The Fire This Time: On the Burning of Nottoway Plantation
As flames consumed the South’s largest antebellum mansion, they set ablaze generations of unfinished reckonings between Black liberation and White nostalgia.
On May 15, 2025, fire tore through the Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, Louisiana. Once the South’s largest surviving antebellum mansion, this 64-room, 53,000-square-foot landmark held a complicated legacy — a testament to both Southern “grandeur” and, more importantly — the forced labor of over 150 enslaved Africans.
The fire began in the plantation’s museum wing around 2 p.m., reigniting later in the evening despite firefighters’ attempts to contain it. By nightfall, little remained beyond smoldering ruins and charged emotions.
While authorities have yet to announce a definitive cause of the fire, its destruction has ignited complex tensions online between Black freedom and white fantasy. For some, the fire symbolized the destruction of a long, cotton-colored nostalgia. For others, it was a Southern deliverance from a past that still haunts the present.
The Sin Beneath the Soil
Owned by John Hampden Randolph, a wealthy sugar planter, the Nottoway Plantation rose from the backs of over 150 enslaved Black people who toiled, suffered, and died to uphold its marble floors and manicured grounds. The mansion was a shrine to stolen labor, a place where wealth grew directly from exploitation.
“I’ve visited Nottoway Plantation a lot,” JaQuilla, a Baton Rouge resident, shared online. “I saw the secret pathways that were literally in plain sight. For the ancestors have spoken, it was time for this place to come on down. Freedom.”
The grandeur of the home masked the brutality that funded it. Tourists admired the high ceilings and white columns without acknowledging that Black hands built every inch of it — under duress, under the whip, without choice. It stood for more than old money; it stood for the lies that old money tells.
Perhaps that’s why, for many, the fire felt spiritual. Activist and Ph.D. candidate Derrick L. Quarles tweeted: “That land carries centuries of pain, and it seems the ancestors had time today. Some debts don’t stay buried.”
Even as the mansion transitioned in recent years into a resort and tourist site, the history on which it was built remained largely whitewashed or untold altogether.
Magnolias and Mythmaking
There’s a Southern story certain folks love to tell. It often smells like magnolias and sounds like violins playing while sitting on a porch swing.
It always skips over the bondage and screams.
Dr. Allison Wiltz, a Black Southern scholar and writer, has called out the persistent white fantasy that fuels plantation tourism. In her searing piece, “Here’s Why White People Romanticize Plantation Life,” she writes: “While aesthetically beautiful, each [plantation] was an absolute house of horrors for the Black people enslaved and forced to live there... Their white fantasy is a Black horror film.”
Despite their grim histories, plantations remain popular tourist destinations in the South, often romanticized and sanitized for White visitors seeking nostalgia. Such tourist destinations rarely offer an unflinching look at the violence and exploitation that made such beauty possible.
Wiltz also points out the painful contrast between how America treats its sins and how other nations do: “In the aftermath of World War II, Germany turned the former concentration camp, Auschwitz, into a memorial and museum... But, in America, most plantations are privately owned and only serve to fetishize the Antebellum period.”
One Big Fire, Two Souths
Reactions to the blaze revealed a South divided. Many white commenters online mourned the loss of the building. One user called for fundraising to rebuild Nottoway “to its original & former glory,” as if restoring the Big House could undo what it stood for. Another, accused Black people praising the fire of “bitterness” and “ancestor worship” — revealing just how deep the discomfort runs when Black folks don’t mourn what white folks value.
But the truth is — the South has always been split this way: One side remembering pain, the other remembering privilege.
Black Southerners, however, continued to respond: “The nottoway plantation burning to the ground is a prime example of karma,” tweeted @Triixcayy. Another added, “I’m Black. I don’t visit plantations.”
Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Justice?
Many have called for rebuilding. Those who say it’s about “history,” “architecture,” or “heritage.” But heritage for whom? And at what cost?
James Baldwin warned in 1963 that if America did not confront its racial sins, it would face the fire next time. That fire, for so long metaphorical — burning in our memories, our policies, our grief — has become literal in White Castle.
For me, nothing was torn down. It was revealed. And it needed to be.
Because some stories don’t speak — until they’re set ablaze.
13 & South is a new publication covering news, investigative stories, and insights on social justice, policy, and systemic inequities impacting Southern Black communities. I value your insights and feedback, and invite your perspectives to contribute to future issues. Please email me at editor@13thandsouth.com. Also, feel free to connect with me on my socials! LinkedIn, Twitter, IG, BlueSky, and Threads.