60 Minutes - 8/28/2022: The Grid, Sharswood

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

Bill Whitaker takes a hard look at the U.S. electric grid – the largest machine in the history of the world, a hodgepodge of public and privately-owned companies cobbled together over generations ��� so essential to daily life that we literally couldn’t live without it. 60 MINUTES’ investigation into the threats facing the grid, from cyber-attacks to sabotage and physical assaults, are eye-opening and not reassuring. What’s more, no U.S. government agency, not even the Department of Energy, is truly in charge of protecting it. Graham Messick is the producer. Lesley Stahl visits Fred Miller and his family in the large house in southern Virginia that they recently bought to host family gatherings, only to discover that their own ancestors had once been enslaved on that very property. Miller’s sister and cousins scoured historical records and enlisted a genealogist to find evidence that their great-great-grandparents, Violet and David Miller, were enslaved on the plantation, then-called Sharswood. The dilapidated building still standing behind the main house has been identified by archeologists as living quarters for some of the enslaved men and women there. Buying this home has opened a window into the Miller family’s past that was not discussed within their family, and that many African American families struggle to obtain. This is a double-length segment. Shari Finkelstein is the producer. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. On the night of April 16th, 2013, a mysterious incident south of San Jose marked the most serious attack on our power grid in history.

If they had succeeded, what would have happened? Could have brought down all Silicon Valley. We're talking Google, Apple, all these guys. Yes, that's correct. Who do you think this could have been? I don't know. We don't know if they were a nation state. We don't know if they were domestic actors.

But it was somebody who did have competent people who could, in fact, plan out this kind of very sophisticated attack and execute it. The Millers are a large family that enjoy getting together. They purchased this historic house in southern Virginia near where they grew up to have a place for family celebrations. This is an original room from the 1800s. But no one could have imagined how the history of the home and its grounds would change everything they thought they knew about their family's history. It's like a full circle. Like it was meant to happen. To me, it was like it was meant to happen. This is God. This is where we're supposed to be.

I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. If there's one thing we can't live without in our modern world, it's electricity.

It provides heat and light, pumps water and fuel, refrigerates food and breathes life into our TVs, computers, and phones. So it's no surprise the North American electric grid, which creates, moves, and delivers our electricity, is considered the most critical part of our critical infrastructure. What is surprising is the nature of the grid itself, a hodgepodge of public and privately owned half-century-old tech that is increasingly vulnerable to severe weather, cyber attacks, and even physical assaults. As we first reported earlier this year, no government agency, not even the Department of Energy, is truly in charge of protecting it. One attack nine years ago was a wake-up call for industry and government alike.

There's been a major transformer leak. This is at a PG&E substation. On the night of April 16, 2013, a mysterious incident south of San Jose marked the most serious attack on our power grid in history. PG&E tells us someone may have fired some shots into that transformer. For 20 minutes, gunmen methodically fired at high-voltage transformers at the Metcalf Power substation. Security cameras captured bullets hitting the chain-link fence. They knew what they were doing. They had a specific objective. They wanted to knock out the substation. At the time, John Wellinghoff was chairman of FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a small government agency with jurisdiction over the U.S. high-voltage transmission system. You were concerned enough that you flew out there?

That's correct. And I took two other individuals who trained special forces, U.S. special forces. They trained people to actually attack infrastructure. And what the former commandos found looked familiar. They discovered the attackers had reconnoitered the site and marked firing positions with piles of rocks. That night, they broke into two underground vaults and cut off communications coming from the substation. But then they went from these vaults across this road over into a pasture area here.

There were at least four or five different firing positions. No real security. There was no security at all, really. They aimed at the narrow cooling fins, causing 17 of 21 large transformers to overheat and stop working. They hit them 90 times, so they were very accurate. And they were doing this at night with muzzle flash in their face. Someone outside the plant heard gunfire and called 911. The gunman disappeared without a trace about a minute before a patrol car arrived.

The substation was down for weeks, but fortunately PG&E had enough time to reroute power and avoid disaster. If they had succeeded, what would have happened? Could have brought down all Silicon Valley. We're talking Google, Apple, all these guys. Yes, that's correct. Who do you think this could have been? I don't know. We don't know if they were a nation state.

We don't know if they were domestic actors. But it was somebody who did have competent people who could, in fact, plan out this kind of very sophisticated attack. The grid is a sprawling target. There are actually three in the U.S. The eastern, western, and Texas has its own. Most of us rarely notice substations. There are 55,000 across the country, each housing transformers, the workhorses of the grid.

Inside these massive metal boxes, raw electricity is converted to higher or lower voltages. Should a transformer explode, like this one in Manhattan during Superstorm Sandy, the system is designed to trigger a localized grid-preserving blackout. But if several sections of the grid go down at the same time, the shutdowns can cascade like dominoes. That's what set off the Great Northeast Blackout in 2003, leaving 45 million Americans without power. A few months before the assault on Metcalf, John Wellinghoff of FERC commissioned a study to see if a physical attack on critical transformers could trigger cascading blackouts. It was actually a very shocking result to us that there's very few number of substations you need to take out in the entire United States to knock

out the entire grid. Knock out the entire grid? That's correct. How many would it take to knock out putting the entire country in a blackout? Less than 20. The report was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. It found the U.S. could suffer a coast-to-coast blackout if saboteurs knocked out just nine substations. You are relaying this in a very measured way. I would think this would be quite alarming. It was alarming. There's no question. It is alarming.

After the Metcalfe attack, FERC pressed the utilities to harden defenses at their most critical substations, erect walls and sensors to prevent similar attacks. There's now a wall around Metcalfe. But many substations remain vulnerable targets, like this one we found in Southern California that serves more than 300,000 customers. Huge transformers protected by a chain-link fence. Anybody who knows about power systems knows that the grid is physically spread all over the countryside. There are a lot of places that are vulnerable. Dr. Granger Morgan is a Carnegie Mellon University professor of engineering who chaired three National Academy of Sciences reports on the power grid for the U.S. government.

The most recent in 2021. An earlier report on terrorism was classified for five years. We simply made a strong case that the grid was physically very vulnerable. Why was there a specific report on terrorism and the grid? There were concerns about the possibility that a terrorist organization could attack the grid. And around the world, there have been a fair number of attacks on grids. They have attacked with bombs, planes and drones. Russia's cyber attack on Ukraine's grid in 2015

knocked about 60 substations offline, leaving 230,000 people in the dark. The U.S. Secretary of Energy has said Russia could do the same thing here. In the report we did on the resilience of the power system, we did argue that we needed an organization, probably DOE and Department of Homeland Security, to systematically look at all the kinds of vulnerabilities we have and then begin to figure out who could address each.

In terms of resilience issues, there's nobody in charge. I mean, there's no single entity that has responsibility for everything. The U.S. electric grid is the largest machine in the history of mankind. It is a marvel of modern engineering. No one person owns or controls it. It's actually 3,000 different companies, both public and private sector, that own or operate little pieces of the electric grid. Mike Mabee is an Iraq war vet, a former cop, and a self-taught grid security expert. By day, he works for the government. In his spare time, he uncovers public information electric utilities would rather not see the light of day and publishes them on a website called Grid Security Now.

He is both fascinated and horrified by the grid. I think everybody needs to be as alarmed as I am. We've had disasters in the past, but they've generally always been regional in scale. What we've never had is a national-scale blackout, which is completely possible under some known threats, such as the cyber threat, the physical security threat, or even extreme weather. And the U.S. public is completely unprepared

to survive without the electric grid for any period of time whatsoever. So you have wind power, too. So when he moved to Texas two years ago, he prepared for the worst, installing solar, wind, and battery power. The whole system's 48 volts. Mabee's family survived last winter's deadly storm. Hundreds of Texans perished.

And the deaths were largely due to hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning, because when people got cold, they would do things like, you know, go into their car in the garage to try to stay warm. Mabee has become a thorn in the side of the federal government and utility companies. I filed a complaint about supply chain cybersecurity.

I filed a complaint about physical security. I filed a complaint about supply chain cybersecurity. I filed a complaint about physical security. I filed a complaint about the Texas blackout. The government and the industry, they think you're an annoyance. I've been termed a grid security gadfly, which I wear that as a badge of honor. One frequent target, the Department of Energy. Mabey told us the grid information the DOE puts out is confusing and dispersed. He said he spends hours trying to make sense of it all. There is a requirement that they report electric disturbance events, but the data from the

Department of Energy is so bad. So, you know, I took it upon myself to do some data crunching. And what I found is that 38% of the electric disturbance events in the United States are due to physical attacks. 38%? That's a lot. So in the past decade, there have been over 700 physical attacks against the U.S. electric grid. Many are copycats of the Metcalfe assault. In 2016, an eco-terrorist in Utah shot up a large transformer, triggering a blackout. He said he'd planned to hit five substations in one day to shut down the West Coast. In 2020, the FBI uncovered a white supremacist plot called Lights Out to simultaneously attack substations around the country.

We're seeing planning to disable the delivery of power to the American people. Dr. Liz Sherwood-Randall is President Biden's Homeland Security Advisor. We met with her and Ann Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber. They told us the administration's infrastructure plans should help secure the grid, but acknowledged the threats are real. We have physical threats to the grid. We have natural threats to the grid. We have cyber threats to the grid. Neuberger came to the White House from the secretive National Security Agency,

where she battled Russian hackers in cyberspace. You said that you'd been talking to private utility companies around the country about the potential for a cyber attack. What are you telling them? We're sharing with them some of the context regarding how Russia and other countries use cyber in crisis or conflict. We've actively downgraded intelligence. We've taken any information we have about malicious software or tactics that the Russian government has used, shared that with the private sector with very practical advice of how to protect against it.

Isn't the problem that when it comes to the grid, there's nothing like the FAA or the Food and Drug Administration or the Securities and Exchange Commission. There's no one overall agency overseeing these, what you said, 3,000 different utilities across the country? We don't have one system. We have several grids. We also have individual energy ecosystems in regions and states. And that's part of our strength, because the resources for energy are different in different regions. And we have to acknowledge that we're not going to have a one-size-fits-all system.

You call it one of our strengths, but it also seems to be one of our vulnerabilities. Well, in my view, we can't impose the regulations that you would be suggesting as a federal government. We can set standards, and we are setting standards in a variety of arenas. Carnegie Mellon's Granger Morgan says what government, industry, and law enforcement are doing doesn't meet the magnitude of the threat. What we need at this point is to get the White House to put all the key players together in a room to identify the biggest vulnerabilities and then take steps to reduce them. I'm surprised that's not being done. It has not been done. And it needs to happen now.

Sometimes historic events suck. now. by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Just off the side of the road sat a grand white house called Sharswood, silently holding secrets from the past, waiting for a new owner to uncover them. Sounds like the opening line of a Southern Gothic novel, but as we first reported in May, this story is about a real family and a real house, this country's history, and a man who found himself at the center of far more than he had bargained for. The man is Fred Miller, a 56-year-old Air Force veteran who was looking to buy property in his Virginia hometown

for his large extended family's frequent get-togethers. He had never heard the name Sharswood, and yet this old house would lead him on a journey of discovery with surprises and revelations that seem both impossible and inevitable all at once. These are the gentle hills of Pennsylvania County, Virginia, quiet rural farm country near the North Carolina border that once produced more tobacco than any county in the state. Hey, we're going to gather in this room here mainly.

Fred Miller grew up here in a close family that likes getting together regularly for birthdays, fish fries, and as his cousin Adam Miller told us, just about anything. You play games and you do like a lot of food competitions. I hear the food is mainly cake. about anything. Fred's cousin, Tanya Miller-Pope, and his sister, Deborah Coles, told us it's a big family. Fred's mother, Betty, and his aunt, Brenda, were two of eleven. How many cousins? Oh, come on. Oh, many cousins? Oh, come on. Oh, come on.

Oh, come on. A hundred. At least a hundred. So no wonder Fred needed to find a big house. Yes. It's a huge place. Exactly. Fred lives in California, where he works as a civil engineer for the Air Force.

But he visits the family in Virginia often. One day out of the blue, my sister called me and told me about a big house up the road for sale. This sister right here? Yeah. Karen Dixon Rexroth, Fred's baby sister, had spotted it. Me and my mom was riding past the house and I saw the for sale sign. I said, oh my goodness, we have to get this house. I called Fred Fred this house is for sale. He's like what house I said, you know the house Though those scary house. I call it The scary house was less than a mile up the road from their moms They passed it every day as kids on their way to school. What did you know about Sharswood?

Absolutely Just knew it was a big house. He was debating should we put in a bid for? What did you know about Sharswood? Absolutely nothing. I just knew it was a big house. He was debating, should we put in a bid for it? I said, yes, absolutely, let's do it. Did she twist your arm? Took all the twisting she could do. I didn't want to buy it. But thinking his bid would be rejected anyway,

he made an offer of just above the $220,000 asking price. Why did you think they weren't going to accept the offer? Well, I mean, initially to me, I thought that because I was black that they would never, surely they would never sell this house to someone that's black. So for us to be able to own this thing, I thought it would never happen in a million years. So guess what happened? A million years. A million years. Yes, yes, absolutely. We used to always see this house out here.

So in May of 2020, Fred Miller purchased the fully furnished house plus 10 1⁄2 acres of land from a family called the Thompsons who had owned it since 1917. The first time I drove up to the place, all I could do is stop at the edge of the road there and just look up and amaze me. Like, wow, this is mine. This is an original room from the 1800s.

Karen says she got obsessed with the house, spending nights and weekends online researching its secrets. The hiding spot, they say, was from the Civil War, so they would hide the valuables. A secret hideaway. Yes, secret hideaway. She discovered the house had been built around 1850 in the Gothic Revival style by a well-known New York architect.

And she learned and told her family that its name had been Sharswood. Every day she was calling me with new information. I'm like, my goodness, okay, relax. Are you exaggerating? No, I'm not exaggerating. But then Karen turned up something that stunned her. In the 1800s, Sharswood had been the seat of a major 1300 acre plantation, one of the larger ones in the county. What did you think of you owning a plantation? I was a little bit,

a little shocked by that, I would say, because I just wanted somewhere to have family gatherings. When I found out that it was a plantation, and then I'm like, okay, Fred just bought a plantation. I was like, we own a plantation. We own a plantation. What are we going to do up there? It was just a feeling of just power. It was just a powerful feeling. It is. Powerful, but of course, plantation implies slavery.

And before the Civil War, Pennsylvania County held more than 14,000 enslaved people, the state of Virginia just under 500,000. I said, do you realize what this is? They didn't have a clue. Dexter Miller, one of Fred and Karen's many second cousins, knew something about Charswood because years ago he'd been co-workers with Bill Thompson, whose family then owned it. Bill joined us for a conversation on what used to be his childhood porch. You grew up in this house? I did. This was my home. He inherited much

of the farmland and still lives up the road. His sister inherited the house and sold it to Fred. You know, when Fred was buying the house, he did not think that the house would be sold to a black person. Why would you think that for you? Because, you know, we are in rural Virginia, right? Well, this is true. For years, Dexter and another second cousin, Sonia Womack Miranda, had been trying to piece together

the Miller family's origins, a notoriously difficult task for African Americans because records are hard to come by, especially before 1865. It really was a hobby. It was addictive. It was addictive. It really was. You were like private eyes.

Yes. They'd been able to trace the whole Miller clan back to one woman. It's Dexter's great-grandmother. It's my great-great-grandmother, Sarah. Sarah Miller. Yes. They had found a picture of Sarah Miller. This is Sarah right here. And they'd gotten hold of her death certificate, which showed that she'd been born in Pennsylvania

County in 1868, just three years after the end of the Civil War. And they found an even better resource, one of their oldest living relatives, a beloved former school teacher named Marion Keys. Miss Keys, as everyone here calls her, recently turned 90. Sarah Miller is the matriarch of the family. Yes, she was. Did you know her? Yes, I did. Well, tell us about her. She would always be out there with a broom in her hand, and she would be waiting for us. Marion Keys remembers her great-grandmother, Sarah, as a force to be reckoned with. What she wanted you to know, you were going to know it. Was she persnickety, as they say?

Yes, yes. Was she difficult? Stern? Very, very. She didn't play. She didn't play. She didn't play. But we loved her. But that's where Miss Key's knowledge of Miller family history ended.

She didn't know anything about the generations before emancipation. When you were growing up, what did you learn or hear from your parents about slavery? Nothing. Nothing? Nothing. They? Nothing. They did not talk about it. I don't know whether they were afraid, whether it was too miserable or painful,

or they wanted to forget it. I don't know, but they did not talk to us about it at all. And we didn't ask them questions about it. Why not? We were afraid to. We heard that again and again from members of the Miller family. Slavery wasn't mentioned at all. Was there almost a code?

We don't talk about slavery, so nobody did. It was something that every black person knew you didn't talk about. The parents would tell you not to discuss grown people business. That's what they'll tell you. The first time slavery was discussed was, I guess, in the 70s when Roots came, the movie Roots came about. That's the first time? When Roots was on television? Did you read about it in school?

Not much. His family also remembers Roots as pivotal. Yes. I think that's what we all felt like. That was an eye-opener. But even after Roots, you didn't go and say, what about our family? No, not at all. What held you back?

I just didn't think they wanted to talk about it. But didn't you want to know? I would love to have known. I would love to have known. I would love to have known. Fred's purchase of Sharswood was about to give him a crash course in his hometown's slavery roots. It started with a call from two archaeologists who wanted to come do research. We're historic preservationists, and so, you know, we start from the idea that these places matter. Dennis Pogue once worked at Mount Vernon. Doug Sanford at Monticello. They asked if they could come explore Sharswood.

But they weren't interested in the ornate house designed by that famous architect. What they cared about was the dilapidated building with the tin roof past the big oak tree behind it. They suspected it had once been slave quarters. There were once hundreds of thousands of these buildings. These were one of the most common types of architecture in Virginia. Let me give you the running dimensions. But now these buildings are rare, with fewer than 1,500 believed to be still

standing. And Pogue and Sanford started a project to search for them. So one, two, three, four. Fred and Karen invited them to come investigate. They examined, measured, and searched for clues. You can see the sighting is... They showed us some of what they found. These are the kind of nails that we expect to see on buildings before 1800. Handmade, wrought nails. Handmade? You can actually see the hammer strokes on the head. Is this the original siding? These are remnants of the original siding, absolutely. Okay. They worked from noon to dusk and finally gave Karen and Fred their conclusion. It's got a complex history, but we think part of that history, a big part of that history, was a quarter for enslaved folks. They say it's one of the best preserved they've seen.

They believe it was originally built in the late 1700s as a house for a white family. That's where the original door was. And was later divided into two separate, single-room slave dwellings. Two families. Yeah, one household here, another enslaved household over there. It just showed there was two different worlds. This front big beautiful world here in the lavish, and you go right behind the house and it was a

whole different story it's kind of crazy for me just even walking around out there do you own that do you own the slave house too i own the slave house i do that's mine wow fred miller's purchase continues to surprise his family and intrigue historians when we come back. When Fred Miller unwittingly purchased what he now knows to be the Sharswood Plantation House, with slave quarters just behind it, he knew virtually nothing about his own family history. He'd always assumed his ancestors had been enslaved, but it felt to him like an unknowable part of a distant past. Learning about his great-grandmother, Sarah Miller, whom his mother had known as a child, piqued his interest. So when he found out her house was still standing, just a few miles away

from Sharswood, he asked his mother, Betty Dixon, to go there with him. All right, we're going to walk down through here. Betty's grandmother, Sarah, had been the first of their ancestors to be born into freedom shortly after the Civil War. That's my father's cabin. It had no light, no electricity. Betty remembers visiting and spending the night here with her grandmother and cousins. Sarah's house didn't look much bigger than the slave dwelling. Just a single room with a smaller one above it and no indoor plumbing.

Come a long ways, huh? Sure did. Glad I didn't have to live in here. Well, you have to make it work. You want a piece of this wallpaper to take with you? Yeah. I hope the landlord don't say nothing. Oh, Lord, there you go.

Sarah Miller is buried in the cemetery of the church the Miller family still attends. I'm glad. Now I can actually come in and see. But unbeknownst to this Miller family, just five miles up the road in a different church cemetery was a tombstone that also read Miller, a far older one with names Fred and his family had never heard of, but were about to. In Karen's search for information about Sharswood, she found a document that mentioned them. It gave the names of the original owners, who was Nathaniel Crenshaw, Miller, and also Charles Edwin Miller. Miller? Yes, Miller.

Any light bulbs? Any wires connect? No, not at that point. Not at that point, it did not. Others had suspected a connection between the two sets of Millers. Because I was telling Dexter back in 88... Bill Thompson says he had mentioned the thought

to Dexter 30 years ago. What we had been taught in high school was that when they freed the slaves, they just took the last name of the person that was there, which was Miller. I just had told Dexter, Dexter, it's a good chance that your ancestors came off of this farm. He did.

He said that. So you knew that this was a plantation? I did. Well, Fred, you said you didn't know. I had no idea. Dexter, you didn't tell Fred. I did not tell Fred. I did not tell anyone. Dexter says he'd kept it to himself because he hadn't found any way to prove it.

And that's where this becomes a detective story, with the Miller cousins now on a mission to figure out whether it could be possible that their own ancestors might have been enslaved on the very property Fred now owned. The first step was figuring out who their last enslaved ancestors were, and Sarah Miller's death certificate held the answer. The names of her parents, David and Violet Miller, who would have been adults at the time of emancipation. Did you know anything about them? Not at all. Not at all. I didn't know anything about them. We didn't.

Even Marion Keys, who knew Sarah Miller, had never heard their names. Enter Carice Luck Brimmer, a local historian and genealogist. Karen reached out to her to see if she could help. What are the special challenges looking for the ancestors of African Americans? African Americans were not listed by name until the 1870 census. So before that, they were just a number. You mean if they were enslaved, they weren't listed? At all.

So really, you're just looking for any type of tips and clues that you can. She started by looking at 1860 records for Sharswood's then-owner, N.C. for Nathaniel Crenshaw Miller. There he is. N.C. Miller right there. Okay. He had 58 slaves here. But with only age and gender listed, you have enslaved people 69, 44, 34, and not a single name. There was no way of knowing whether Violet and David were among them.

So Carice looked up David and Violet Miller in the 1870 census, the first one after the Civil War, where they finally appeared by name. It showed they were farmhands, that they couldn't read or write, and it listed their children, including, as Carice showed us, a very young Sarah Miller. There's Sarah. She's one year old. One years old. And this looks like Emily. Yes. She's three. And here's Samuel. Yeah. He's five. To Carice, that meant Samuel, Sarah's older brother, was born before emancipation. So Carice searched for him in another historical record called the Virginia Slave Birth Index, where slave owners had to list births on their property.

This document... And there, under N.C. Miller's name... N.C. Right. And there's Samuel. Was Samuel. And look at that. Oh, my God.

List Violet as his mother. It was the genealogy equivalent of a smoking gun. So this is proof that Violet, Sarah's mother, was enslaved by N.C. Miller. Yes. And this is absolute proof. This is absolute, definite proof. And you were able to tell Karen? That her ancestors, David and Violet, were enslaved at Sharswood.

That was tough. So did you call Fred? I did. I don't think he believed me in the beginning. I didn't believe him. So the connection suddenly is made with your family, slavery, in this house. In this house. And you own it. Once I realized that it was actually my blood that was here, it took on a whole new meaning for me.

It really saddens me sometimes. A lot of times I'm up a wee hours of the night now just thinking about what happened here. As news spread through the family, there was sadness. But that's not all there was. I almost felt like I was losing my breath for a moment. It was almost like a feeling of being found. Yes. This is where I started.

And as black people, we don't always know where we started. So here we are sitting in this house. I can't believe it. I can't believe it that I'm in the plantation house. Of the plantation that my family was enslaved. You're laughing as if this cannot be true. Cannot be. That's right.

But it is. I felt, I felt complete. I'm not half of a human being anymore. They make me whole, even if I don't know them. I felt a connection to them at Sharswood. I touched a tree. I hugged the tree. And I said, oh my God,

you was here when my ancestor was here. I wonder which ancestor of mine touched the tree. I didn't know what to say or do. I just hugged the tree and felt like I'm home.

He shared the news with Bill Thompson, who had had that hunch all those years ago. I look at it that I've been a servant to this farm and this house my whole life. And for the Miller family to come back home, to my home, our home. Our home, absolutely. It's great.

It's a celebration of coming home. You've never heard anything like this. Yeah. So a number of plantation properties like Mount Vernon and Monticello have established relations with descendants of the enslaved there. But to actually see those descendants come to own that plantation property, wow. This is God. This is where we're supposed to be.

It's like a full circle. Like, it was meant to happen. To me, it was meant to happen. The Millers also see the hand of their ancestors in all of this. I think there had to be, because did everything, I did everything in my power to make the smell. Did not make it happen, yeah. I tried to mess it up at every angle. But those ancestors had one more surprise in store. With all the revelations, there was one question that continued to gnaw at Dexter. Where were his enslaved ancestors buried?

So just this winter, he asked Bill. I said, Bill, there's one question that's been bothering me. Where is the slave cemetery? He said, Dexter, it's right over there. I said, right over where? He said, you see those trees over there? So did you just go right up there then? We went right up there.

The trees Bill Thompson pointed to, just beyond Fred's property, sure didn't look like a cemetery. That is, until you start to look closely. Is that one of the... That's one of them right there. Oh, my God. As you can see, this is the indention right there.

The headstone there, maybe this is the footstone on the other end. Yeah. There's always seemed like to be there's one. Yeah, absolutely. Poking up through the leaves all around us were pointed rocks, some small, some medium-sized. No names, no engraving, just plain anonymous markers of many, many lives.

Wow. This is astonishing. It is. It's kind of overwhelming, isn't it? It is. It really is. I mean, we all live in the same area. We come past this place, and we would not know that our ancestors

were right there beside us the entire time. Fred, if you hadn't bought that house? Right. You're right. If I hadn't bought that house, we'd never know. Never? Never. So how has all of this affected you? It's changed me. It's definitely changed me.

You ever angry? I get a little bit upset sometimes when I find out things that I should have known already. Angry at yourself? At myself and at the system, because I think that we should have known more. What about the school system? Should have known more. Family? Should have known more, absolutely.

You want the story of slavery told. I want the story of slavery told. It's important. So this is converted from a door to a window? Yeah. Fred wants to do whatever's necessary to preserve the slave house. You know, this has been exposed for, you know, 200 years. He's in the process of setting up a nonprofit to make that possible.

That's important to me, too, because I know a whole lot of emphasis on it, on that big White House there. Oh, exactly. But this right here is really near and dear to me. This is the story. This is the story. Family story. Absolutely. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

There's eight right here. And he's been thinking about the cemetery, too. I can imagine this being someone young. We have to do something about this. Yeah, have to. And I will. I'm going to fix it. Do you think you might allow historians to come?

Absolutely. Absolutely. This place will be open to anyone who wants to learn. Anyone? Anyone can come here. But for now, Sharswood is serving the purpose Fred bought it for in the first place, gathering the Miller family

together in celebration. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. Happy birthday to ya. Happy birthday, happy birthday to ya. What do you think Violet and David would think if they could see that you own this place?

I'm hoping they would be proud of us, and I think they would be. They endured a lot. I mean, I can't even imagine what they went through. Happy birthday. Looking down on us now, they must be smiling at us. Since our story first aired, the Millers have discovered even more relatives descended from Violet and David Miller. Earlier this month, several hundred family members gathered at

Sharswood for a family reunion. Watch the Millers visit the Sharswood Slave Cemetery for the first time at 60minutesovertime.com. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.