Enslaved People’s Cabin and Garden

Around a dozen enslaved people lived on Smith Farm from 1850-1860, according to the census. They would have lived in a cabin behind the Smith family house. The original structures didn’t survive into the 1960s when the family house was moved to our property, so a similar cabin, estimated to have been built in the 1850s, was moved onto our campus in 1973 from an area about 20 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta.

We use this space to interpret the stories of the enslaved people in Georgia – their daily lives, the communities and culture they formed, the cruelty and mistreatment they faced, and their acts of resistance.

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When you walk off the back porch of the cabin, you’ll enter a recreation of what enslaved gardening may have looked like. Our Gardens Team has cultivated and interpreted this special place for ten-plus years as a way to showcase this vital and often marginalized history. Research assistance to create this space was often provided by the excellent teams at both the Kenan Research Center and the Cherokee Garden Library.

On some farms and plantations where chattel slavery took place, like the Smith Farm, enslaved communities were able to tend their own gardens for use by their communities.

Enslaved gardeners worked tirelessly in the pre-dawn and evening hours to tend these green spaces for their loved one’s survival, means to resist their oppression, and to express themselves culturally.

For example, medicinal plants like Echinacea, Boneset, and Mullein allowed for community medical care. Fast growing and nutritious West-African heirlooms, like Black-Eyed Peas and Okra, kept newly freed peoples fed in the immediate, and often economically harsh, years of the postwar South. Enslaved gardeners even bred a plethora of heirlooms such as Fish Pepper and Odell’s Large White Watermelon. Both of which are still in circulation today and can often be found during the Summer months in our garden.

These green spaces represent generations of agricultural and horticultural knowledge in the most difficult of circumstances.