Moving Midway Plantation
Moving Midway is a poignant 2008 film that chronicles the rediscovery of filmmaker Godfrey Cheshire’s ancestral past encompassing a former Southern plantation near Raleigh, North Carolina. When Cheshire returns to North Carolina from New York, he finds that urban sprawl and a shopping center is creeping up on Midway Plantation, originally built in 1848. His cousin and current owner Charlie Silver proposes a controversial move: to uproot and move the family home several miles to escape the encroaching sprawl.
In the process of learning about the history of Midway, Cheshire enlists the help of history professor Robert Hinton, himself a descendant of former slaves at the Raleigh plantation.
As the film chronicles the physical moving of the home across several miles to its new location, it simultaneously chronicles a new discovery and reconciliation of a rich history and heritage, including the new discovery of at least 100 African American cousins that Cheshire and Silver were not previously aware of.
Moving Midway will be screened this Saturday at the North Carolina Museum of Art, part of a 2-day series on The Southern Plantation Revisited, which also includes a screening of Gone With The Wind and a concert of Piedmont blues featuring Algia May Hinton, herself a Midway descendant.
Killer Design 