Buried in a Massachusetts archive lies a 1910 family photo album of Milford Plantation, a South Carolina estate built in 1838. Assembled by Mary Clark Thompson — a wealthy Northern philanthropist and the estate's twentieth-century owner — and her nephew Clark Williams and his wife Anna, the album documents the plantation's landscape, architecture, and people across ninety-six black-and-white photographs. Though numerous Black laborers and neighbors appear throughout its pages, only two are named: Ben and Ann, formerly enslaved by Governor John Lawrence Manning and still living on the property at the time of the album's creation. At first glance, these images seem to offer little about the Black men, women, and children who inhabited Milford. A closer look reveals far more. This paper interrogates the album as both a product of the Northern white gaze and a site of Black self-assertion. The paper's second phase reads against the grain, treating the photographic encounter as a contact zone. The paper concludes by centering Ann Johnson through historical speculation and critical fabulation, combining census records, church documents, and interpretive imagination to reconstruct her fuller history.
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