Descendants of Georgia enslaved people wrestle with legacies of surviving plantations
Massive plots of land rise to the surface with each rolling hill on the country roads to southern Georgia.
In Thomasville, just minutes from the Florida border, privately owned antebellum-era Pebble Hill Plantation continues to thrive in the 21st century with historical tours and event spaces. Nearby, residents sift through a livelihood where the estate doesn’t just loom in the background, but acts as a forefront attraction in the community.
Sharing fond memories of growing up on land where his ancestors lived in bondage is empowering for James “Jack” Hadley.
Hadley, the grandson of formerly enslaved Richard Hadley Sr., was born on the antebellum-era Pebble Hill Plantation in 1936. His family continued to live and work on the property after emancipation.
He recalled seasons where the Black laborers and their families played baseball games, celebrated Christmas, held church services and attended schools on the premises.
“We always had a big Easter celebration on the plantation,” 89-year-old Hadley reminisced on his time growing up at Pebble Hill.
Just under a year shy of the country’s 250th birthday, Black Americans continue to reckon with an America founded on the ideals of freedom that simultaneously shackled their ancestors at physical institutions that still stand.
Many ponder the purpose and symbolism plantations hold in a modern society, whether those historical landmarks stand as antebellum remnants of nostalgia or as physical reminders that Black people were not considered human in a country founded on freedom.
Either way, multiple legacies are embedded within the foundational structures of plantations.
Today, the structures are still used as tools for white superiority, says director of public history and historic preservation at Morehouse College, Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, Ph.D.
“For white (people), plantations may reflect a symbol of white superiority that other whites may aspire to achieve: white wealth, white power, white political power, economic power,” she said. “It’s also the romanticization of the South and the Confederacy.”
Rather than viewing them as elegant mansions and high society, Sims-Alvarado, a Black woman, said it’s important to acknowledge the cruelty that also took place.
In May, Louisiana’s Nottoway Resort — listed as the largest surviving antebellum plantation — was destroyed by a fire. A place heralded mainly as a popular wedding venue, Nottoway’s destruction led to a deeper discussion of pre-Civil War estates where Black people were forced to labor.
Reclaiming history
Founded in the early 19th century by Thomas Jefferson Johnson, Pebble Hill was worked by slave labor to farm cotton, corn, sugar cane and tobacco. After the Civil War, many of the formerly enslaved Black Americans stayed on the property and worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers — even when ownership of the land switched to another family.
The Black families who had essentially grown up on the property maintained a relationship with the estate — which eventually grew to about 3,000 acres — even after the property moved from being a residential space to a historical site in 1978.
Unlike his forefathers, Hadley’s life took him in a different direction and away from Pebble Hill Plantation. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force upon graduating from high school, before returning home to a career with the Postal Service and opening a Black history museum in Thomasville.
“This organization’s main objective is to get the message to our young people that Black Americans have done great things to help build and shape America — its goals and dreams,” the Jack Hadley Black History Museum states on its website. “The organization feels that all children, regardless of race, need to know the accomplishments of Black men and women in American History.”
Pebble Hill’s Curtis said Hadley’s involvement in the history of Pebble Hill has helped boost the interest of other enslaved descendants, which has included a family reunion at the plantation.
“Jack is a big part of our storytelling here (at Pebble Hill),” Curtis said. “It grows every year because more and more people are getting interested in their genealogy,” Curtis said.
‘It was very emotional’
At Jarrell Plantation in central Georgia, descendants of the enslaved do not necessarily have on-site reunions like those at Pebble Hill, but many live around the Macon metropolitan area and recognize there could be some relation because of their unique last name.
“We’re proud of who we are, even though our history may have come from a time when things were not acceptable,” descendant Earnestine Jarrell Broady explained.
Nestled on the back roads of Juliet, Georgia, Jarrell Plantation was established in 1847 and grew into a 600-acre cotton plantation labored by enslaved African Americans.
After the Civil War and General William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops raided Confederate properties, including Jarrell, the Jarrell family continued operating and expanding the site until it was donated to the state in 1974.
Jarrell Broady didn’t realize her association with the plantation until she conducted research for a regional cookbook about 40 years ago. She is the great-great-granddaughter of Reason Jarrell, the mixed-race son of enslaved Polly and white plantation owner John Fitz Jarrell.
“When I was doing my research on my regional cookbook, I actually walked the entire plantation and I saw the house where (Reason) lived,” Jarrell Broady said. “It was very emotional.”
Though acknowledging that she had mixed emotions about the relationship between Polly and the enslaver that she deduced was nonconsensual, Jarrell Broady said she was proud to know her family’s origins.
“A lot of people don’t know where their family lineage started, and I’m just pleased to be able to say that I do.”
Reason Jarrell had a home on the Jarrell property, not far from his white relatives. After years of being unoccupied and not maintained, Reason’s house was demolished when the plantation became a state-owned historic site.
Jarrell Broady managed to obtain an old fireplace brick and door hinge before the structure was razed.
“Those were the only things that were really solid that I could take away and have some type of memory of my great-great-great-grandfather.”
Hiding in plain sight
Plantations do not just sit in rural areas outside cities. Within the Atlanta metro, the Archibald Smith Plantation — within walking distance of Roswell City Hall — is free to the public as a national historic site.
Anthony Gaba-Delacroix, who walks by the plantation to get to work at a restaurant, said it’s important for Black people to know the history of the grounds.
“Right now, for my feet to be able to walk on this land that our ancestors or past generations have suffered in, there’s a kind of freeing sense to that,” he said. “All of this community that’s affluent and very wealthy was built on the backs of our people, and where are they?”
Similarly, Lateshia Woodley of Atlanta, who took her granddaughters to visit Archibald Smith Plantation in June, said she wants the girls to know and understand the complexity of history.
“There’s a place for (plantations), for us to understand that these systems of oppression existed,” she explained. “It’s important in today’s history. I believe if you don’t know your history, you’re bound to repeat it.
“There’s a place in the modern day for those particular structures. However, I don’t believe that they should be romanticized as some have been.”
‘The romanticization of the South’
Outside of historical tours, there has been a resurgence in the aesthetics of plantation culture.
Though the original antebellum structures no longer exist, the Pebble Hill Plantation, which is privately owned, does book private events to help offset property finances, Curtis said.
“There’s a lot of controversy surrounding weddings at plantations. That’s all a personal choice,” she said, adding that people may not consider how it makes others feel. “They don’t take into account any of the historical reflection at all.”
Sims-Alvarado, also the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Preserve Black Atlanta Inc. to save historical landmarks, explained, “There were very few whites who actually had very large plantations like (in ‘Gone With the Wind’).”
She said people who celebrate plantations today are attempting to channel a mythological elite lifestyle without recognizing the horrors and inhuman practices that took place. They need to understand the horrors that took place.
Joseph McGill Jr., a former park ranger who founded the nonprofit history organization The Slave Dwelling Project, said plantations that continue to operate need to rectify their past by bridging relationships with descendants of the enslaved.
“(Descendants) are just looking for that connection to where their families, their ancestors were enslaved,” he explained, noting that reparation funds should be collected when plantations charge fees for admission or allow private events like weddings.
“It was about money then. Keep it about money,” McGill stated. “Tell these wedding planners or these wedding folks who want to have their weddings on plantations that a portion of their wedding fee is going to that reparations fund.”
Now at 70, Jarrell Broady said she and the rest of her family take pride in having ancestral ownership of the Jarrell Plantation, but it is still a heavy weight to carry because of the foundations of racial inequality.
“There’s some degree of pride associated with knowing where you come from. But every single day we’re reminded, as Black people, that we really don’t have the freedoms that we think we have,” Jarrell Broady said.
As a child, Hadley’s grandfather Richard, who was born enslaved, was given a bullhorn by Pebble Hill Plantation original owner Johnson. He used the bullhorn to alert those who were enslaved on the plantation when it was time to work in the morning and then again at night. Richard kept the bullhorn until his death in 1910.
The bullhorn sat on the mantlepiece when Hadley was growing up. He said he never knew the meaning behind it until he moved back to Thomasville as an adult.
Now, the bullhorn rests at the museum in honor of Hadley’s grandfather and others who have made the sacrifice for his freedom.
“I want the people to be happy to celebrate Black history,” said Hadley.
“We survived. We made it.”
About the Author
Brooke Leigh Howard is a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Black culture team, UATL.
