Sunnyside Plantation | |
---|---|
Town/City | Lake Village |
State | Arkansas |
Province | Chicot County |
Coordinates | 33°19′N91°14′W / 33.317°N 91.233°W |
Established | c. 1820–1830 |
Disestablished | 1945 |
Owner |
|
The Sunnyside Plantation was a former cotton plantation and is a historic site, located near Lake Village in Chicot County, Arkansas, in the Arkansas Delta region.
Built as a cotton plantation in the Antebellum South, it was farmed using the forced labor of enslaved African Americans. After the American Civil War in 1865, freedmen farmed it. From the 1890s to the 1910s, the plantation used convict laborers and employed immigrants from Northern Italy, many of whom were subject to peonage. They were later replaced by Black sharecroppers. The plantation was closed down and it was broken up in the 1940s. Nowadays, only a historical marker reminds Lake Village residents and visitors of its history.
The land belonged to Native Americans, followed by the French, until Emperor Napoleon sold it to the United States as a result of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. By 1819, the Arkansas Territory was established. A year later, in 1820, slavery became the law of the land as a result of the Missouri Compromise.
The land near modern-day Lake Village in Chicot County, Arkansas was acquired in the 1820s and 1830s by Abner Johnson, a planter from Kentucky. [1] [2] [3] Johnson served as the Sheriff of Chicot County from 1830 to 1834. [4] His plantation spanned 2,200 acres, with 42 African American slaves working in the cotton fields. [2] By 1836, the Arkansas Territory had become a state of the United States of America.
In 1840, the plantation was acquired by Elisha Worthington for US$60,000. [2] [3] Worthington also agreed to give 250 bales of cotton to Johnson annually for the next ten years. [3] Alongside the land and several buildings, Worthington purchased 42 of Johnson's slaves in the transaction. [3] He built a dock on the Mississippi River to facilitate the transportation of cotton. [2]
During the American Civil War of 1861–1865, the plantation was badly damaged by Union Army forces. [3] Worthington moved his slaves and livestock to Texas from 1862 to 1865, and let his two mulatto children, including his son James W. Mason, take care of the land. [3] On June 5, 1864, Union forces invaded the plantation to disrupt landings on the Mississippi River by the Confederate States Army. [2] Meanwhile, on June 5–6, the Battle of Old River Lake, also known as the Battle of Ditch Bayou, took place not far from the plantation. [2] By 1865, it had been declared "abandoned land" by the Freedmen's Bureau. [3] Even though Worthington was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson, he decided to sell his plantation, partly due to the loss of his workforce, the dwindling price of cotton, and his worsening health. [2]
In 1866, Worthington sold the plantation to Robert P. Pepper of Kentucky. [3] Two years later, in 1868, it was acquired by Major William Starling of the William Starling Company, [5] through inheritance. [3]
In 1881, the plantation was acquired by John C. Calhoun II, the grandson of John C. Calhoun, and his brother, Patrick Calhoun. [2] The brothers were seen as prominent financiers and builders of the "New South". [6] Together, they founded the Calhoun Land Company, and attempted to bring former slaves back to their old plantations. [2] John C. Calhoun II testified before the United States Senate Committee on Education and Labor in September 1883, explaining that his goal was to empower freedmen to save and become self-sufficient tenants. [3] The testimony was so well-received that it was published by civil rights leader Timothy Thomas Fortune in his 1884 Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics. [3] In reality, while some freedmen managed to become tenants, other were sharecroppers, or even wage laborers. [2]
By the mid-1880s, the Calhoun brothers decided to sell the plantation, partly because of the flood of 1882. [2]
By 1886, it was acquired by the New York banker Austin Corbin as repayment of debt incurred by Calhoun. [2] [3] Corbin built a mansion, called Corbin House, and moored his boat, Austin Corbin, on Lake Chicot. [2] He added a railroad from the cotton fields to the cotton gin to save time and boost production. [2] He also established a telephone line to Greenville, Mississippi, the county seat of nearby Washington County, Mississippi, home to the cotton industry. [2] However, most freedmen refused to work for Corbin, because he was not a Southerner but a carpetbagger. [2]
In 1894, Corbin entered into an agreement with the state of Arkansas to use convict laborers. [2] He was given 250 convicts, who picked cotton on the plantation. [2] The profits were split between Corbin and the state. [2] With the help of Emanuele Ruspoli, 1st Prince of Poggio Suasa, who served as the Mayor of Rome from 1892 to 1899, Corbin brought Italian immigrants led by Pietro Bandini [7] to work on the plantation. [3] The immigrants came from Marche, Emilia and Veneto, setting sail from Genoa and arriving in New Orleans, Louisiana. [8] They lived in a house on their own twelve-and-a-half acre lots of cotton, which they were obligated to pay back over the next twenty years, with an annual rate of five percent. [2] Each immigrant picked the cotton on his own lot, which Corbin agreed to purchase. [2] When Corbin died in 1896, many Italians stayed on the plantation. [2] Moreover, Prince Ruspoli visited the plantation in 1896. [3]
In December 1898, Corbin's heirs leased the plantation to Hamilton R. Hawkins, Orlando B. Crittenden, Morris Rosenstock, and Leroy Percy. [9] [10] Percy, a prominent planter from Greenville, Mississippi, suggested that European peasants were more industrious than Blacks. [9] However, the businessmen were accused of "peonage." [10] In 1907, after hearing many complaints from immigrants, Edmondo Mayor des Planches, the Italian ambassador to the United States, visited the plantation. [9] As he explained in his 1913 report, Attraverso gli Stati Uniti per L'Emigrazione Italiana, he was unimpressed by Percy's rosy rewriting of reality. [9]
Shortly afterward, Mary Grace Quackenbos, an attorney with the US Department of Justice, visited the plantation to look into repeated reports of peonage. [10] In her report, she agreed that it was practised and added that only prosecution could put an end to it. [10] Not surprisingly, Percy disagreed with her and suggested that the Italian immigrants could save a lot of money from their labor. [9] Albert Bushnell Hart, a professor of history at Harvard University, agreed with Percy. [9] Congressman Benjamin G. Humphreys II agreed with them and argued that immigrants could pay off their debts by selling their cotton. [9] limited economic opportunities in Northern Italy caused not much to be done to support Quackenbos's views. [8] Prosecution was stopped in its tracks, possibly because of Percy's friendship with US President Theodore Roosevelt with whom he had hunted bears on his Smedes Plantation, in Mississippi. [10] Over the years, many of the Italian workers moved to St. James, Missouri, Irondale, Alabama and Tontitown, Arkansas. [11] [3] [8] Others moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where they worked in coal and iron mines. [9]
Sweet Hope (Guernica Editions, 2011), a historical novel by Mary Bucci Bush, tells the story of Italian immigrants working on a Mississippi Delta cotton plantation in the early 1900s. It is based on the experiences of Bush's grandmother, who worked on the Sunnyside Plantation as a child. [12] [13]
By the 1910s, the Italian laborers were replaced by Black sharecroppers. [3] In 1920, the plantation was acquired by W.H. and J.C. Baird. [3] Four years later, it was acquired by the Kansas City Life Insurance Company at an auction. [3] In 1935, they leased it to the Arkansas Rural Rehabilitation Corporation. [3] The plantation was visited by the Federal Writers' Project in the late 1930s. [3]
The plantation was finally broken up, as tracts of land were sold to individual buyers from 1941 to 1945, in the midst of World War II. [3] Nowadays, only a historical marker reminds residents and visitors of its lost history. [2]
Chicot County is a county located in the southeastern corner of the U.S. state of Arkansas. As of the 2020 census, the population was 10,208. The county seat is Lake Village. Chicot County is Arkansas's 10th county, formed on October 25, 1823, and named after Point Chicot on the Mississippi River. It is part of the Arkansas Delta, lowlands along the river that have been historically important as an area for large-scale cotton cultivation.
Arcola is a town in Washington County, Mississippi. The population was 304 at the 2020 census, down from 361 at the 2010 census.
Peon usually refers to a person subject to peonage: any form of wage labor, financial exploitation, coercive economic practice, or policy in which the victim or a laborer (peon) has little control over employment or economic conditions. Peon and peonage can refer to both the colonial period and post-colonial period of Latin America, as well as the period after the end of slavery in the United States, when "Black Codes" were passed to retain African-American freedmen as labor through other means.
The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta, or simply the Delta, is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth", because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history.
Lake Chicot is a lake adjacent to the Mississippi River. The lake is located on the east side of Lake Village, Arkansas in Chicot County. It is the largest oxbow lake in North America, as well as the largest natural lake in Arkansas.
The history of the state of Mississippi extends back to thousands of years of indigenous peoples. Evidence of their cultures has been found largely through archeological excavations, as well as existing remains of earthwork mounds built thousands of years ago. Native American traditions were kept through oral histories; with Europeans recording the accounts of historic peoples they encountered. Since the late 20th century, there have been increased studies of the Native American tribes and reliance on their oral histories to document their cultures. Their accounts have been correlated with evidence of natural events.
LeRoy Percy was an American attorney, planter, and Democratic politician who served as a United States Senator from the state of Mississippi from 1910 to 1913.
Austin Corbin was a 19th-century American banking and railroad entrepreneur. He consolidated the rail lines on Long Island, bringing them under the profitable umbrella of the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR).
The Arkansas Delta is one of the six natural regions of the state of Arkansas. Willard B. Gatewood Jr., author of The Arkansas Delta: Land of Paradox, says that rich cotton lands of the Arkansas Delta make that area "The Deepest of the Deep South."
William Alfred Dockery was an American landowner who built from scratch the Dockery Plantation, the famous home of such original Delta blues musicians as Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson, and Pops Staples.
Lakeport Plantation is a historic antebellum plantation house located near Lake Village, Arkansas. It was built around 1859 by Lycurgus Johnson with the profits of slave labor. The house was restored between 2003 and 2008 and is now a part of Arkansas State University as a Heritage site museum.
Mary Grace Quackenbos Humiston (1869–1948) was the first female Special Assistant United States Attorney. She was a graduate of the New York University School of Law and was a leader in exposing peonage in the American South. She was also known for a short time as "Mrs. Sherlock Holmes", starting with her work solving the cold case of Ruth Cruger who disappeared in New York in 1917.
Lycurgus Johnson (1818–1876) was an American cotton planter and large slaveholder in the Arkansas Delta during the antebellum years. Born to the powerful political and planter Johnson family in Scott County, Kentucky, he became the owner and developer of the Lakeport Plantation in Chicot County, Arkansas. It bordered the west bank of the Mississippi River.
Isaac H. Hilliard (1811-1868) was an American planter and cotton factor in the Antebellum South. He was an advocate of the Confederate States of America. During the American Civil War of 1861–1865, he moved his family slaves to Texas and later Louisiana. After the war, he was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson and liquidated his cotton-factoring business. His Arkansas plantation was inherited by his sons.
Elisha Worthington was an American planter and large slaveholder in the Antebellum South. He was the owner of the Sunnyside Plantation in Chicot County, Arkansas.
The Florence Plantation was a former cotton plantation and is a historic site, located in the community of Harwood in Chicot County, Arkansas.
John Caldwell Calhoun II (1843–1918) was an American planter and businessman. He was a large landowner in Chicot County, Arkansas, and a director of railroad companies. He was a prominent financier and developer of the "New South".
There was a historical trend of immigration of Italians into the U.S. state of Arkansas in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Sweet Hope (2011), an award-winning historical novel by Mary Bucci Bush, tells the story of Italian immigrants living in peonage on a Mississippi Delta cotton plantation in the early 1900s. It was inspired by the experiences of Bush's grandmother, Pasquina Fratini Galavotti, who worked on the Sunnyside Plantation in Arkansas as a child.
Pietro Bandini was an Italian Catholic priest and missionary to the United States who was prominent in the Italian American community. He began his career as a Jesuit missionary in the Western United States, where he worked with Native American tribes, and went on to establish the Saint Raphael Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants and Our Lady of Pompeii Church in New York City. He led a group of Italians to Sunnyside Plantation in Arkansas in the hopes of establishing an immigrant colony and later founded the city of Tontitown with them. For his work on immigration, he was lauded by Pope Pius X and the Queen Mother Margherita.