WILSON COUNTY, Texas – Robin Muschalek said she often gets the same reaction when she tells someone that people were enslaved in Bexar County.
“They’re shocked,” said Muschalek, co-owner of the historic Whitehall Polley Mansion, a former slave plantation in Wilson County.
“We want to make sure that’s part of the history we tell of the house,” Muschalek said.
See drone footage of the former plantation and Cibolo Creek below:
A retired military couple, Keith and Robin Muschalek had already bought a home when they first saw it in 2014.
“We did not know what this building was. We thought it was a dance hall,” she said.
A year later, they bought the neglected two-story house as “a retirement project.”
“Everything was in a state of dilapidation,” her husband said. “A lot of the floors were rotting. You’d have to, like, step over big holes.”
Not visible from the road, a historical marker on the porch is how they learned the house was built in the late 1840s and early 1850s by Joseph Polley. He was one of the original settlers known as “The Old 300,″ who were brought to Texas by Stephen F. Austin.
The marker also mentions Polley was the first sheriff of Austin County.
It also said Robert E. Lee had spent the night here when he was a U.S. Army colonel before the Civil War.
“Then the antennas go up,” Keith Muschalek said.
Eager to know more, the Muschaleks met Allen Kosub, who along with his wife Regina, created the website, Lost Texas Roads.
Keith Muschalek said Kosub told him, “Well, Keith, that’s a plantation home. And there’s many plantation homes along what we call the Cibolo Valley.”
By searching official deeds and other records, Allen Kosub said his website has a map showing 37 parcels of land bought along Cibolo Creek by plantation owners, but only about a third of them enslaved 20 or more people.
He said the Polley Plantation was one of those.
But Keith Muschalek said, “If you read that marker, you would have no clue that this was a slave plantation.”
For that reason, he said, the marker put up in 1965 should be updated.
Robin Muschalek said the 1860 census confirms what they know so far. She and her husband have turned up about 20 first names of those enslaved by Polley.
They said only one, Cato Morgan, was respected enough by the Polley family that their son wrote his obituary.
However, in Polley’s will, Robin Muschalek said he gave each daughter an enslaved person of their choosing.
Having restored the mansion, doing most of the work themselves, the Muschaleks said the Whitehall Polley Mansion is now a museum.
They said the Polley descendants hold their reunions there, and it’s become a popular setting for bridal photos.
With their “retirement project” finished, the Muschaleks said their priority now is to find out as much as they can about the enslaved who lived and worked at the plantation.
Although the Polley family cemetery is across the street, the Muschaleks wonder, “Where are the graves of the enslaved that died?”
The other unanswered question revolves around their emancipation: “Where did they go?”
Keith Muschalek said there were numerous freedmen colonies in the area at one time, where the newly emancipated supported one another.
“We just want to know more about the enslaved people,” he said.
So perhaps it was fate when Pastor Ray Warren of Haven Oaks Community Bible Church paid his first visit to the Whitehall Polley Mansion.
Looking at the list of the enslaved that the Muschaleks have compiled so far, Warren made an astounding discovery.
“Their last name is right here,” Warren said. He said he’d found his wife’s ancestors, Albert Nious, his first wife Josie and his second wife Anne.
Warren said his wife and her cousins will be just as surprised to learn “they’re actually descendants of some of the slaves here.”
“It’s crazy,” Warren said. “God is wonderful. He does things that we don’t understand.”