The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation: Stories of My Family’s Journey to Freedom

In addition to touring the grounds surrounding the Wessyngton mansion, National Black Arts Festival members and guests walked in the footsteps of Baker’s ancestor in the slave cabin area of the plantation.  The group went inside a restored slave cabin built ca. 1830.  In 1860, there were 274 enslaved African Americans on the plantation, housed in forty log cabins.  At the onset of the Civil War, Wessyngton held the largest African American population in the state of Tennessee and was the largest tobacco producer in America.

Tags: African History, Antebellum Plantation, black history, Civil War, Dr. Collette Hopkins, National Black Arts Festival, plantation slavery, Plantations, Slave cabins, Slave Housing, Slave Labor, Slave Life, Southern Plantation, Tennessee slavery, Wessyngton mansion

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 13th, 2010 at 12:21 am and is filed under Book Tour & Reviews, Civil War, Current Events, Genealogy & DNA, Interviews, Introduction & Personal, Plantation Life, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.