plantation house

Plantation House Series: James Reddick Barnes house.

The James Reddick Barnes house, built between 1850 and 1860, stands well back off the road in Saratoga township, southeast of Wilson. It is not registered with the National Register of Historic Places.

In the 1860 slave schedule, James R. Barnes reported enslaving 41 people and controlling another 32 as trustee for minors. (Though unnamed in the census, those minors included the Isaac Scarborough heirs.) In June 1856, two people he jointly owned with others, Cate and Sherard, were sold at auction at a toll house on White Oak Swamp. As high bidder, Barnes was able to buy them back.

In 1950 and 1960, the Wilson Daily Times ran articles on historic Wilson County houses, most of which had anchored plantations. The James R. Barnes house was featured twice.

Wilson Daily Times, 10 January 1950.

Ten years later, the house’s history had stretched a bit. Now the claim was that the house itself, rather than the land, had passed through seven generations from John Barnes. However, Barnes died in 1789 and his grandson Reddick Barnes in 1835, and great-grandson James Reddick Barnes actually built the house. (Also note the incorrect suffixes added to the names of the owners, i.e. III, IV, and VI. They are the result of the reporter’s incorrect interpretation of the owner’s generation of ownership, as spelled out in the 1950 Times article.)

Wilson Daily Times, 8 January 1960.

 

First notes from Mississippi.

Obviously, I am terrible at taking breaks.

I’m in Columbus, Mississippi, this morning, about to head home. I came to search for traces of Wyatt Moye and Robert S. Adams, slavetraders who funneled enslaved people from eastern North Carolina, including what is now Wilson County, to the notorious slave markets at Aberdeen, Mississippi.

I spent Juneteenth copying deeds at Chancery Court; talking settlement of Mississippi, the internal slave trade, and convict leasing with a local brother looking at property records for his church; poring over old news columns at the public library; and dodging mad thunderstorms.

It’s hard, heavy stuff, but the warmth of the folks I’ve encountered has countered the weight. I’ll share some photos today and gradually write up what I’ve found.

Aberdeen is an old town by Mississippi standards and was a powerhouse in the antebellum era. Still, from an outsider’s perspective, it doesn’t lean heavily into magnolias and Big House tropes, though it’s got plenty of both.

Tina Robbins at the Visitor’s Bureau provided a wonderful welcome to town and lots of helpful material, including an African-American history driving tour.

Paradise Alley was back of the main street, and the block in which Black folk once gathered for shopping and entertainment among their own. 

Slavetrading was good money. This was Robert S. Adams’ house in Aberdeen. 

The Tombigbee at sunset, Columbus.

I would pay good money for these kind of clearly delineated property records. Props to Monroe County.

Or these.

Both the Choctaw and Chickasaw have ties to this area. Waterways still flow with indigenous names — Tombigbee, Luxapallila, Buttahatchee, Boguegaba, Boguefala, Mattubby, Tubbalubba, Tallabinnela. And deed books reflect the transfers of property from Native people after the Chickasaw Cession of 1832.

Wyatt Moye’s house in Aberdeen. He later moved on to Louisiana to expand his human trafficking activity.

The Masonic Temple.

Home of Bukka White, and maybe Howling Wolf and Albert King.

Y’all know I love a vernacular headstone artist. This was the most remarkable marker of several in Monroe County’s Mount Hebron Missionary Baptist Church cemetery. The stone reads: Nubin White Jr. born Oct. 25 1935 Died Sept. 4 1980 He Drove The School Bus For Ten Years In Aberdeen He Work At Antional Cushion Spring Co.

Plantation House Series: Lewis Rountree house. [Updated.]

I thought this antebellum house was built by a Woodard, but according to a state GIS map, it’s “Roundtree house (A. Cozart house).”

What does that mean? Where did I get Woodard from?

I first saw this house from the windows of my elementary school bus as it rumbled east from my neighborhood, Bel Air Forest, to pick up Robin, a boy who lived a mile down the highway. The road curved, then split, with NC-58 headed southeast to Stantonsburg and 264 more easterly to Saratoga. The two-story house sat in plain view on the north side of 264, up a dirt track. I can’t recall if the house was occupied then, but judging by its condition when I took these photographs circa 1991, I think not. In, as I recall, the late 1990s, the intersection was reconfigured, but the house stood until the early 2000s.

Detail from map of Wilson County at HPOWEB 2.0, nc.maps.arcgis.com. 

I did a little poking in deeds. Long story short, S.H. Cozart bought a bundle of parcels, including this one, from Graham Woodard in 1941. Graham Woodard had inherited the property as the only child of Fannie Rountree Woodard, who died in 1894. Fannie Woodard, whose husband Frederick A. Woodard we have met, had inherited it from her father Moses Rountree, the wealthy 19th-century Wilson merchant.

Wilson Advance, 30 November 1883.

Per the Nomination Form for the Moses Rountree House, built about 1869 in town, Rountree “was born in 1822 on the family plantation several miles east of the present city of Wilson on what is now Route 264.”

Detail of a 1894 survey map found in the Moses Rountree estate file showing two lots inherited by Graham Woodard. As the aerial image below shows, the main landscape features remain the same — Toisnot Swamp and its small tributary, a forked road. A tiny square marked “House” is the house in question.

No longer looking for a Woodard property, I went back to Kate Ohno’s Wilson County’s Architectural Heritage and voila — the Rountree House, believed to have been built  about 1830 by Moses Rountree’s father Lewis Rountree. (Lewis Rountree enslaved Hilliard Ellis and Warren Rountree, among a few dozen others. Moses Rountree also was a slaveowner, acknowledging three adults and one infant in the 1860 slave schedule.)

Per Kate Ohno, the Rountree House.

But wait. The house depicted in the book is not the house I photographed, though both were two-story structures built during the antebellum period. The most immediately noticeable difference is that the house above has a hipped roof and hip-roof porch, and Ohno’s house has a gable roof and shed-roof porch. But there are other inconsistencies — the number of chimneys, the number of porch posts and second-story windows, the ashlar skirting.

I’m back to square one.

Aerial image (via Google Maps) of Rountree-Woodard-Cozart property. Toisnot Swamp runs at bottom right. Its Mill Branch (2) is visible as a line of trees and a dammed pond. The approximate location of the house is (1).

Estate of Moses Rountree (1884), North Carolina Wills and Probate Records 1665-1998, http://www.ancestry.com.

[UPDATE, 16 March 2025: A course correction and comment on the fallibility of memory. Yesterday, I shared this post with members of Wilson County Historical Association in hopes that someone could help unravel the mystery. Among others, Cliff Darden responded and shared his own childhood recollection of the gable-roof Rountree house.  I began to wonder if I were conflating two distinct memories — seeing this house from my school bus window in the mid-1970s and photographing a house in the early 1990s. Though I was not sure the data would go back far enough, I checked Google Maps’ Streetview for images of the site. Voila — here’s the January 2008 view:

The resolution is terrible, but that’s clearly the gable-roof Rountree house. The house had disappeared by time the next image was made in 2012 (and the barn several years later.)

Where, then, did I take the photographs above? I lived in New York City at the time, and on visits home would ramble the backroads of Wilson and Wayne and Edgecombe and Nash Counties, photographing abandoned farmsteads with a Canon AE-1. I’m looking for my contact sheets and will update this post again if I’m able to pinpoint the location. I am reminded of the value of interrogating my own memories and am grateful for the time taken by others to share theirs.]

Plantation House Series: Peacock-Applewhite-Yelverton house, again.

A sign hanging at the driveway entrance reads Maywood Manor, Est. 1850, and the large, four-columned portico plays into stereotypes of plantation Big House. In fact, per Stantonsburg Historical Society’s A History of Stantonsburg Circa 1780 to 1980 (1981), though slaveholder James Peacock built this house on the northwestern outskirts of Stantonsburg about 1860, the fancy entrance was not added until 1914. Here’s the house with its original exterior. (Also — “Maywood Manor”???)

Photo by Lisa Y. Henderson, March 2024.

Plantation House Series: William and Elizabeth Simms Woodard house.

Wilson Times, 10 January 1950.

We have studied the cluster of plantations owned by the Woodard family near White Oak Swamp here, as well as the disposition of enslaved people held by William and Elizabeth Simms Woodard. The photos above and below depict the Woodards’ house, built in 1832.

Though the house seems to have been in fine form in the early 1980s, when the second photograph was taken, it has since been demolished.

Lower photo courtesy of Woodard Family Rural Historic District nomination form.