SSH President and Treasurer
Jobie Hill is a licensed Preservation Architect and Slave House Expert with over twenty-four years of professional experience. She has degrees in historic preservation (MS) and art history (MA), a BA in anthropology, and is a Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design Accredited Professional (LEED AP). She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in history with certificates in African & African American Studies and Information Science & Studies.
Since 2011, her research and professional work has focused exclusively on domestic slave buildings. She is engaged in interdisciplinary research examining the architecture of slavery, the influence these dwellings had on the lives of their inhabitants, and the preservation of the history of enslaved people. In 2012 she started an independent project titled “Saving Slave Houses (SSH),” with the primary goal to ensure that slave houses, irreplaceable pieces of history, are not lost forever. In her efforts to preserve extant slave houses and to education the public about them she has had the opportunity to partner with the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), TED Talk, Trimble, Google, Historic American Buildings Survey, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, National Trust for Historic Preservation, C-SPAN, Virginia Humanities, Montpelier and Monticello.
SSH Board Member and Secretary
Star Reams is a family historian, genealogist, and descendant of the enslaved community at Pharsalia Plantation in Nelson County, Virginia. Her work focuses on reconnecting descendant families, preserving oral histories, and supporting collaborative interpretation at sites of enslavement.
Since 2021, Star and her sister Nina Polley have served as consultants with Saving Slave Houses, contributing to the Descendants Workshop, the Silenced Voices documentary, and the Slave House Exploration and Evidence Tracing (SHEET) Field School. Through these projects, she has helped integrate descendant oral histories and genealogical research into preservation efforts, ensuring that the stories of enslaved communities remain central to the interpretation of these spaces.
Star is a co-founder and board member of the Descendants of Enslaved Communities at the University of Virginia and serves as Chair of the Research and Oral History Committee. She is also active in the statewide Descendants of Enslaved Communities of Virginia (DEC-VA), where she works to support descendant-led research, memory work, and community engagement.
Her research centers on the descendant community connected to Pharsalia and the broader region of Central Virginia, using archival records, oral history, and DNA to trace lineages from enslavement through emancipation and into the present. Through this work, she contributes to broader conversations on memory, reparative history, and the role of descendants in the stewardship of historic landscapes.