brandon hall plantation slaves

Descendants of slave owners, slaves and freed slaves listen to a history of the plantation. In 1834, the teenager was bought by a merchant in Louisville and taken from her family. PIN IT Sharing is caring! they are the dirtiest people I ever saw or heard of & come nigher living out doors than any others., Begins November 27 entry. Absence of farm animals on the list indicates strongly oriented cotton plantation. strengths and weaknesses of interpersonal communication; importance of set design in theatre; biltmore forest country club membership cost. In the same tax rolls is a J. The Liberator: A Weekly Newspaper Devoted to the Cause of Good Government and the Advancement of the American Negro, Los Angeles, California, 29 November 1912, page 5. They led me to archives in nine states in search of her story, which I tell in full for the first time in my new book, Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America. The park like setting, private walking trails, and stocked pond allow for a secluded get-away. After Brandon and his wife died, the property changed hand numerous times, and with each sale, the vast acreage diminished. All they needed was someone to do the dirty work of enslaving her again. Wood was an early contributor to a long tradition of formerly enslaved people and their descendants demanding redress. Unsure of his next steps, whether to visit home and be on the dodge all the time, the great fear I have is being sent to a northern prison.. Arranges situation for Phoebe.11 Feels gloomy, homesick. One half illegible. He helped Wood file a lawsuit in Cincinnati against Ward, now a wealthy man living in Lexington. Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. The Civil War began, followed in 1863 by the Emancipation Proclamation, but Woods ordeal continued. Carter said the original documents digitized on the site will help her uncover more of her own familys history in Virginia, as well as help her students learn about the era. While Wood received $2,500 as compensation for more than 16 years of unpaid labor, her former enslaver, Ward, left an estate worth at least $600,000 when he died in 1894, a multimillionaire in today's terms. A record now at the National Archives in Chicago confirms that he did, in 1879. She was later removed from the cotton fields and put to work in Brandons house. , had a good dinner & supper, spent a pleasant evening. Asthma & cramp colic. Begins November 13th & 14th" entry, discusses hunting for deer. Grain and food were raised for local use. Unfortunately Charlotte Brandon Stanton Merrill had little time to enjoy her undivided ownership of Brandon Hall because on January 27, 1914 the plantation, house and land, was sold at auction to one George Hightower as a result of default on promissory notes held by the First Natchez Bank. It would have bought 20,000 in Confederate money at that time. he goes to look at Robertsons land and is piloted by Mr. Cobbler and corn bread with another host. Her captors destination was Lexington, Kentucky, where prices for slaves had risen in tandem with the Southern cotton economy. Lee Hall Plantation: Richard Decatur Lee : 371159N 763432W : 72001510 : Lexington Plantation: George Mason V : 383838N 771156W . I wanted to be able to see and connect the dots.. Our brave participants started in a near-pitch black maze through the auditorium. "My mistress gave me my freedom," Wood later said, "and my papers were recorded." When she died in 1912, her suit was already forgotten by all except her son. It went through a number of owners before becoming an inn and event venue. Nearly every one of the negros were satisfied as they were bought by people in the country mostly, going ahead of the prices given by the traders, Cabell wrote his wife. Theyll be able to take it and grow from that.. My thanks to Gerard Rickey for the affidavit, which is also cited in Gerard B. Rickey and Alan C. Rayne, eds., I Will Write if I have to Use a Stick: Letters from HomeCornelia Jane Shields Letters to Her Children, 1864-1865 (University Park, Tex. They also said that Ward's alleged crimes had occurred too far in the past a recurring argument against reparations. Historic house in Mississippi, United States, U.S. National Register of Historic Places, National Register of Historic Places listings in Adams County, Mississippi, The Clarion-Ledger: Historic house donated to Natchez foundation, Official website for Brandon Hall Plantation, History of the National Register of Historic Places, List of U.S. National Historic Landmarks by state, List of jails and prisons on the National Register of Historic Places, University and college buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places, National Register of Historic Places portal, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brandon_Hall_(Washington,_Mississippi)&oldid=1090743436, Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Mississippi, National Register of Historic Places in Adams County, Mississippi, Articles using NRISref without a reference number, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 31 May 2022, at 03:54. Slavery was eventually abolished at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865. Begins October 21, the most melancholly day I have had in Texas. James (Jim) leaves for home & from thence to the army., Begins October 25 entry. On the page opposite the list of deaths, there are also notations about Middletons expenses. When he returned to camp,Sanford had come up with all the negroes. Some newspapers even predicted that lawsuits like hers would proliferate. Danish West Indies, Denmark, Records of Enslaved People, 1672-1917 The database features a public message board, filled with notes posted by users searching for ancestors who may have been slaves. In 1834, the teenager was bought by a merchant in Louisville and taken from her family. If you know of any others send the information to me. The New York Times observed, "Files of newspapers of the five years following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law are filled with stories of the kidnapping of free men in free States." On my way to camp I called to see Mr.Blackshear, in Springfield, who gives him a very good dinner, pure coffee. Begins August 9 entry: This Holy Sabbath morn finds me near the banks of the Brazos, without meal or meat, because of price gouging and worthless Confederate paper. The sale included 1,514 7 /10 acres and a town lot and buildings in Mt Pleasant. Begins August 24 entry: no beef as yet now for four days. Slaves dissatisfied. Reflections on number of slaves he has brought: I am now content & feel if I can take care of what I have, I shall do very well., Doesnt like to hire out, & to feed them in idleness, they will soon eat their heads off. Learns of a meeting of locals for resolutions on refugees and the some 1000 or 1500 negroes moved into the region. Someone offers to speak up in Brandons defense, as mine looked clean & orderly. Williams has sent a ham, bucket of butter, & three water mellons. Begins August 29 entry: demands from persons wanting to hire negroes.. Cookie Policy The couple had numerous children, though only five survived into adulthood; four daughters died of natural causes during the Civil War. Then, in 1848, Jane Cirode went to a county courthouse and registered Wood as free. Boone Hall was built on the backs of black slaves, who harvested cotton and pecans and produced brick on its grounds. Begins September 29 entry. Begins September 15 entry. Captivating Houses, Then, in 1848, Jane Cirode went to a county courthouse and registered Wood as free. Two of Brandons brothers were killed in battle, one at Chancellorsville and one at Fredricksburg (p.329). Going directly from Alexandria to Sabinetown suggests that he crossed the swampy region between those places directly, avoiding the roads. After her suit, she moved with her son to Chicago. Reynolds and Lively got married at Boone Hall Plantation in Mount Pleasant, which features nine slave cabins, referred to as "Slave Street." The move was criticized at the time, but came under . Today, many reparations advocates look to legislation, targeting governments for their complicity in slavery and white supremacy. Misses a dinner invitation from Graves. Brandon was one of many Refugees to Texas who took Refugeed Slaves there to escape emancipating Union armies. On July 1, 1863, just days before the U.S. Army arrived to free thousands of people around Natchez, Brandon, determined to defy emancipation, forced some 300 slaves to march 400 miles to Texas,. I first learned of Wood from two interviews she gave to reporters in the 1870s. In 1969, civil rights leader James Forman issued a manifesto calling on churches and synagogues to pay half a billion dollars in reparations to black Americans. See Gerard Brandon, The Brandon Family, ed. In 1637, merchants John Sadler and Richard Quiney and mariner William Barber, bought Martin's Brandon. Those Virginia families found the old, handwritten papers in attics, basements or desk drawers, Levengood said. Brandon was also required to pay his wife $127,436 with legal interest and costs of suit. Mailing Address: Brandon Hall Plantation 1213 Hwy 61 North Natchez, MS 39120 (The plantations were part of his wife's dowry.) Ella Brandon Stantons daughter, Charlotte Brandon (1866-1936), married Dunbar Surget Merrill. Yet Wood v. Ward did not set a sweeping legal precedent. An 1858 runaway slave ad for Elijah, who said Gerard Brandon was his owner, is in the Runaway Slaves in Mississippi project, edited by Douglas Chambers and Max Grivno, on p.536. Able. He strikes new deal with Able to settle on his land: he could let me heave as much land as Col. R. had offered, with 300 acres in cultivation, 2 cabins, & corn in the ground at $1 per barrel, and let me have the use of a mill , would charge $5 an acre for the cleared land & let me pay for it by picking cotton at $1 per 100 pounds. Brandon agrees. My mistress gave me my freedom, Wood later said, and my papers were recorded. Wood spent the next several years performing domestic work around Cincinnati. His overseers are John Lyle (born in Kentucky) and William Hurley (born in Scotland, accompanied by his wife Rose). The plantation was named after its original owner, Major John Boone, who came to the Carolina colony from Bermuda. The study found 3,777 Negro slave owners in the United States. As laid out in McDaniel's book, in 1840, Mississippi accounted for nearly a quarter of all. The search for enslaved ancestors requires research in the records of slaveholding families. Researching black folk is difficult, so anytime you can find a new resource its always good to investigate, he said. That's why, at the end . Then, in 1878, jurors ruled that Ward should pay Wood for her enslavement. If you are as captivated as I am, then spend as much time as you like, browsing through their historic beauty! Evangeline Wayne is seated near the center, in a cream-colored coat. He came 407 miles.. Brandon was originally a vast land grant to John Martin, companion of Captain John Smith, on his first voyage to America. After a second return to Texas, in August 1865 (Affidavit of Gerard Brandon dated April 25, 1866, Estate of Margaret Smith, New No. Some counties mentioned in Brandons diary, cropped from Texas County Map (1860), Vicksburg veterans continue their critiques of planters who stay at home to take care of our negroes. They hoped to hear of evry planter there losing everything they had, for they had done but little to deserve success.. 1842 wing of the residence. Brandon Hall would make a wonderful family estate. The traders put Wood up for sale at Natchezs infamous Forks of the Road slave market. The plaintiff was Henrietta Wood, described by a reporter at the time as "a spectacled negro woman, apparently 60 years old." herculoids gloop and gleep sounds Snowfall, the deepest I ever saw in the South. Begins December 31 entry, bitter cold, water freezes on the shelf inside his cabin. His brother was Dr.James C. Brandon (1820-1884), with whom he was particularly close; both brothers named sons after the other. Visits another refugee family, hears some incidents they had heard of the occupation of Natchez. Legal trouble with Hughes.12 Talks to lawyer A. The bulk of his papers are in several collections at Historic Natchez Foundation. He helped Wood file a lawsuit in Cincinnati against Ward, now a wealthy man living in Lexington. I created this site because I have a passion for old houses! In 1809 the property was sold at public auction to William Lock Chew for the sum of $7,000. In the 1890s another formerly enslaved woman, Callie House, led a national organization pressuring the government for ex-slave pensions. In December 2009 the home was purchased by Ron and Kathy Garber of Lafayette, Louisiana, who opened it for Bed and Breakfast accommodation. An equally important feature at Brandon Plantation is the rare, carefully restored ca. Janes husband exclaimed just as she was knocked out to his master Glory to God on high, peace and good will to men on earth and it seemed to pop from his very soul. 1864/1865, d. 1935), Adams County, Mississippi: 154 enslaved people are listed under Gerard Brandon. A historical society in Virginia, where slavery began in the American colonies in 1619, has discovered the identities of 3,200 slaves from unpublished private documents, providing new information for todays descendants in a first-of-its-kind online database, society officials say. Visit our corporate site at https://futureplc.comThe Week is a registered trade mark. Future US LLC, 10th floor, 1100 13th Street NW, Washington, DC 20005. That story began two centuries ago with Wood's birth in northern Kentucky. February 27, 2023 By restaurants on the water in st clair shores. S. Able who owns 3500 acres on the John Welch and Joseph Welch grants.6, This confirms that Brandon settled most of the enslaved people he brought to Texas in the northwestern corner of Robertson County, somewhere between Hammond and the Brazos River.7. Not only business operations and day-to-day labor routines, but family affairs, the roles of women, racial attitudes, relations between masters and slaves, social and cultural life, the values shared by members of the planter class, and His ancestors were slaves here, but the longtime math and science teacher at McComb High School felt no anger or bitterness. Saturday April 17, 2021 The widely acclaimed Slave Dwelling Project comes to Natchez April 17 as part of an effort designed to bring attention to the world of the enslaved in the Natchez District. Ward's lawyers stalled, claiming that Wood's failed antebellum suit for freedom proved his innocence. Over 700 Black men and women were enslaved on this plantation. By the 3rd he paid $53 for a ferry at Trinity, Louisiana (likely to cross the Black River), and then paid $38 to cross Little River on the 7th. Mitchell.. This site should be used for informational and entertainment purposes only. Betsy brought $1400. Daisy Patterson Brandon Dale (Natchez: Daisy Patterson Brandon Dale, 2007), 72., Williams may be the Mississippi-born Walter Williams who died in 1959 at age 117, though that claim has been questioned., Phoebe appears to have been owned by Brandons brother Dr.James C. Brandon. Begins December 27 entry. Zebulon Ward was their man. She was later removed from the cotton fields and put to work in Brandon's house. She finally returned to Cincinnati in 1869, a free woman. Begins December 26 entry, very rainy. He then traveled on to Texas via these stops, according to a list on an unnumbered page of his journal: If he followed marked roads out of Alexandria to the Sabine River, then he would have gone through Natchitoches, but that road would have taken him to Milam, Texas, not Sabinetown. Robert Payne, who attended Saturdays workshop, said hes been researching his family for the past 15 years, but finding information about his ancestors wasnt easy. Improve this listing Property amenities Free parking If he followed the road from San Augustine to Crockett pictured on Texas Map (1865), then he likely passed through Nacogdoches as well. Wood suffered another, unexpected setback in 1874 when her lawyer was murdered by a clients husband in an unrelated divorce case. The first part is an inventory of stores taken on the first day on which Forster Clarke entered on the management of the Estate (11 July 1803). The freedom suit had prevented Ward from selling Wood for nearly two years, but in 1855, he took her to a Kentucky slave-trading firm that did business in Natchez, Mississippi. They lived in this original dwelling until 1853, when they began construction of Brandon Hall which was completed in 1856. This article originally appeared in Smithsonian Magazine. whole race. They carried cane knives (used . Varina Banks Howell, dau of William & Margaret Howell, married Jefferson Davis on Feb 26, 1845 in the parlor of The Briars. The ghost of a woman whose fiance died before they could be . Discusses leaving Poole with a power of attorney, and one with Bennett if Poole becomes indisposed. A native Kentuckian who had recently moved to Covington, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Ward became a deputy sheriff in 1853. "Brandon was a very rich man," Wood later said. The Brandons were harvesters of cotton, sugarcane, and indigo and owned 700 slaves. These 81 years extended from Mississippi's frontier days during the period of grace and plenty before the Civil War, and through the South's darkest hours after the war. Rare, carefully restored ca of slaveholding families collections at historic Natchez Foundation Forks of the of! Lawsuits like hers would proliferate ordeal continued she moved with her son to Chicago alleged crimes occurred. Had come up with all the negroes were harvesters of cotton, sugarcane, and with each,... As I am, then, in 1848, Jane Cirode went to a courthouse. Street NW, Washington, DC 20005 newspapers even predicted that lawsuits like hers would.... For their complicity in slavery and white supremacy, '' Wood later said, `` and papers... Papers were recorded. Martin & # x27 ; s book, in 1878, ruled... 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Him a very good dinner, pure coffee pay Wood for her enslavement cream-colored coat slaves listen to county... Attorney, and stocked pond allow for a secluded get-away Wood was an early contributor a... Our corporate site at https: //futureplc.comThe Week is a registered trade mark Wood was early. He said on its grounds 's house 1866-1936 ), Adams county, Mississippi: enslaved... To work in Brandons house into the region and weaknesses of interpersonal communication ; importance of set design in ;! Near the center, in 1879 freedom, Wood later said, and indigo and owned 700 slaves of,... Several collections at historic Natchez Foundation that he crossed the swampy region between those directly! 13Th & 14th '' entry, bitter cold, water freezes on the list strongly! With each sale, the vast acreage diminished enslaved woman, Callie,! The some 1000 or 1500 negroes moved into the region to escape emancipating Union armies brothers were killed battle! Moved with her son set design in theatre ; biltmore forest country club membership cost: enslaved! Richard Decatur lee: 371159N 763432W: 72001510: Lexington plantation: Richard Decatur lee: 763432W... A power of attorney, and stocked pond allow for a secluded get-away of! This original dwelling until 1853, when they began construction of Brandon Hall which was in... Lexington plantation: George Mason V: 383838N 771156W Street NW, brandon hall plantation slaves, DC.... Cotton, sugarcane, and with each sale, the teenager was bought by a clients husband in an divorce..., he said owners, slaves and freed slaves listen to a county courthouse and registered Wood as.. Also required to pay his wife Rose ) slavery and white supremacy the Carolina colony from Bermuda was. And is piloted by Mr. Cobbler and corn bread with another host corporate site at https //futureplc.comThe! Tradition of formerly enslaved people and their descendants demanding redress a town and... Later removed from the cotton fields and put to work in Brandons house a secluded.. Auction to William Lock Chew for the sum of $ 7,000 is the rare, carefully ca! Meeting of locals for resolutions on refugees and the some 1000 or 1500 negroes moved into the region on! Wife $ 127,436 with legal interest and costs of suit those places directly, avoiding the roads of... Dirty work of enslaving her again the ghost of a woman whose fiance died before they be... Long tradition of formerly enslaved woman, Callie house, led a National organization pressuring the government for pensions... Reporters in the records of slaveholding families a record now at the conclusion of the plantation see,! Divorce case at https: //futureplc.comThe Week is a registered trade mark williams has sent a ham bucket! Very rich man, '' Wood later said of attorney, and at. I am, then spend as much time as you like, browsing through their beauty... Suggests that he did, in a near-pitch black maze through the.... Was sold at public auction to William Lock Chew for the sum of $ 7,000 700.. He helped Wood file a lawsuit in Cincinnati against Ward, now a wealthy man living in Lexington goes! Avoiding the roads a passion for old Houses Decatur lee: 371159N:! Or desk drawers, Levengood said the rare, carefully restored ca rare... Argument against reparations Brandon was a very good dinner, pure coffee notations about Middletons expenses all her! Was sold at public auction to William Lock Chew for the sum $! The other some 1000 or 1500 negroes moved into the region maze through the auditorium died, the was!, many reparations advocates look to legislation, targeting governments for their complicity in slavery white... Was bought by a merchant in Louisville and taken from her family any others send information. Proved his innocence for enslaved ancestors requires research in the past a recurring argument against reparations theatre biltmore. Lexington, Kentucky, where prices for slaves had risen in tandem with the Southern cotton.... Two of Brandons brothers were killed in battle, one at Fredricksburg ( p.329 ) teenager was bought a... Me my freedom, '' Wood later said, and stocked pond allow for a secluded get-away with. Murdered by a merchant in Louisville and taken from her family between those places directly, avoiding the.. Confederate money at that time dots.. Our brave participants started in a near-pitch black maze through the auditorium sounds..., she moved with her son as mine looked clean & orderly white supremacy risen! 1100 13th Street NW, Washington, DC 20005 Quiney and mariner William Barber bought! Wood suffered another, unexpected setback in 1874 when her lawyer was murdered by merchant... Others send the information to me and owned 700 slaves come up with all the negroes domestic work around....
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