When John F. Baker Jr. learned that a photograph in his seventh-grade social studies textbook showed his great-grandparents, he began the lifelong research project that would become The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation, the fruit of more than thirty years of archival and field research as well as DNA testing spanning 250 years. Baker's vivid and captivating book is the most accessible and exciting work of African American history since Roots, revealing not only his own African American family's story but the history of a plantation and the descendants of the enslaved who labored there and the family who owned them. Founded in 1796, Wessyngton Plantation covered 15,000 acres and held 274 captives, whose labor made it the largest tobacco plantation in America. In addition to his research of birth registers, letters, diaries, and more, Baker conducted dozens of interviews -- three of his subjects were more than one hundred years old -- and discovered caches of historic photographs and paintings, which bring this compelling history to life. - Back cover.