PresentationTitle
Panel. Understanding Slavery and its Legacies at Robert Sheegog's Estate
Location
Nutt Auditorium
Start Date
22-7-2018 4:00 PM
Description
- Uncovering Antebellum Slavery and Jim Crow-Era Service at William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak / Jillian E. Galle, Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery at Monticello; Jeffrey T. Jackson, Tony Boudreaux, and Maureen Meyers, University of Mississippi
Before Rowan Oak was Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, it was a fashionable townhouse built in the early 1840s for Robert Sheegog, an Irish immigrant cotton planter with large planation holdings in northern Mississippi and southern Tennessee. Sheegog kept between eight and ten enslaved people at his town home in Oxford, some of whom he regularly hired out to the University of Mississippi. A complex landscape of labor surrounded Rowan Oak, including domestic structures that housed enslaved African Americans and, after emancipation, free Blacks who labored in the main house. This paper discusses the recent collaboration between the University of Mississippi’s Slavery Research Group, the University’s Center for Archaeological Research, and Monticello’s Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (www.daacs.org) to archaeologically document the lives of enslaved laborers during Sheegog’s antebellum occupation at Rowan Oak, their transition to freedom, and the later service of Caroline Barr, Faulkner’s lifelong care giver. This collaborative archaeological project is part of a larger architectural and historical survey of slavery at the University of Mississippi and in the town of Oxford. - Faulkner’s Architecture, Family, and Race at Rowan Oak / Edward Chappell, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Faulkner’s buildings at Rowan Oak richly express his evolving attitudes toward race relations and his own family. The long lives of surviving slave quarters in northern Mississippi reflect continued use over a century following their short decades of habitation by enslaved people. Virtually all were remodeled after the Civil War, in varying degrees, as ex-slaves demanded improvements. The Sheegogs’ brick quarter was one such building, reconditioned before c.1900. That quarter and other old buildings at Rowan Oak charmed Faulkner, who harbored romantic beliefs about their great age, but he chose to build a new house for Narcissus McEwen, Jack Oliver, Caroline Barr, and other domestic workers. Faulkner, then, engaged in his own effort at improvement of domestic workers’ accommodation, albeit small and further buffered from the main house. This structure, which he called his “servants’ house”, was one of a number of building projects at Rowan Oak that mirror William and Estelle Faulkner’s emotional and familial state. The first enlargement of the main house was a collaborative restoration by the couple, including defined black and white space, though the races constantly overlapped within them. Subsequent enlargements were emphatically different, intended to separate Faulkner from the family and express his disdain for esthetics of the old regime. - The Architecture of Urban Slave Quarters in Northern Mississippi / Carl Lounsbury, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Standing a few yards behind the main house at Rowan Oak is a one-story brick slave quarter. Obscured by a privet hedge and scarred by badly repaired brickwork, the unoccupied building is scarcely recognized as rare survivor, the home of enslaved and free black residents who lived and worked there for more than half a century. This paper examines the form and function of the Rowan Oak quarter as a building type that appeared in a number of towns in northern Mississippi in the 1850s and how it was transformed in the postbellum period to accommodate new social and economic realities.
Relational Format
Conference proceeding
Recommended Citation
Galle, Jilliam E.; Jackson, Jeffrey T.; Boudreaux, Tony; Meyers, Maureen; Chappell, Edward; and Lounsbury, Carl, "Panel. Understanding Slavery and its Legacies at Robert Sheegog's Estate" (2018). Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. 3.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/fy/2018/schedule/3
COinS
Jul 22nd, 4:00 PM
Panel. Understanding Slavery and its Legacies at Robert Sheegog's Estate
Nutt Auditorium
- Uncovering Antebellum Slavery and Jim Crow-Era Service at William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak / Jillian E. Galle, Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery at Monticello; Jeffrey T. Jackson, Tony Boudreaux, and Maureen Meyers, University of Mississippi
Before Rowan Oak was Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, it was a fashionable townhouse built in the early 1840s for Robert Sheegog, an Irish immigrant cotton planter with large planation holdings in northern Mississippi and southern Tennessee. Sheegog kept between eight and ten enslaved people at his town home in Oxford, some of whom he regularly hired out to the University of Mississippi. A complex landscape of labor surrounded Rowan Oak, including domestic structures that housed enslaved African Americans and, after emancipation, free Blacks who labored in the main house. This paper discusses the recent collaboration between the University of Mississippi’s Slavery Research Group, the University’s Center for Archaeological Research, and Monticello’s Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (www.daacs.org) to archaeologically document the lives of enslaved laborers during Sheegog’s antebellum occupation at Rowan Oak, their transition to freedom, and the later service of Caroline Barr, Faulkner’s lifelong care giver. This collaborative archaeological project is part of a larger architectural and historical survey of slavery at the University of Mississippi and in the town of Oxford. - Faulkner’s Architecture, Family, and Race at Rowan Oak / Edward Chappell, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Faulkner’s buildings at Rowan Oak richly express his evolving attitudes toward race relations and his own family. The long lives of surviving slave quarters in northern Mississippi reflect continued use over a century following their short decades of habitation by enslaved people. Virtually all were remodeled after the Civil War, in varying degrees, as ex-slaves demanded improvements. The Sheegogs’ brick quarter was one such building, reconditioned before c.1900. That quarter and other old buildings at Rowan Oak charmed Faulkner, who harbored romantic beliefs about their great age, but he chose to build a new house for Narcissus McEwen, Jack Oliver, Caroline Barr, and other domestic workers. Faulkner, then, engaged in his own effort at improvement of domestic workers’ accommodation, albeit small and further buffered from the main house. This structure, which he called his “servants’ house”, was one of a number of building projects at Rowan Oak that mirror William and Estelle Faulkner’s emotional and familial state. The first enlargement of the main house was a collaborative restoration by the couple, including defined black and white space, though the races constantly overlapped within them. Subsequent enlargements were emphatically different, intended to separate Faulkner from the family and express his disdain for esthetics of the old regime. - The Architecture of Urban Slave Quarters in Northern Mississippi / Carl Lounsbury, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Standing a few yards behind the main house at Rowan Oak is a one-story brick slave quarter. Obscured by a privet hedge and scarred by badly repaired brickwork, the unoccupied building is scarcely recognized as rare survivor, the home of enslaved and free black residents who lived and worked there for more than half a century. This paper examines the form and function of the Rowan Oak quarter as a building type that appeared in a number of towns in northern Mississippi in the 1850s and how it was transformed in the postbellum period to accommodate new social and economic realities.