Qualla: Hayes Plantation

Hayes Plantation: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The official version of Hayes is architectural: a five-part Palladian villa, one of the finest in the American South, designed by English-born William Nichols Sr. between 1814 and 1817 on a low rise east of Edenton, overlooking Edenton Bay to the south and Queen Anne's Creek to the north. A central block crowned with a broad belvedere, curved hyphens connecting it to flanking dependencies, a National Historic Landmark since 1973. The official version is also incomplete. The villa was built by enslaved people whose names the documents mostly do not record. The family it housed produced one of the most important Black abolitionist and civil rights lineages in nineteenth-century America - and the planter who held the title to the place never publicly acknowledged the daughters he had with the woman he had once enslaved.

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Hayes Plantation: Edy Wood and Her Daughters

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

James Cathcart Johnston, who completed Hayes a year after his father's death in 1816, was called a bachelor by Edenton society. Research published in 2013 by historian Mary Maillard established what the documents had always implied: Johnston never married, but he fathered four da...

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Hayes Plantation: The Hands That Built It

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Construction began in 1814 and finished in 1817. The labor that quarried the stone, fired the brick, dressed the cypress timber, raised the central block, and finished the curved hyphens connecting the dependencies was almost entirely enslaved. The plantation account books list e...

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Hayes Plantation: Inherited, Not Bequeathed

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

James C. Johnston died at the end of the Civil War. He left Hayes to Edward Wood of nearby Greenfield Plantation, described in the will as his "friend and advisor." Edward Wood moved his family in. Wood, like Johnston before him, had children with his wife Caroline Gilliam Wood -...

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Hayes Plantation: The View from the Belvedere

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Climb to the belvedere on the roof of the central block and you see what the families who built and held Hayes saw: Edenton Bay shining south, Queen Anne's Creek curling north, fields running flat to a cypress horizon. The grounds are private; the National Historic Landmark desig...

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