In Virginia’s Executive Mansion, grand rooms are filled with oil paintings and roped-off period furniture. Visitors could go the entire trip without seeing a smaller, more modest brick building tucked to the side of the home.
But for more than 50 years, enslaved people served governors from the kitchen quarter — those governors who uprooted enslaved people from across the state to the capital in Richmond, Va.
Descendants of the enslaved are now leading an effort to complete the history of the mansion, which is the oldest continuously occupied governor’s residence in the United States.
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