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General Grant’s Cabin, Hopewell, VA

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What is: General Grant’s cabin at the Eppes Plantation

What was: For nearly a year, General Grant occupied a tent and later a cabin here, while he commanded his army in the final months of the Civil War. Grant hosted several visiting dignitaries, including Secretary of State William Seward, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and President Lincoln visited the site during the siege in 1864-5.

Grant chose the Eppes family Appomattox Plantation at City Point (now Hopewell, VA) for his headquarters and supply depot because of its strategic location, situated on a bluff overlooking the James and Appomattox rivers. It had a port and railroad access.  There was a telegraph station constructed in the house.  The Appomattox Plantation became central for the offices of the Quartermaster.

Grants operation occupied most of the front lawn, 22 log structures, as a major supply center serving 100,000 men who were besieging Petersburg and Richmond.  His supply base at City Point was one of the world’s busiest seaports and combined with the use of the Military Railroad for communication and transportation. The successful capture of Petersburg and its network of railroads was the key to the fall of the Confederate capital city of Richmond, ending the war less than a week later.

By May 1865 Dr. Richard Eppes had taken the Amnesty Oath but found that due to his wealth he did not qualify to benefit from the Amnesty Proclamation. He had to raise money to obtain the title to his land and to settle up with the Federal government, including purchase the structures the Union army left behind on his land before he could touch them. By early 1866, after a favorable transaction with the government, the plantation was back in his hands and by March his family was together again at City Point.

A major limitation to our understanding of the enslaved community is due to limited surviving archaeological sites. The family’s financial situation in the early twentieth century led to the sale of the Hopewell and Bermuda Hundred Farms, destroying the archaeological record of the slave quarters there.

 

What is: Appomattox Manor at City Point, Virginia, the town is now known as Hopewell, VA. It is most well known as Grants headquarters, part of the Petersburg National Battlefield

What was: The area around the plantation was first settled in 1613. Captain Francis Eppes originally acquired a large tract of land in 1635, encompassing area known as City Point, along the James River. Today the town is known as Hopewell, VA. The property remained in the Eppes family until 1979.

In 1844, at the age of 20, Dr. Richard Eppes, who had had earned his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania, inherited his ancestral home, Appomattox Manor at City Point, Virginia. When war broke out, Eppes enlisted in the 3rd Virginia cavalry and helped to equip the unit. Eppes then became a civilian contract surgeon for the Confederate army in Petersburg for the duration of the war.
Prior to the Civil War, Eppes owned nearly 130 slaves and 2,300 acres. The slaves performed the hard labor on this estate, as well as all the household functions. Eppes recorded truancy in labor, feigned illnesses, and theft of food. Most of the punishments for those people consisted of a reduction of rations or a whipping.

Just days after a Union raiding party landed at City Point, the Eppes’ family departed and all but 12 of the slaves cast their fortunes with the Union army. When General grant arrived at City Point he established his headquarters in a tent on the east lawn of Dr. Richard Eppes’ plantation. From tents on the east lawn, replaced in the winter with cabins, Grant and his officers coordinated the Union campaign. President Lincoln visited City Point twice during the siege to meet with his top military officers, and tour the Depot Field Hospital, the largest of the four military hospitals. Source: National Parks Service, Petersburg National Battlefield, Virginia

 

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The Slave Chapel at Bremo Bluff, Virginia

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What is: The parish house of Grace Episcopal Church, Bremo Bluff, Virginia

What was: The Bremo Plantation estate covers more than 1,500 acres in Fluvanna County, Virginia. Overlooking the James River, it is a rare property of its era, still owned by the family that built it in 1745.   The chapel was built in 1835 for the slaves as part of the vast plantation of General John Hartwell Cocke.

It is the state’s only known slave chapel and represents Cocke’s deep concern for the religious and moral edification of slaves. He had his slaves taught to read and decided that it was his Christian duty to provide them with religious instruction. Cocke was determined that his slaves should have their own house of worship and thus had the board-and-batten structure built on what became know as Chapel Field.

In total 246 people were enslaved here from 1781 – the earliest date on record – until 1865.  However, enslaved men also cleared the land and built a structure (which still stands) to claim the land grant in 1725. Bremo Plantation required numerous hands to keep the plantation running, and nearly all of this work fell onto the enslaved.

Despite the Cocke’s interest in education and religion for the slaves, according to Fluvanna Historical Society Representative Tricia Johnson, “The last few years before his death, Cocke wrote that enslavement was the natural order of things and it wouldn’t be possible to end the practice.”

Cocke’s need to make Bremo Plantation as self-supporting as possible forced his slaves to do almost all of the work in keeping Cocke’s idea of self-supporting. When the enslaved failed to do so they had to endure physical punishments such as whippings and starvation. He had no qualms against separating families if it meant his plantation was more efficient.

 

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Hot Tin Roof, Sharecropping, Stovall Plantation, MS

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What is: Sharecroppers home, hot tin roof at the edge of the Stovall Plantation

What was: The Stovall Plantation is about 6 miles northwest of Clarksdale.  It’s 4000 acres of cotton and soybeans and been in the family since 1836. Clarksdale made the blues and sent the music north; it was the starting point of the Great Migration during which 5 million blacks left the South from 1940 to the mid-’60s, each heading for a new life in the North.

McKinley Morganfield moved there when his mother died in 1915. He was just 3 years old, and he came to be raised by his grandmother in her sharecropper’s shack on the plantation. He picked up a nickname, Muddy Waters, and started fooling around with music in his early teens, first the harmonica, then guitar. He played all around town, at suppers and get-togethers; he played on the front porch of the shack, on Saturday nights turning the place into his own juke joint, complete with homemade whiskey.

It took years, but he built a reputation, and it brought him recognition before he was 30. In 1940, Alan Lomax, the folklore collector at the Library of Congress, traveled to the Delta to record the music of Robert Johnson, the undisputed wild man of blues music. Trouble was, Johnson had been dead for nearly three years, poisoned by strychnine-laced whiskey one hot Saturday night at a roadhouse in Three Forks. Legend has it he had been fooling around with the roadhouse owner’s wife, and that was that. Or maybe he was stabbed; after more than 50 years, details remain sketchy.

So Lomax discovered he’d missed Johnson, but he heard about this guy named Muddy Waters at the Stovall Plantation. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/travel/1993/07/04/where-the-blues-were-born/8efc1c14-e178-45df-b79b-3e15ba8ea3f6/).

 

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Cotton Gin Outside Clarksdale, MS

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What is: Cotton Gin near Friars Point, Mississippi. Abandoned cotton gin between Clarksdale and Friars Point, MS.

What was: Founded in the 1830s and continuing to operate into the 20th century, the King and Anderson Plantation was an enormous spread of seventeen thousand acres just northwest of Clarksdale and reputed to be the largest family plantation in Mississippi. It was located near this Cotton Gin.

Originally, large plantations had their own private cotton gins. Over time, the increasing number of smaller farms, the emergence of sharecropping after the civil war and new technologies led to the rise of public gins. By the early twentieth century, large, public facilities that not only ginned cotton but also sold seeds to cottonseed oil firms, populated nearly every town and county in the state’s cotton belt.

In addition to the economic function, public gins served a social function. “Trips to the gin provided farmers living in the far reaches of Mississippi’s counties with breaks in the tedium and solitude of toiling on small, isolated farms. The same gins served black and white farmers, and gin operators made no efforts to serve whites before blacks. While waiting in line to gin their cotton, farmers of both races came together to discuss pests, weather patterns, and prices. As shared public spaces, therefore, gins offered brief respites from the stifling confines of Mississippi’s racial caste system.” Source: https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/cotton-gins/.

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The Bremo Bluff Post Office, Bremo Bluff, Virginia

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What is: The Bremo Bluff Post Office, Bremo Bluff, Virginia

What was: Bremo Bluff is an unincorporated community located on the northern bank of the James River in Fluvanna County, Virginia, United States. The locale was established by the Cocke family in 1636. The Bremo plantation covered 1500 acres and included three separate estates, all created in the 19th century by the planter, soldier, and reformer John Hartwell Cocke on his family’s 1725 land grant.  In total 246 people were enslaved there from 1781 – the earliest date on record – until 1865.  However, enslaved men also cleared the land and built a structure (which still stands) to claim the land grant in 1725. During the American Civil War, the family of General Robert E. Lee sought refuge in the community.

Around 1840, the James River and Kanawha Company developed a series of locks and canals that improved river transportation. A boat wharf was built to accommodate the river traffic that became an important part of the local economy by the 1850s. In 1895, Bremo Bluff had a population of 72 people with a post office and railroad service. The railway at Bremo Bluff soon became one of the five busiest stops for passenger and freight traffic for the Richmond Allegany Railway. By 1918, four trains each day were stopping at the town.

In 1931, the Virginia Electric & Power Company constructed a 30-megawatt coal-fired power station along the path of the James River Line at Bremo Bluff. Bremo Power Station was operated most recently by Dominion Energy.

Today, The Bremo Bluff Post Office serves 930 Bremo Bluff residents. It’s estimated that approximately 1,484 packages pass through this post office each year. #

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Cotton Gin near Friars Point, Mississippi

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What is: an abandoned cotton gin between Clarksdale and Friars Point, MS.

What was: Founded in the 1830s and continuing to operate into the 20th century, the King and Anderson Plantation was an enormous spread of seventeen thousand acres just northwest of Clarksdale and reputed to be the largest family plantation in Mississippi. Originally, large plantations had their own private cotton gins. Over time, the increasing number of smaller farms, the emergence of sharecropping after the civil war and new technologies led to the rise of public gins.

By the early twentieth century, large, public facilities that not only ginned cotton but also sold seeds to cottonseed oil firms, populated nearly every town and county in the state’s cotton belt. In addition to the economic function, public gins served a social function. “Trips to the gin provided farmers living in the far reaches of Mississippi’s counties with breaks in the tedium and solitude of toiling on small, isolated farms. The same gins served black and white farmers, and gin operators made no efforts to serve whites before blacks. While waiting in line to gin their cotton, farmers of both races came together to discuss pests, weather patterns, and prices. As shared public spaces, therefore, gins offered brief respites from the stifling confines of Mississippi’s racial caste system.” Source: https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/cotton-gins/.

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