Snow Hill Plantation’s uncommon transformation into a Black-owned cooperative.

By Taneasha White-Gibson

At the Catawba Trail Farm, founded by sisters Delphine Godley Sellars and Lucille Godley Patterson, land once occupied by the 30,000-acre Snow Hill Plantation outside Durham, North Carolina, is being reclaimed as a community garden. For $100 per year, residents can rent one of the 40-plus garden beds, learn to grow their own produce, and take it back home to feed their families. The sisters hold classes and share skills on canning and growing, host gleaning events, and collaborate with partners to give fresh produce and recipes away, with more activities to come.

The Godley sisters’ organization, Urban Community AgriNomics (UCAN), was founded in 2016 with the connected missions of reducing food insecurity, preventing and reversing health issues, improving the academic success of community children, and empowering healthy families. UCAN helps further these goals by supporting community members in learning to grow their own food, even if they don’t own land. (According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Black owners account for less than 1 percent of rural land ownership.)

After beginning the process of acquiring 53 acres of the farm’s conservation land in 2018, Sellars and Patterson, with the help of partners and ample volunteers, cleared trees, dug wells, and rebuilt a trail originally used by the Catawba people. The rehabilitation has resulted in a space meant for “growing communities, one seed at a time,” according to the organization’s website.

Community Empowerment

Kofi Boone, FASLA, a professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at North Carolina State University, described the farm and its programs as an example of a Black Commons, a pooling of collective land and resources intended to stabilize and empower Black communities. “They have this way of storytelling that doesn’t just talk about nature for nature’s sake. They see reconnecting to the land as a spiritual and cultural thing, and they’ve been very successful at communicating that,” Boone says.

Boone’s Just Communities Lab recently began working with UCAN to support strategic planning around Sellars’s and Patterson’s long-term goals for the property. Boone and Just Communities’ support of UCAN includes holding workshops for future landscape and sustainability plans for the organization.

The sisters say they believe the Catawba Trail Farm can support not only community and resilience, but healing. Every Saturday morning, the space is open to anyone interested in getting involved, and Sellars says they’re open to visitors getting whatever they might need from the place. “If you come out and all you do is sit down, or walk the trail because you need that peace, then you got what you came here for,” Sellars says. “Maybe the next time you come, you’ll sit and talk with us. But the sense of community where we’re all learning together without judgment is key.”

Cultural Relationships

Five years after reclaiming the land once used for oppression and violence, the Catawba Trail Farm is not only a site for fresh produce and eggs from their chicken coop, but a hub for feeding families, educating others about construction, and encouraging youth to be independent and self-sufficient for years to come.

Boone says the community that has grown out of the Catawba Trail Farm embodies a cultural relationship with the landscape: “Everything from acknowledging the legacy of Indigenous people to acknowledging and recognizing the legacy of enslaved Africans that worked at the site—in their own way, they’re working to use the landscape to create these transformative kinds of opportunities.”