Chapter 5 Southern Plantation.
It all started in a fairly normal travelogue way. I travelled to Uncle Theodore the Elder’s plantation and described the landscape. Georgia …a bit of history… Antebellum antecedents… the house, veiled by moss, guarded by red cedar, charred portraits, very remote …
I continued hoping for some humorous encounters with eccentric locals or sinister tales to wet an anti-tourist tourist’s appetite.
To see the elegant façade at dusk strangers wonder why landowner Uncle Theodore the Younger, all cigar smoke and scratchy blues, allows such a grand colonnaded house to be approached by a farm track. Well he’s a poker player... Here I make an important distinction between Theodore the Elder still hobbling about the orchards and cotton fields scythe in hand and Theodore the Younger.
This used to be a big farm back in the day. Since the fire of ’49 (1849 that is) nothing remains of the plantation house but the façade; restored in 1952 by an over earnest Georgia Preservation Society.
Away went the blackened face and charcoaled French windows. At the Western end a curved stone stair case now goes nowhere, its Yankee iron rails twisted by a Confederate fire. The Georgia Preservation Society-gave up in 1953 beaten by great uncle Theodore’s selfish and peculiar desire to set up home in his own house.
He constructed a legal conundrum: skilfully affixing a shack according to the GPS, though by any other standards a large elegant wooden room attached just behind the Eastern end of the stone façade. To the GPS a blemish on the face of sweet DixieLand . So bitter was the battle (covered with glee by the Georgia Post) visitors came from five states to see for themselves the holy fuss.
It’s a quiet place these days if you discount the odd family who settled out- back after the war and of course the Princeton academics: a childless black couple dry as Palmetto fans. Their research on “Stair Cases of the South-A Social and Economic History” runs to three volumes. Our stair case to heaven ticks all their scholarly boxes.
Lamps glow through wavy glass. The shack-Georgia parlance-is a large oak room with a kitchen and stove running along the side wall. Beyond this other rooms have been added: a bathroom with indoor running water-sometimes; four bedrooms of varying sizes the usual suspect furniture liberated from the original house. A narrow hickory staircase leads up to a shot gun study.
What was obscure was why the confederates or possibly Klansmen sent a letter to the family stating the house was to be raised to the ground, giving the date. The landowner and his wife were away in Charleston so their nine surviving children cleared the house with three freed house slaves of as much crystal, paintings and furniture as they could carry. They then hid across the river and returned to the smouldering ruin two days later.
I found the letter in a box with faded photographs showing an uncanny resemblance between the landowner and his wife, their children and two of the freed slaves Merlin and Dora.
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