Sharswood, part 1: A house bought for family opened a door to history

The purpose was family

Fred Miller grew up in Pittsylvania County and later worked in California as a civil engineer for the Air Force. CBS reported that he wanted a large place in his Virginia hometown where his extended family could gather for birthdays, reunions, meals, and the ordinary celebrations that keep a family connected.

In May 2020, Miller purchased the fully furnished house and 10.5 acres from the Thompson family, which had owned the property since 1917. The house stood less than a mile from his mother’s home, and members of the family had passed it for years without knowing the name Sharswood or the history attached to it.

Research changed the meaning of the purchase

Karen Dixon-Rexroth began researching the old house and learned that it had been the center of a large tobacco plantation. Other relatives, including Dexter Miller and Sonya Womack-Miranda, had already been tracing the family’s past.

With help from local historian and genealogist Karice Luck-Brimmer, the records connected the family to people enslaved at Sharswood.

That sequence matters. Fred Miller did not buy the property because he already knew the ancestral connection.

Relatives had been researching it before his purchase; Fred learned about it afterward. The family then began deciding how a private gathering place could also carry a public history.

Begin with people, not the coincidence

The remarkable change in ownership is an entry point, not the whole story. Sharswood’s history includes the Miller descendants who recovered names, the people held there in bondage, the labor that sustained the plantation, and the buildings and burial ground that remain as evidence.

Published accounts disagree about the historic plantation’s acreage, giving figures from 1,300 to 2,500 acres. Until land records are reconciled, this series calls it a large tobacco plantation and keeps the verified 2020 purchase—10.5 acres—separate from estimates of the nineteenth-century holding.