Amanda's school daze

I have a letter written in 1984 about our family history from a member of the Moranda* branch. In this letter the writer says that Amanda Caroline went to college. Most of the information in this letter seems to depend on a couple of letters Basil Edmondson Newton wrote to his daughter Audrey in the 1920s.  But although Basil Edmondson Newton did write in one of those letters that his mother taught school later on in her life, this notion that she had gone to college was new to me.

I'm generally a little bit skeptical of family lore. But I thought I'd check out this statement, and it turns out to be true. The second school in Georgia that I emailed checked their records and reported back that both Amanda Caroline and her younger sister Harriet attended LaGrange Female College in 1853 and graduated in 1854.

From the 1855 catalogue, courtesy of LaGrange College Library.

LaGrange began as a school for girls, then was chartered by the state legislature in 1831 as LaGrange Female Academy. In 1847 it became LaGrange Female Institute, and the legislature gave it the authority to grant degrees. In 1851 it became LaGrange Female College. Most early colleges in the US were organized by religious denominations, and LaGrange was not an exception. It had always been run by Methodist clergy, and after 1857 it was under the jurisdiction of the North Georgia Methodist Conference, which it still is, as LaGrange College. It was founded remarkably early for a women's college, and it's said to be the oldest private college in Georgia.  

We don't know why James and Rebecca Edmondson decided to send their daughters to college. Being able to teach was considered a good way for a woman to earn a living in case her husband died or she never married.  And it certainly became useful for Amanda Caroline later on, as we shall see. Maybe  Rebecca and James were thinking of this. We also don't know what these young women learned, or who was teaching them. I'll try to do a bit more research about the college after Christmas and write about it then.



*The Morandas are our cousins, the descendants of Basil Edwin Newton's sister Nona Mae. So we share a set of great (or great-great, depending on your generation) grandparents, Nora Alice White and Basil Edmondson Newton. We used to know some of them, but we've kind of lost touch. 

Benjamin Hardin Newton's Civil War, 1862-1864

We last left Benjamin recuperating, probably at Spring Place, in the late summer and fall of 1862. It was the twilight of plantation life. A year later James S. Edmondson would sell his north Georgia property, gather his household, and seek refuge in the relative tranquility of southwestern Georgia. You would think the planters would have realized how little time they had left, but we don't really know if James Edmondson was a realist or a wishful thinker or somewhere in between. In any event, when the Edmondsons finally left Spring Place in the summer of 1863, James had already sold the property. In the years to come, many Edmondsons would be carried back to Spring Place and buried in the graveyard there.  But as living breathing human beings, after the summer of 1863 they were scattered to the four winds, and it was never their home again.

Georgians had thought the state would not be invaded, buffered from the major action as it was by the Carolinas. But they were wrong. If you look at a map of the battles and skirmishes and campaigns in Georgia, you see that a great deal of it ran along the railway line between Atlanta and Tennessee, right through the heart of northwestern Georgia. Gaining control of that railway was a chief strategy for the Union. The Edmondson family had been wise to leave.

Courtesy The National Park Service

The second major area of battle was of course around Atlanta itself, and Sherman's devastating sweep from there to Savannah, at the end of the war.  

Benjamin Newton had spent the first part of his war in Virginia, if not on the front lines of battle, at least within the realm of it. The rest of his war would be fought here in Georgia, in the midst of an increasingly disorganized military and a crumbling administrative infrastructure, as the Confederacy went down to defeat.

Three months after his resignation from the 11th Regiment, in the fall of 1862, Benjamin was serving as 1st Lieutenant and Adjutant with the Georgia Dragoons, headquartered not far from Spring Place, in Dalton.* (You can read about Dalton during this time here, if you want.) Records from February and March 1863 show that he was now a 1st Lieutenant in the 4th Cavalry, commanding recruits, and still headquartered in Dalton. In Dalton, in February, he requisitioned and paid for a pair of shoes, costing five dollars. Benjamin did not move from the Dragoons to the 4th Cavalry; the Dragoons were reorganized in 1863 into the 4th Cavalry, and later into the 12th Cavalry. So he was serving in the same cavalry unit from October 1862 until he received a special assignment in April 1864.  

It seems that Benjamin's health continued to decline. Records from Floyd House and Ocmulgee Hospitals in Macon show that he was on sick leave by the beginning of 1864. At the end of January, he returned to duty. But in mid-February he was back at Ocmulgee Hospital, from where he was transferred to the hospital at La Grange, with a diagnosis of tuberculosis.

As the war moved into its final, terrible months and Benjamin became more obviously ill, he and Amanda Caroline married. They were married in Macon in December 1863, possibly while he was actually in the hospital. Their marriage was performed by a Baptist preacher in Macon who was involved in the pastoral care of soldiers at the hospitals there. Both the bride and the groom were twenty six years old.  It's hard to imagine what they were feeling on the day of their marriage. Was it hope? Determination? Joy? Grief?

Bibb County Marriage Book, courtesy of The Georgia Archives

In the middle of March 1864 Benjamin requisitioned a new revolver from the Macon Arsenal, for which he paid fifty five dollars. (A sign perhaps of hope, or maybe determination.) Four months after his marriage and two months after his diagnosis, at the end of April 1864, Benjamin was assigned to special duty as the Enrolling Officer for the 7th Congressional District. It was a desk job, suited for someone frail. He proceeded to Griffin Georgia, a bit to the south of Atlanta, to begin his new post. Amanda Caroline probably went with him to Griffin.

In May and June of 1864 Benjamin requisitioned stationery, including letter paper, envelopes, steel pens, lead pencils, and blank books. In June he informed his superiors that  " I am entirely out of paper and it cannot be 'had' here." He needed the supplies urgently, and wanted them sent right away by the hand of a Private Bush. Benjamin seems to have been determined to stick to his post and to do his work as best he could, even while General Sherman was finishing up the destruction of Atlanta, just a few miles away, and about to begin his march to the sea.  

*The sources for this post and the preceding one are a collection of photocopied records from the archives of the Confederate army, which (mysteriously) I have.

Benjamin Hardin Newton's Civil War, 1861-1862

After leaving his job as a ranger on the Butterfield Overland Mail Service, Benjamin Hardin Newton left Arkansas in early 1861 and traveled to his relatives in Spring Place, Murray County Georgia.  He may not have met his Georgia relatives before this, since travel between Georgia and Arkansas would not have been easy.  But James Edmondson, the patriarch of Spring Place, was Benjamin's maternal uncle. The Arkansas and Georgia branches of the family would have kept in touch over the years, since other family members had also settled in northwest Arkansas.

So Cousin Benjamin arrived in Spring Place in the spring of 1861. That may have been an idyllic time for Benjamin, as he got to know his cousins and experienced a taste of what was probably a more luxurious life than he had been used to in Fort Smith, which was really a rough frontier town. Of course this life he was tasting was about to be completely swept away.

In July, Company C --called the Murray County Rifles-- of the 11th Georgia Infantry was formed. Benjamin joined on the very first day of its organization, as a private.* His younger cousin and future brother-in-law Tom Polk Edmondson joined too, also as a private. As the company and its regiment were being organized, Benjamin was made adjutant of the regiment and a second lieutenant.  From that point he was no longer in Company C, but became a member of the general officer staff of the regiment. Adjutant was primarily an administrative position that entailed assisting the officers and maintaining the organization.  His appointment as adjutant suggests that he was at least decently well educated; and the letters and notes that appear in his service file suggest the same thing.

The 11th Georgia Infantry was a volunteer unit, but not everybody was a volunteer. Some -- maybe just the officers -- had appointments in the Regular Army. The difference between being a regular rather than a volunteer was, of course, a pay check. Late in 1861 Benjamin applied for an appointment as a regular officer, which he received.  His service record includes notes he wrote about his application as well as letters of recommendation from his superior officers, who describe him as "gallant," "efficient,"  "prompt and energetic," and "a young man of much promise." It's also from these recommendations that we learn about his experience with Butterfield.  

His regiment saw action at the Battle of Yorktown and at Williamsburg and in other engagements of the Peninsula Campaign around Richmond.  It was probably during this campaign that Benjamin was wounded, since his  medical report is dated June 24th, a few weeks later.

Battle of Seven Pines, or Fair Oaks.  Courtesy of The Library of Congress.

At the end of June 1862 Benjamin resigned from the Army with a medical discharge. The brigade surgeon reported that Benjamin was unfit for service because of a wound in the hip and also because he was suffering from chronic diarrhea. (This was one of the worst scourges of the Civil War, and claimed more lives than battlefield injuries.)

After he resigned, Benjamin probably returned to Spring Place to recuperate.  Because of his resignation, Benjamin missed the most horrific battles of the war. But his resignation did not end his military service. After making a recovery, he  re-enlisted in late 1862.

Map of the Peninsula Campaign Courtesy of The Civil War Trust

*For some odd reason I have 42 pages of old, very poor, photocopies of Benjamin Hardin Newton's official Confederate service record. On the first page is written, "Please return to Earl Arnett" but obviously that didn't happen. It's a little hard to piece together all the various bits of this record. But this is what I have come up with, based on what's there, as well as corroborating material at the Library of Congress Soldiers and Sailors site.  

Benjamin Hardin Newton (1837-1873)

Benjamin Hardin Newton was born in 1837, probably in Big Creek Township in what was then Crawford County Arkansas. In 1851 this part of Crawford County, along the southern border of the Arkansas River, was annexed to Sebastian County. This part of Arkansas was opening up to settlement by whites as the government continued to move the eastern Indian tribes further west, into Indian Territory, which  would eventually become Oklahoma.

This detail of a map of Arkansas shows Fort Smith at the very western edge of the state, bordering Indian Territory. The map shows that Sebastian County has annexed that part of Crawford County south of the Arkansas River where Basil and his wife once lived. 

It seems from the census records that Benjamin and his sister Amelia and younger brothers David C. and Thomas A. grew up first in Big Creek Township -- which was called a Township but was not really a town at all but very wild -- and then in nearby Fort Smith, which was wild too, in a different way. Their father, Basil Newton, died sometime before 1850, and maybe their mother took them to live in Fort Smith after that. Or maybe the family was already living in Fort Smith when Basil died.

It's likely that their mother was a sister of James S. Edmondson, who was Amanda Caroline's father. We know this because Basil Edmondson Newton, Amanda and Benjamin's son, said so in a letter he wrote to his own daughter. The 1850 census shows a Mariah Campbell, seamstress, and the Newton children living in Fort Smith next door to Samuel Edmondson, who was probably another Edmondson brother. Old Thomas Edmondson, James S. Edmondson's father, had come out to northwestern Arkansas from Elbert County Georgia at some point, and his daughter may have come with him and met and married Basil Newton sometime in the early 1830s. So Amanda Caroline Edmondson and and Benjamin Hardin Newton were first cousins. It may seem strange to us, but it was not all that uncommon back then.

In the 1860 census, Maria Newton is still living next door to Samuel Edmondson's son James and his family. Samuel Edmondson has remarried and is living in another house not far away.  In 1860, the youngest Newton son, Thomas, was still at home, but sons David and Benjamin were not living with in the Newton household any longer.

I don't think this Mariah Campbell or Mariah Newton is the Edmondson sister who married Basil Newton and was the mother of Benjamin. There is a Mariah Edmondson who could well belong to that group of brothers and sisters, but she married someone else, in Georgia, and was still living in Georgia with her husband and children in 1850. So Mariah Campbell or Mariah Newton is more likely to have been Benjamin's step-mother. His mother probably died in the middle to late 1840s. We really don't know any more about her yet.

At some point in 1860, Benjamin began to work for the Butterfield Overland Express.  He later said that he had served as a ranger with Butterfield for eight months before the early part of 1861. Butterfield's route carried the mail and passengers from St. Louis to San Francisco. Fort Smith was a major hub along the route, which took a southerly route through Arizona. Since he said he worked on the Plains, he likely worked on the portion of the route from Fort Smith through Oklahoma and into Texas. What did a ranger do? I don't know -- ride shot-gun? It all sounds very wild westish. He was twenty three years old.

Butterfield Overland Mail Route

What we see when we look at an old photograph

Here's a photograph of Rebecca Banks Edmondson, Amanda Caroline's mother.

The photograph raises some basic research questions for us. Most simply: how do we know the identity of the woman in the  picture? I have a whole pile of photographs of other people from the nineteenth century that are not labelled. Sometimes I can figure out who somebody is, but most of the time, I can't.

In this case, though, we got lucky. Somebody wrote on the back: "Grandmother Edmondson." It could have been her only grandson Basil Edmondson Newton who wrote it, or maybe it was his mother, Amanda Caroline. I really can't imagine how we have this. The most likely possibility would be that Basil Edwin Newton (your great-grandfather if you are in Nathan Gray's or Aaron Yarbrough's generation) got it from his father, Basil Edmondson Newton. This leads to another story that explains why we don't know more than we do about this Edmondson-Newton part of our common family history.

In 1903, Basil Edmondson Newton abandoned his pregnant wife Nora Alice and his four small children, including Basil Edwin Newton, in southern California, where they had been living for a few years.  We'll learn more about this later.  He remarried a few years later, and after a bit more knocking around got himself a steady gig as pastor of a church in Hope, Arkansas. His son Basil Edwin Newton came from California to live with him in Hope. There, Basil Edwin met Annie Forney Duckett.

But we don't really know what happened to Basil Edmondson Newton's old family stuff, the kind of stuff that we have so much of from Annie Forney's side of the family. Maybe we will locate some of it eventually, through other family branches. For now, we have this photograph, and we know who this woman is because she's identified on the back.

We also know where it was taken. In those days, photographs were mostly formal portraits and taken in studios. People sat for them, had copies made up, and sent them to their relatives who lived far away, as mementos. Sitting for your photograph was a serious business, as you can see here. This photograph is the small sort you could easily send in the mail -- it's only 2.5" x 5".  It's not a tintype, which came a little earlier in the technology of photography. Instead, it's made on photographic paper which is then affixed to a stiff card. The back of the card is imprinted:

"Jno W. Williams/Photographer/Shelbyville, Ky."

According to the 1870 census, John W. Williams, photographer, age 48, was living in Shelbyville that year. Other sources suggest that he was active in Shelbyville as a photographer throughout the 1860s, after having turned from portrait painting to photography as the new technology became available in the 1850s. So this was a professionally made studio portrait.

But what would Rebecca have been doing in Shelbyville Kentucky? Her daughter Georgia A. Edmondson, a younger sister of Amanda Caroline,  had married Charles T. Keeney at Spring Place Georgia in December 1862. In 1870, Charles, now a doctor of medicine, and Georgia were living in Bewleyville Kentucky. We know the Keeneys were living in Shelbyville in 1873, and I will tell you how we know about that in some later post.  Since we also know that Rebecca died in October 1871, we can date this photograph sometime before that, from the late 1860s to sometime in 1871. She would have been in her sixties.

Here's a detail of the same photograph. I think it's probably unusual to be able to see your great-great-great-great grandmother gazing at you across the generations. Even if she's a bit fuzzy.

Ancestors of Rebecca Banks Edmondson

Rebecca Banks Edmondson (Levi Branham's "Miss Beckie") was the grand-daughter of Thomas Banks and his second wife, Betty Chandler. Rebecca's father, John, was born while they lived in Granville County, North Carolina, along the south side of the Tar River.

The Banks family moved down into Georgia at the end of the 18th century after about twenty years in North Carolina, and before they were in North Carolina they were in Virginia.

Here's a surprisingly nice Ken Burnsian-type (home-made version) video that some Banks relatives have made about the family's history. The focus of the video is Thomas Banks, who was Rebecca's grandfather.  The video's makers based their account solely on documented research, always a good thing. And they have done a careful job of establishing the historical context of the migration from Virginia into Georgia.

The House on Diamond Hill

Here's a recent scholarly study of life in the Vann House, where, after the Vann family was forced to abandon their home, along with all the other Cherokees,  Amanda Caroline was born and grew up.  

Awards & Distinctions

2011 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize, American Society for Ethnohistory

2011 National Council on Public History Book Award

2011 Lilla M. Hawes Award, Georgia Historical Society

At the turn of the nineteenth century, James Vann, a Cherokee chief and entrepreneur, established Diamond Hill in Georgia, the most famous plantation in the southeastern Cherokee Nation. In this first full-length study to reconstruct the history of the plantation, Tiya Miles tells the story of Diamond Hill's founding, its flourishing, its takeover by white land-lottery winners on the eve of the Cherokee Removal, its decay, and ultimately its renovation in the 1950s.

This moving multiracial history sheds light on the various cultural communities that interacted within the plantation boundaries--from elite Cherokee slaveholders to Cherokee subsistence farmers, from black slaves of various ethnic backgrounds to free blacks from the North and South, from German-speaking Moravian missionaries to white southern skilled laborers. Moreover, the book includes rich portraits of the women of these various communities. Vividly written and extensively researched, this history illuminates gender, class, and cross-racial relationships on the southern frontier.

About the Author

Tiya Miles is the Elsa Barkley Brown Collegiate Professor of African American Womens History and professor of history, American culture, Afroamerican and African studies, and Native American studies at the University of Michigan. Her first book, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, won the Organization of American Historians' Turner Prize and the American Studies Association's Romero Prize. In 2011 she was selected as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

336 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 18 illus., 1 table, 4 maps, appends., notes, bibl., index

Cloth

ISBN  978-0-8078-3418-3

Published: August 2010

Paper

ISBN  978-0-8078-7267-3

Published: August 2012

It's from The University of North Carolina Press, and you can order it here.

A child slave at Spring Place

Levi Branham's My Life and Travels is the truly remarkable memoir of a former slave who was born in Murray County in 1852. 

Photograph courtesy of the Murray County Museum.

At some time in the 1850s Levi was sold to James Edmondson, the neighbor of his first owner. Levi tells us that his first owner, a Dr. Black, said he wanted to sell all his slaves to James Edmondson because he knew that Edmondson would not separate them. But in fact, as we learn later in the account, Levi's mother was working at a second farm owned by Edmondson, near Jasper, Tennessee. So, although Levi went back and forth to Jasper at times, most of the time he lived as a child in the Vann House, until 1863. That year the entire Edmondson household, white and black, "refugeed" down to Terrell County, Georgia, where apparently Edmondson had other property. Levi Branham returned to Murray County in 1873. He was living in Spring Place in the late 1920s, when he wrote his memoir.  

Here are excerpts from Levi Branham's memoir:

I spent a large portion of my life in the Chief Vann house with my old master, Mr. Edmondson. He had a daughter by the name of Jennie. Jennie had a waitress* who was named Tein. Another of his daughters was Sug,** whose waitress was Fannie. Another one of his daughters was Georgia whose waitress was Elvie. These were all of the single daughters that Mr. Edmondson had when I was with him, but he had three married daughters whose names were Harriet, Sallie and Sue. Harriet married Bob Anderson, Sue married Street, and Sallie married Dr. Mathis.

One of my young masters was John Edmondson, another, Tom Polk Edmondson. I was Tom Polk's waitman until he went to the Civil war between the North and South. Bill, the youngest, was quite small. All of the waitmen and waitresses stayed in the Edmondson house now known as the Chief Vann house. The room in which we stayed had a fine carpet on which we slept. Mr. Edmondson gave us fine blankets and we surely did sleep warm and comfortable.

My old mistress, "Miss Beckie", was very good to us. She took more pains with us darkies than our parents did, simply because she had more to care for us with, and too, she loved us. Occasionally "Miss Beckie" would give us tea for medicine. She had a hard time getting this tea in me, but I had to take it after all. Sometimes she would give us peach brandy which I was always glad to get. Sometimes we would pretend that we were sick so we could get sweetened coffee and buttered biscuits which certainly tasted good to us darkies. I thought as much of "Miss Beckie" as I did my mother.

When all the white boys and girls would be away "Miss Beckie" would gather the little negro children around the fire and talk with us. One day I said to "Miss Beckie": "Why do we little negro children have to work for you?" She said, "That's the way our fore-parents fixed the matter." I said to her, "when I get grown I am going to change the situation somewhat."

* "Waitress" and "waitman" were apparently the terms for slaves who were personal servants. The personal servants of the Edmondson sons and daughters were evidently children, as Levi was when he was "waitman" for Tom Polk Edmondson.  

** "Sug" was evidently the family name for Amanda Caroline. 

Lots of scholarly ink has been spilled over the literary conventions of published slave narratives, and how to interpret those narratives.Was this really such an idyllic childhood? Was "Miss Beckie," Rebecca Banks Edmondson, Amanda's mother, really like a mother to little Levi Branham? Well, that's what he tells us. My feeling is that his memoir requires several close readings. It's hard to know about those aspects of life that he has chosen not to  tell us; but it would be disrespectful to dismiss what he does choose to tell us. It's actually astonishing that we have this history at all. The vast majority of the enslaved were never able to speak so directly to us. So maybe the best we can do is to read this memoir with as much empathy as we can bring to the task, and as much humility and imagination as we can muster.  

The old Chief Vann house has been torn away considerably now from what it was when we lived there. There were large sliding doors in the house. Sometimes when there would be dances, there would be as many as sixteen in a set at one time. I have often seen old Mr. Frank Peeples on the dancing floor, but oh, my! he was cutting a shine. Now Mr. Peeples is like me, he is not able to do any dancing.

My old mistress would always say she was going to whip me, but she never whipped me but once. She was always threatening to whip me and one morning after the others had gone to work and I was still lying in the bed, my old mistress came upstairs to my room with an old cow hide and struck me three or four licks. I jumped up and ran to the field. That was the first cow hide and the last one that I have seen. She never had a chance to whip anyone else, or me either, because I took the hide and cut it in two with an axe and then I buried it.

I had a very bad time when I was small, and some very good times too. Mr. Edmondson, my master, owned two farms, one in Tennessee and another in Georgia. My mother was in Tennessee on his farm while I was in Georgia with my old mistress, whom I loved as well as my mother, for she was very dear to me.

What we do get in reading Branham's memoir is a rare glimpse, however much obscured, of the life of a privileged household just before and during the Civil War.  

In the dining room was a long table at which about fifteen or twenty could be served. In those days people used fly brushes, so Mrs. Rebecka had a large one over the table with a great long string that reached to the other end of the dining room and I had to pull the string. Oh! how I would pull and watch the white folks eat. They would eat and sit there and talk until I would get so hungry looking at the food my mouth would water. I always got plenty to eat, but just to stand there and look at the good food would make me hungry.

When I was a boy living in the Chief Vann or Edmondson house, my work was to mind the calves, carry water, churn and pull the fly bush, but some times I would give them the dodge. Up in the garret in the Chief Vann house Mr. Edmondson kept all of his sugar and it was my job to go up every morning and bring down enough sugar for breakfast and while I was up there, I would always fill my pockets with sugar, and go around all day eating sugar when I got ready. My pocket would get so stiff sometimes it felt like it had been starched.

One day when I was a boy one of my young masters came home and said that Breckenridge, Douglas and Abe Lincoln were running for president, and that if Mr. Abe Lincoln was elected that the negroes would be free. Then he asked me if I wanted to be free and I told him "yes."

Some stories hint at the intimacy of these complex relationships: 

Mr. Edmondson had a cur dog by the name of Watch, which we children did not like; he was a very good dog, too. One day Mr. Westfield gave "Miss Rebecka" a drove of sheep, about fifty, I suppose, so to do injury to the dog, Mr. Edmondson's children and I took some sheep wool and packed it between the dog's teeth, then carried the dog to "Miss Rebecka" Edmondson and told her that the dog had been killing her sheep. She ordered the dog to be killed, believing that he was killing sheep, but the poor dog was innocent. I have thought over and over how bad it was that we told what was not true on the poor dog, and I am compelled to say that I hate to think how bad it was for us to do a trick like that. But you know how boys are.

When I was a boy, an old colored man wanted a white boy and me to get some whisky for him, as the colored people could not get any whisky in those days. So Bill Ellis the white boy that went with me, he was about my age, bought the whisky and had it put in a jug. We started on back, and on our way we had to pass through a place called "the haunted holler." There we stopped and began to draw us some of the whisky. We had a bottle but could not see how to pour the whisky, so we drew it out in our mouths and then emptied it into the bottle until we had the bottle full. We then took up our load and began to travel. When I got home and sat down by the fire it made me sick, and "Miss Rebecka" asked me what was the matter, so I told her that I had been to town and some one had shocked me on the shocking machine. She said, "all right, I will see about it," and Mrs. Scythe Luffman came along and told her that she had seen Bill and me with some whisky, so she asked me again and I had to tell her the truth. She then asked Bill about it and made it so plain that he had to tell her just how it was. I tell you Mrs. Rebecka was hard to fool, but we sure did fool her about Watch (the dog) killing her sheep.

 And some vignettes cast light on the vastly different worlds of slave and master. Levi was about thirteen years old when the following exchange took place: 

During the Civil war, 1865, Old Man Dover sent all the negroes over to a little town called Dover in Terrell county to fast and pray. Another little negro boy and I got our fish hooks and started to go fishing. He told us if we did not go to fast and pray that we would have to get our hoes and go to the field and work, so we went on to Dover with the rest of the colored people and I got down and prayed the best I knew how. This was the words of my prayer: "O Lord, please help Abraham Lincoln to whip Jefferson Davis." When we were all through praying we went back home. Mr. Edmondson said to me, "what did you pray?" and I told him that I prayed like this: "Oh Lord, please help Jefferson Davis to whip Abraham Lincoln," and he said, "you prayed right," and handed me a half dollar. I was afraid to tell him what I prayed.

Levi did not return to Murray County from the Edmondson refuge in Terrell County until 1873. By then, the life of the Edmondson family had drastically changed. Rebecca Banks Edmondson died in 1871, and her husband James in 1873. When the household left the Vann House in 1863 they never returned to it. 

My master owned all land west from the Chief Vann house to the Conasauga river, which is a distance of about four miles. He owned thirty-five or forty slaves. Mr. Edmondson never had any overseers, but had a foreman. After crops were laid by, Mr. Edmondson would give a picnic for his slaves. He would take part in the picnic. I tell you we surely did have a jubilee time.

When the war was in its highest state, Mr. Edmondson sold the Chief Vann house and his land to Colonel Tibbs. The latter kept it eight or nine years and sold it to Goins from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Mr. Goins sold it to Mr. Dill and Dill sold it to Chip Owens. Later Mr. Owens sold it to Mr. D. Kemp. Mr. Kemp sold it to Mr. Dooly; Dooly sold it to Sellers. Sellers sold it to Higdon. Higdon sold it to Dr. Bradford who still owns it. I live now at the place where I was born and raised. As soon as I step out on my front porch I can see the old Edmondson house now known as the Chief Vann house. 

When I was living at the Chief Vann house, I was young and active. I could run, jump and leap like a frog. I used to think that there were only two boys that could hold me a light and they were a white boy named Rob Rembert and a colored boy named George Edmondson. We would always tie when we would try to throw stones at one another.   

In 1862, Spring Place was a wealthy little town. Mr. Edmondson, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Seay were very good to their negroes. Some of them around were regular speculators. I knew a preacher by the name of Selvidge who preached around Spring Place to the negroes, and his text was "Servant obey your master." And he would have the negroes washed and dressed then he would put them on the block and bid them off like a group of horses or mules.

My master always said that his negroes did not pay him anything; what he had, he had made in the Legislature. He used to own a large plantation in Tennessee, and he allowed the negroes to run an account there, and when they did not or could not pay up he would let them work on Sunday at a sawmill, paying them one dollar a day, until they paid up their debts.

I am always thinking of the old Chief Vann house. I left there the latter part of 1863 and had not been inside the house since then until about three weeks ago. Mrs. Cox, the lady who now lives there seemed to take great pleasure in showing me the different rooms in the house after I told her that I lived there in my boyhood with Mr. Edmondson. It seems that the house has been changed a great deal since I was there. The plastered walls seem to be falling, and when I was a boy that old house seemed like Heaven to me. It resembled Hardwick's bank in Dalton that, it seemed too good for a fly to light upon.

The Vann House in 1934, about the time Levi Branham took his tour inside.
 Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

The grandchildren and great grandchildren of Mr. Edmondson seem to think a lots of me and my wife. Always when they come from South Georgia and from places in the north they would bring me and my wife something nice to eat and wear. It seems that they cannot come to North Georgia without coming to see "Uncle Boisey" and "Aunt Amanda."

Levi Branham, historian, 1852-1944. Photograph courtesy of the Murray County Museum.

Levi Branham, My Life and Travels, Dalton, Ga.: The A. J. Showalter Co. Printers and Publishers, 1929.  © This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.  The full text can be read here. 

Spring Place, Georgia, 1837

Amanda Caroline was born in Spring Place, Murray County Georgia in 1837. Amanda was the sixth of ten or eleven children. Her father James S. Edmondson bought the house built by James Vann, a vastly wealthy member of the Cherokee Indians, after the Cherokee were forced to abandon their lands in north and west Georgia. 

This map shows the 1830 boundaries of the Cherokee Nation in northwestern Georgia. Spring Place is located  on the upper left of the map, in the heart of the Cherokee lands. Courtesy of Georgia Info, Digital Library of Georgia

By 1834 the Cherokee removal was complete, and James Edmondson was already ensconced in Murray County as a property owner and a Justice of the Peace. The Vann House is now administered by the Georgia's Parks, Recreation, and Historic Sites. The house is considered important because James Vann built it, not because the Edmondsons owned it from about 1850 until sometime in 1863. But it does still exist, and it was the place where Amanda lived at least half her life until her marriage, and it where her Arkansas cousin Benjamin Hardin Newton came to stay in the spring of 1861, just before he enlisted in the Georgia Volunteers.  

You can read a bit more about the Vann House at http://gastateparks.org/info/chiefvann/