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. Mandys child died. Photograph: Jessica Crawford. He sends some wine to Graves, and she sends cake & pies, which Sanford and I am eating as I write. Begins December 30 entry, hunting deer. Horse foundered, took him to Middletons camp. Hover over the town names to trace her tortuous path from slavery to freedomand back. This database is a compilation of information on over four thousand slaves from Louisiana who were involved in manumission (the formal emancipation from slavery) between 1719 and 1820. The ghost of a woman whose fiance died before they could be . These slaves hadn't been disguised as 'servants . Snowfall, the deepest I ever saw in the South. Begins December 31 entry, bitter cold, water freezes on the shelf inside his cabin. I created this site because I have a passion for old houses! 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.. By 1878, white Northerners were retreating from Reconstruction. His wife Charlotte (39) and children Elmina (16), James (14), Charlotte (12), Sarah (9), Agnes (9), Mary (5), and Alice (4) are listed a fellow members of the household. A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials. 1845, d. 1909), Charlotte Lottie Brandon (b. This property has much more to offer. #ResearchRoadTrip pic.twitter.com/7lk820jLbt. Gangs worked throughout the antebellum period to capture free black men, women and children and smuggle them into the South, under the cover of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which required the return of runaway slaves. Brandon married Charlotte Smith Hoggatt in 1840 in Adams County, Mississippi. 1850 - According to the District Census, Boone Hall was producing 4,000,000 bricks per year using 85 slaves . | READ MORE. Contact the agent for information. An affidavit provided by Brandon in a later lawsuit indicates he departed on July 1.5. If he followed the road from San Augustine to Crockett pictured on Texas Map (1865), then he likely passed through Nacogdoches as well. I really sometimes wish the war was ended, & would rejoice to hear the glad tidings of peace. Begins August 30 entry awakened by a fuss about eggs & a chicken and a slave who has robbed a hen house of a neighbor last night. Learned of others who had been to a poor mans house to beg bread & meat, another robbery of rye to make coffee. Brandon vexed, curses. This description comes from Mortuary Customs and Beliefs of South Carolina Negroes, published in 1894 by May A. Waring in the Atlanta Constitution: Our brave participants started in a near-pitch black maze through the auditorium. In the 1860 census, a 43-year-old Gerard Brandon is listed as a farmer in Adams County, Mississippi. Brandon told me that Mr.Poole was offered $2000 in gold for Phoebe on his way to Texas, but he was on ahead of wagons and negroes and did not hear of it until too late. (this book has a wealth of info on slaves - since many of the people listed were freed in wills - details of emancipation are there as well as detailed physical descriptions) In the 1890s another formerly enslaved woman, Callie House, led a national organization pressuring the government for ex-slave pensions. More critical talk from his dinner partners about rich planters, whose negroes are dressed better than Texas soldiers. Brandon feels it unfair but holds his peace. H. Weir of Centerville, who hit me a dig.. Brandon Hall C1856. In January 1914, the plantation, house, and land was sold to George Hightower as a result of a default on a promissory note, thus ending an 81-year chain of ownership by the Brandon and Hoggatt families. After 1815, as white settlers rushed into the lower Mississippi River Valley, many looked to purchase slaves to cultivate the regions most profitable crop. Cirode returned to France in 1844, abandoning his wife, Jane, who eventually took Wood with her to Ohio, a free state. The Civil War began, followed in 1863 by the Emancipation Proclamation, but Wood's ordeal continued. In 1889, he was one of the first African-American graduates of what became Northwestern Universitys School of Law. The case was eventually dismissed. All rights reserved. p.3: Deaths on Trip to Texas, continued onto 4. A record now at the National Archives in Chicago confirms that he did, in 1879. Thats the kind of things that owners did with slaves. Yes, Boone Hall Plantation did have slaves right from the time it was established in 1681. When the United States banned the importation of slaves after 1807, Virginia became the largest provider in the nations internal slave trade, Levengood said. Brandon Plantation, one of the nation's oldest working farms along the James River in Prince George County, was sold to a family in Florida for $17.8 million. Includes elegant balconies, walkways, gazebo, pond, 2 guest cottages and a 3,438 sqft reception hall. I first learned of Wood from two interviews she gave to reporters in the 1870s. Thats when you have to be creative.. Returns from Salado to reports of death, including Henrietta has just come to say Diceys little boy is dead. After moving to Ables, All at Home for the war. Description of the Able Family , and another Mississippi refugee named Williams.10 Difficulty getting a beef he had paid for. A Note to our Readers Sometimes its a real detective work. Brandon strictly instructs them not to trade with anyone. The defendant was Zebulon Ward, a white man who had enslaved Wood 25 years before. 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. 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." "Brandon was a very rich man," Wood later said. Begins November 2 & 3 entry, attends a public sale of someones effects. Brandon Hall Plantation, west side. Begins December 24 entry. MORE VIRGINIA SLAVERY RESOURCES. 3:10 PM EST, Mon February 6, 2012. Her captors' destination was Lexington, Kentucky, where prices for slaves had risen with the Southern cotton economy. 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. Two hundred and five years ago, on the night of January 8, 1811, more than 500 enslaved people took up arms in one of the largest slave rebellions in U.S. history. Though a fraction of what Wood had asked for, the amount would be worth nearly $65,000 today. In 1833 Chew sold the property to Nathaniel Hoggatt, a successful planter whose daughter Charlotte inherited the land after his death. The society stores the documents in an archive spanning thousands of square feet, he said. Plantation records reveal nearly every aspect of plantation life. Today, it remains virtually unknown, even as reparations for slavery are once again in the headlines. The plaintiff was Henrietta Wood, described by a reporter at the time as "a spectacled negro woman, apparently 60 years old." It remains the largest known sum ever granted by a U.S. court in restitution for slavery. Destructive 'Super Pigs' From Canada Threaten the Northern U.S. Did an Ancient Magnetic Field Reversal Cause Chaos for Life on Earth 42,000 Years Ago? Old Mr. S. Turner bought Jane and children. Some pictures of the Brandon cemetery are on Flickr. The plantation, founded in 1681, is one of the oldest working plantations in the US. Sanderson hung back in Natchez. 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 The search for enslaved ancestors requires research in the records of slaveholding families. 1890 ( photo) The Briars , (aka Briers), built 1814-18 possibly by John Perkins, Natchez. Enough to make a man gloomy. Reads Ellas letter. The Brandons had numerous slaves and most likely used them for tobacco growing, resulting the in the prosperity that enabled the construction of the ca. She must be about 85 years old now. The postwar constitutional amendments that abolished slavery and extended national citizenship to ex-slaves enabled Wood to pursue Ward in federal court. Wood suffered another, unexpected setback in 1874, when her lawyer was murdered by a client's husband in an unrelated divorce case. A native Kentuckian who had recently moved to Covington, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Ward became a deputy sheriff in 1853. In November 2015, I retraced some of this route by car when coming back from Natchez. His overseers are John Lyle (born in Kentucky) and William Hurley (born in Scotland, accompanied by his wife Rose). Henrietta Woods story began two centuries ago with her birth in northern Kentucky. Brandon Hall Plantation. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.[1]. Chilly weather. ( photo 1; photo 2 ) But Gerard Rickey notes in an email from November 23, 2016, that there is also a Henrietta mentioned in the memoir of James Brandons son Gerard Brandon (the nephew of the GB who owned Henrietta Wood). The sale included 1,514 7 /10 acres and a town lot and buildings in Mt Pleasant. The "finest" house at the Brandon Hall Plantation, for example, was built by the enslaved. He came 407 miles.. 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. Slave traders met the demand by buying slaves in Virginia, Kentucky and Maryland and selling them in the cotton states. erath county rant and rave; springfield, mo jail inmates; essex county hospital center jobs; blanching vs non blanching erythema; star trek next generation cast salaries and Mimy and three children $2505. When he died in 1951, after a long career as a lawyer, he left behind a large clan of descendants who were able to launch professional careers of their own, even as redlining and other racially discriminatory practices put a chokehold on the South Side neighborhoods where they lived. Researching black folk is difficult, so anytime you can find a new resource its always good to investigate, he said. The gang located Wood's employer in Cincinnati, a boardinghouse keeper named Rebecca Boyd, and paid her to join their scheme. Then, in 1878, jurors ruled that Ward should pay Wood for her enslavement. See, Trinity River (specific place illegible, but may be Madisonville) (possibly by July 22, when he paid $28 for a ferry, according to page 5 of the journal), qq Transcribe relevant portions of Texas diary, qq Go through probate records on Ancestry. The building is an example of the fast-disappearing service structures that once were a ubiquitous feature of the Southern agrarian landscape. Today, many reparations advocates look to legislation, targeting governments for their complicity in slavery and white supremacy. They and their heirs farmed it successfully until 1720 when it was sold to Nathaniel Harrison. She was soon sold again, to a French immigrant, William Cirode, who took her to New Orleans. She was suing him for $20,000 in reparations. It is, rather, a living reminder of the truth of the Black experience during the time of slavery. Brandon mentions his diary in a letter to his daughter Ella, dated October 21, 1863, and found in the Vonkersburg Family Collection at the Historic Natchez Foundation. Researching a slaveholder's genealogy can be a time-consuming task, but fortunately, there are many genealogies for South Carolina slaveholders . List of troubles: screw wormshow many of them there are. Mailing Address: Brandon Hall Plantation 1213 Hwy 61 North Natchez, MS 39120 Travels to Belton in buggy. Brandon was originally a vast land grant to John Martin, companion of Captain John Smith, on his first voyage to America. Brandon Plantation was situated in the area where the regularized production of bright leaf tobacco was developed in the 1820s, an industry requiring slave labor. The Civil War began, followed in 1863 by the Emancipation Proclamation, but Woods ordeal continued. One of N.J.'s first instances of slavery is marked at this burial ground 27/02/2023 Kathy DeAngelo, a member of the historian commission from the Tinton Falls historical society shows the Crawford House and burial ground that was an iron mine where enslaved African Americans worked in Tinton Falls, NJ on Tuesday Feb. 14, 2023. Not everyone agreed with the verdict, but the facts of her horrific story were widely accepted as credible. In 1809 the property was sold at public auction to William Lock Chew for the sum of $7,000. Discovery Company. Gerod Brandon appears on the 1864 County Tax Rolls for Robertson County with no real estate, but 270 slaves valued at $108,000, as well as $5000 in Confederate Notes and $6,125 in horses, cattle, and other property. Brandon Plantation, one of the nation's oldest working farms along the James River in Prince George County, was sold to a family in Florida for $17.8 million. Wood was among them. Cookie Policy Slaves at the Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens. 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. Gerard Brandon, one of the largest slaveholders in the South, bought Wood and took her to his house, Brandon Hall, on the Natchez Trace. Begins September 29 entry. The postwar constitutional amendments that abolished slavery and extended national citizenship to ex-slaves enabled Wood to pursue Ward in federal court. II, p. 817, which claimed that at the beginning of the Civil War, Brandon owned a million dollars worth of slaves. From 1914 until the present, Brandon Hall Plantation has had ten owners. Most rural enslaved people were owned by masters who had 10-20 enslaved people, who often were housed in closer proximity to masters, perhaps sharing housing, and perhaps having access to closer relations with their masters than plantation slaves had. (That route is supported by a notation on page 5 of his journal showing that he paid a toll at Neches on July 21.). : Estate of Sara Brandon Rickey, 2000), 63n6., Thanks to Will Jones for locating Brandons name in the county tax rolls as part of his RA Assignments for Fall 2015., See Map of Robertson County, Portal to Texas History., Sandersons 72 slaves, valued at $64,800 appear in the Freestone County Tax Roles for 1864. Your Privacy Rights He would charge $5 an acre for cleared land & let me pay for it by picking cotton at $1 per 100 pounds. For more on Able, see Able Family. Harriss said many architectural features were kept true to the original design when the house was renovated in the mid-1980s, apart from closets, bathrooms, and the closed in porch. p.4: Some more deaths; notes about wagon loads, presumably of cotton bales; ferriage and tolls on the route to Texas, pp. He owned 700 to 800 slaves on several plantations, and he put me to work at once in the cotton field, she said. They carried cane knives (used . Brandon was a very rich man, Wood later said. Few white Americans wished to dwell on those evils. 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. Two days earlier, the jury had watched as Wood took the stand; her son, Arthur, who lived in Chicago, was in the courtroom. Ward planned to make Wood the latest victim of this trade, but she resolved to fight. Slavery was eventually abolished at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865. When the Horlbeck family bought the plantation in 1817, they opened up a brickyard and began producing bricks using the clay from the nearby Wampacheone Creek. Warsaw Indiana Website Design by 1Eighty Digital, 1744 Colonial For Sale In Norwich Connecticut. We sold all the negros 43 in number at astonishingly large prices the whole amounting to $32016. Reflects on James in the field. After Brandon and his wife died, the property changed hand numerous times, and with each sale, the vast acreage diminished. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. , gazebo, pond, 2 guest cottages brandon hall plantation slaves a town lot buildings!, bucket of butter, & would rejoice to hear the glad of... Instructs them not to trade with anyone & # x27 ; t been disguised as #. 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