting and racist United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).

They lobbied for monuments, rewrote textbooks, and created clubs that taught kids to honor the Confederacy.

• One of their pamphlets literally told schools to deface any history books that didn’t paint the South in a positive light.

Thanks to them, the South became littered with Confederate statues—and generations of children grew up learning a distorted version of history.

The result: generations raised on lies that perpetuated white supremacy.

So when people call plantation weddings “romantic” or say these estates are just part of “Southern heritage,” they’re repeating a version of history built by people who were hell bent on defending white supremacy.

That’s how we ended up with whitewashed “resorts” like Nottoway.

👀 What we choose to preserve

America has poured millions into preserving plantation homes like Nottoway—grand staircases, white columns, manicured lawns.

• But we haven’t invested in teaching the truth about what happened inside them.

These estates are celebrated as beautiful, but they are rarely acknowledged as sites of terror. Tourists marvel at the chandeliers, but never learn the names of the people who were forced to polish them.

That’s the cost of erasure: we spend money on nostalgia instead of education. We preserve buildings and burn history.

• The fire at Nottoway forces a question we’ve avoided too long: What are we really preserving, and why?

Want the rest of the story?

The rest of this Deep Dive is just for NOTICE News+ members—people who believe in bold, unflinching journalism that challenges power and tells the truth. Join today and unlock the full Deep Dive, plus everything else we publish.