Stagville, the old plantation turned state historic site out north of town, has its seasonal observance today.

While it's encouraging to see any institution with a seasonal observance that is correctly named -- "Christmas at the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters" -- it's even more encouraging to see that this is happening at Stagville for the third "holiday season" in a row.

Considering that the site previously went three years in a row without any little remembrance at all, tomorrow's affair is a reminder how things have improved for a preservation practically re-forgotten.

The particular schtick at Stagville is contrasting Christmases as once observed in its 1787 Bennehan House and in its 1850 Horton Grove slave quarters. The very presence of both such places there -- plus what is probably Durham County's oldest structure, the 1750 Horton Cottage -- makes Stagville pretty remarkable, as antebellum sites go anywhere.

Up until about 30 years ago, though, the old plantation was getting pretty run down and overgrown. Then, its reclamation became the first project of Durham's then-new Preservation Society.

Local preservationists engineered the property's transfer from Liggett & Myers Tobacco to the state of North Carolina, which, in its bureaucratic wisdom, maintained the place in an almost pristine state of neglect. After a burst of attention and enthusiasm, Historic Stagville, for most intents and purposes, receded back into history.

That state of affairs was relieved only by a bureaucratic reorganization, and subsequent injection of energy, in 2003.

Of course, one reason for Stagville's position out of mind is its position out seven miles in the country on the Old Oxford Highway. And the transition out there from Durham is a reminder in itself, of a whole 'nother Durham County.

Out here, Durham is where, on a fall-to-winter Saturday, the roadside is bedecked with the pickup trucks of deer hunters: a country of scrub woods, sluggish streams, sheer space and an almost palpable loneliness.

Once -- say in Stagville times -- this northern country was full of communities that might have grown into a city had the railroad not built farther south.

The trains made an economic center of gravity upon a formerly desolate ridgeline between the upper Neuse and New Hope bottoms, and the towns that might have been drained there, leaving little more than names on the map: South Lowell, Orange Factory, Hampton, Willardville.

Horton Grove remains, though its last residents left half a century ago; but the path that runs past its slave-house row leads in a few hundred yards to a place that is called Shop Hill, but is in fact, now, just woods.

For some people, downtown may be Durham; or Southpoint, Hope Valley, the RTP or Angier Avenue. The fact there is more to the place than those is worth a little remembrance -- if just every once in a year or so.