Raleigh, conservation group buy Stagville property

Raleigh paid $55,000 toward the purchase, while the conservation group paid $300,000. The land connects the Stagville State Historic Site to the Triangle Land Conservancy’s Horton Grove Nature Preserve and includes streams that empty into the headwaters of Falls Lake.

“This is an excellent opportunity for the city,” Ed Buchan, environmental coordinator for Raleigh’s Public Utilities Department, said in a statement. “This will keep the upland forest and wetlands intact to protect the Little River and the headwaters of Falls Lake. There has been a lot of development pressure in the northern part of Durham. There are some pristine wetlands on this property, and this deal will keep that protected and keep it from being urbanized.”

The land will eventually be transferred to the state Department of Cultural Resources to be combined with the adjacent Stagville site.

The historic site marks the location of the Bennehan-Cameron plantation, which had some of the largest land holdings in pre-Civil War North Carolina. By 1860, the family owned nearly 30,000 acres throughout the South and about 900 slaves. The Stagville plantation consisted of several thousand acres at the center of the estate.