Let us walk around our historic buildings: Rosewell, the colonial churches, plantation homes, old courthouses and other public buildings.

On our stroll through history, we find signs to tell us how these places came to be, and who was responsible for putting them in our communities. We are prompted to honor the builders … the people with the plans and the money who established these structures that have lasted many centuries.

We are so proud to have these landmarks as part of our heritage. But in celebrating that heritage, we are likely to forget the actual builders, the human beings who shaped logs into beams with crosscut saw, made bricks one by one, and dug the trenches for the foundations.

In many cases, possibly most, these builders were the slaves, the property of those who lived within the walls erected by the blood and sweat of manual labor. And in most of those cases, the real builders have been forgotten.

During the last few decades our nearest living history museu...