Granville County, North Carolina
Granville County is a county located on the northern border of the U. S. state of North Carolina. As of the 2017 Census, the population was 59,557, its county seat is Oxford. Granville County encompasses Oxford, NC Micropolitan Statistical Area, included in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, NC Combined Statistical Area; the county has access to Kerr Lake and Falls Lake and is part of the Roanoke and Neuse River watersheds. The county was formed by English colonists in 1746 from Edgecombe County, it was named for John Carteret, 2nd Earl Granville, who as heir to one of the eight original Lords Proprietors of the Province of Carolina, claimed one eighth of the land granted in the charter of 1665. The claim was established as consisting of the northern half of North Carolina, this territory came to be known as the Granville District known as Oxford. In 1752, parts of Granville and Johnston counties were combined to form Orange County. In 1764, the eastern part of Granville County was reassigned to the new Bute County.
In 1881, parts of Granville and Warren counties were taken to be combined as Vance County. John Penn was a politician of early America. After passing the bar, Penn moved to Granville County in 1774; the county had become the hub of Carolina's independence campaign. A remarkable orator, Penn had earned a place at the Third Provincial Congress of 1775, he replaced Richard Caswell, joining William Hooper and Joseph Hewes in Philadelphia for the convening of the Continental Congress in 1776. John Penn, with Cornelius Harnett and John Williams, signed the Articles of Confederation for North Carolina. Penn retired to Granville County, he died at a young age of 48 years in 1788, his remains are interred at the Guilford Courthouse National Military Park in Greensboro, NC. Like most early counties on the eastern side of the early North Carolina colony, Granville was site of the Tuscarora uprising. Once the natives were defeated in the Tuscarora War, Virginia farmers and their families settled Granville County, where they concentrated on tobacco as a commodity crop.
The economy of the region was dependent on slave labor, as tobacco was labor-intensive to cultivate and process. By the start of the Civil War, Granville planters worked more than 10,000 slaves on their farms, at a time when total county population was 23,396. During the Civil War, more than 2,000 men from Granville County served the Confederacy. One company was known as the "Granville Grays." Most in this regiment fought in most major battles during the war. Many survived until the end of the war. Although the Civil War brought an end to the plantation and slave labor economy that had made Granville County prosperous, the agricultural sector continued to thrive in the county. Freedmen stayed in Oxford to work, the discovery of bright leaf tobacco stimulated the industry. Many African Americans in Granville County were free before the start of the Civil War; the free people of color before the Civil War were descendants of families formed by unions between white women and African or African-American men before the American Revolution.
They made lasting contributions to the region through their skilled labor. Several black masons constructed homes for the county's wealthy landowners. Additionally, the bright leaf tobacco crop proved a successful agricultural product for Granville County; the sandy soil and a new tobacco crop that could be "flue-dried" proved a great incentive to farmers and tobacco manufacturers. According to historian William S. Powell, Granville has remained a top tobacco-producing county in North Carolina for several decades. By the late 1800s and early 1900s, Oxford had become a thriving town with new industries, literary institutions, orphanages, due to jobs created by the bright tobacco crop. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, northern Granville County, together with Halifax County, Virginia were important mining areas. Copper, tungsten and gold were mined in the region; the Richmond to Danville Railroad was a critical lifeline to the northern part of the county and provided an important link for miners and farmers to get their goods to larger markets in Richmond and Washington, DC.
From the late 19th century into the early 20th century, whites in Granville County lynched six African Americans, a number of extralegal murders equalled by two other counties in the state. Most of these killings took place in the decades around the turn of the century; each of the three counties is tied in having the second-highest number of lynchings per county. Among these was a double lynching in the county seat on December 1, 1881. An armed mob of masked men stormed into the county jail, they took out John Brodie and Shadrack Hester, two African-American men charged with murdering a local white man. They took the prisoners to a tree near where the death took place, hanged them. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Granville County played a pivotal role as tobacco supplier for the southeast United States. With many farms and contracts tied to major tobacco companies, such as American Tobacco Company, Brown & Williamson, Liggett Group, the local farmers became prosperous. During the Great Depression, the tobacco fields were subject to a new plant disease.
The Granville Wilt Disease, as it became known, destroyed tobacco crops all across northern North Carolina. Botanists and horticulturists found a cure for the disease at the Tobacco Research Center located in Oxford. Camp Butner, opened in 1942 as a training camp for World War II soldiers, once encompassed more tha
Planter class
The planter class, known alternatively in the United States as the Southern aristocracy, was a socio-economic caste of Pan-American society that dominated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century agricultural markets through the forced labor of enslaved Africans. The Atlantic slave trade permitted planters access to inexpensive labor for the planting and harvesting of crops such as tobacco, indigo, tea, sugar cane, oil seeds, oil palms,hemp, rubber trees, fruits. In the American South, planters maintained a distinct culture characterized by its similarity to the manners and customs of the British nobility, whom many planters were related to, with an emphasis on chivalry and hospitality, the latter becoming a marked trait of modern Southern society; this southern culture with its landed gentry was distinctly different from areas north of the Mason–Dixon line and west of the Appalachians that were characterized by small land holdings worked by yeoman farmers without slave labor. After the American Civil War, many in this class saw their wealth reduced as the enslaved Africans were freed.
Union forces under Generals William T. Sherman and Phillip Sheridan had cut wide swaths of destruction through portions of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia destroying crops, killing or confiscating livestock, burning barns and gristmills, in some cases torching plantation houses and entire cities such as Atlanta in scorched earth tactics designed to starve the Confederacy into submission. After emancipation, many plantations were converted to sharecropping with freed Africans working as sharecroppers on the same land they had worked as slaves before the war. During the Gilded Age many plantations, no longer viable as agricultural operations, were purchased by wealthy northern industrialists as hunting retreats; some plantations became museums on the U. S. National Register of Historic Places. Planters were prolific throughout the British, French and Spanish colonies of North and South America, the West Indies. Members of this class include colonists Robert "King" Carter, William Byrd of Westover, many signers of the Declaration of Independence including Benjamin Harrison V, Thomas Nelson, Jr. George Wythe, Carter Braxton and Richard Henry Lee, Founding Fathers, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Mary Chesnut, Valcour Aime, Sallie Ward, the fictional Scarlett O'Hara from the movie Gone with the Wind.
The search for gold and silver was a constant theme in overseas expansion, but there were other European demands the New World could satisfy, which contributed to its growing involvement in the Western-dominated world economy. While Spanish America seemed to fulfill dreams of mineral wealth, Brazil became the first major plantation colony in 1532, organized to produce a tropical crop – sugar – in great demand and short supply in Europe; the other major powers, England and the Netherlands, soon thereafter hoped to establish profitable colonies of their own. Presented with new opportunities, Europeans disenchanted by the rigid social structures of feudalism emigrated to the abundant virginal lands of the colonial frontier. Arriving through the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, settlers landed on the shores of an unspoiled and hostile countryside. Early planters first began as colony farmers providing for the needs of settlements besieged by famine and tribal raids. Native Americans friendly to the colonists taught them to cultivate native plant species including tobacco and fruits, which within a century would become a global industry itself funding a multinational slave trade.
Colonial politics would come to be dominated by wealthy noble landowners interested in commercial development. In an effort to reduce the financial burden of continental wars, European governments began instituting land pension systems by which a soldier an officer, would be granted land in the colonies for services rendered; this incentivized military professionals to settle in the Americas and thus contribute to colonial defense against foreign colonists and hostile Natives. John Rolfe, a settler from Jamestown, was the first colonist to grow tobacco in North America, he arrived in Virginia with tobacco seeds procured from an earlier voyage to Trinidad, in 1612 harvested his inaugural crop for sale on the European market. During the 17th century, the Chesapeake Bay area was immensely hospitable to tobacco cultivation. Ships annually hauled 1.5 million pounds of tobacco out to the Bay by the 1630s, about 40 million pounds by the end of the century. Tobacco planters financed their operations with loans from London.
When tobacco prices dropped precipitously in the 1750s, many plantations struggled to remain financially solvent. In an effort to combat financial ruin planters either pushed to increase crop yield or, with the depletion of soil nutrients, converted to growing other crops such as cotton or wheat. In 1720, coffee was first introduced to the West Indies by French naval officer Gabriel de Clieu, who procured a coffee plant seedling from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Paris and transported it to Martinique, he transplanted it on the slopes of Mount Pelée and was able to harvest his first crop in 1726, or shortly thereafter. Within fifty years there were 18,000 coffee trees in Martinique enabling the spread of coffee cultivation to Saint-Domingue, New Spain and other islands of the Caribbean; the French territory of Saint-Domingue began cultivating coffee in 1734, by 1788 supplied half the global market. The French colonial plantations relied on African slave laborers. However, the harsh conditions that slav
Chickasaw
The Chickasaw are an indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands. Their traditional territory was in the Southeastern United States of Mississippi and Tennessee, they are federally recognized as the Chickasaw Nation. Sometime prior to the first European contact, the Chickasaw migrated from western regions and moved east of the Mississippi River, where they settled in present-day northeast Mississippi and into Lawrence County, Tennessee; that is where they encountered European explorers and traders, having relationships with French and Spanish during the colonial years. The United States considered the Chickasaw one of the Five Civilized Tribes, as they adopted numerous practices of European Americans. Resisting European-American settlers encroaching on their territory, they were forced by the US to sell their country in the 1832 Treaty of Pontotoc Creek and move to Indian Territory during the era of Indian Removal in the 1830s. Most Chickasaw now live in Oklahoma; the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma is the 13th largest federally recognized tribe in the United States.
Its members share a common history with them. The Chickasaw are divided in two groups: the Intcutwalipa, they traditionally followed a system of matrilineal descent, in which children were considered to be part of the mother's clan, whence they gained their status. Some property was controlled by women, hereditary leadership in the tribe passed through the maternal line; the name Chickasaw, as noted by anthropologist John Swanton, belonged to a Chickasaw leader. Chickasaw is the English spelling of Chikashsha, meaning "rebel" or "comes from Chicsa". A documented prior source was when the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto named them as "Chicaza" when De Soto's expedition came into contact with them in 1540 as the first Europeans that explored the North American south east; the origin of the Chickasaw is uncertain. Twentieth-century scholars, such as the archaeologist Patricia Galloway, theorize that the Chickasaw and Choctaw split into as distinct peoples in the 17th century from the remains of Plaquemine culture and other groups whose ancestors had lived in the Lower Mississippi Valley for thousands of years.
When Europeans first encountered them, the Chickasaw were living in villages in what is now Northeastern Mississippi. The Chickasaw migrated into Mississippi, their oral history says they migrated along with the Choctaw from west of the Mississippi River into present-day Mississippi in prehistoric times. The Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere spanned the Eastern Woodlands; the Mississippian cultures emerged from previous moundbuilding societies by 880 CE. They built complex, dense villages supporting a stratified society, with centers throughout the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys and their tributaries. In the 15th century, proto-Chickasaw people left the Tombigbee Valley after the collapse of the Moundville chiefdom and settled into the upper Yazoo and Pearl River valleys in Mississippi. Historians Arrell Gibson and anthropology John R. Swanton believed the Chickasaw Old Fields were in Madison County, Alabama; these people are the only nation from whom I could learn any idea of a traditional account of a first origin.
Another version of the Chickasaw creation story is that they arose at Nanih Waiya, a great earthwork mound built about 300 CE by Woodland peoples. It is sacred to the Choctaw, who have a similar story about it; the mound was built about 1400 years before the coalescence of each of these peoples as ethnic groups. The first European contact with the Chickasaw ancestors was in 1540 when the Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto encountered them and stayed in one of their towns, most near present-day Tupelo, Mississippi. After various disagreements, the American Indians attacked the De Soto expedition in a nighttime raid, nearly destroying it; the Spanish moved on quickly. The Chickasaw began to trade with the British after the colony of Carolina was founded in 1670. With British-supplied guns, the Chickasaw raided their neighbors and enemies the Choctaw, capturing some members and selling them into Indian slavery to the British; when the Choctaw acquired guns from the French, power between the tribes became more equalized and the slave raids stopped.
Allied with the British, the Chickasaw were at war with the French and the Choctaw in the 18th century, such as in the Battle of Ackia on May 26, 1736. Skirmishes continued until France ceded its claims to the region east of the Mississippi River after being defeated by the British in the Seven Years' War. Following the American Revolutionary War, in 1793-94, Chickasaw fought as allies of the new United States under General Anthony Wayne against the Indians of the old Northwest Territory; the Shawnee and other, allied Northwest Indians were defeated in the Battle of Fallen Timbers on August 20, 1794. The 19th-century historian Horatio Cushman wrote, "Neither the Choctaws nor Chicksaws engaged in war against the American people, but always stood as their faithful allies." Cushman believed the Chickasaw, along with the Choctaw, may have had origins in present-day Mexico and migrated north. That theory does not have consensus. In 1797, a general appraisal of the tribe and its territorial bounds was made by Abraham B
Joseph Martin (general)
Joseph Martin, Jr. was a brigadier general in the Virginia militia during the American Revolutionary War, in which Martin's frontier diplomacy with the Cherokee people is credited with not only averting Indian attacks on the Scotch-Irish American and English American settlers who helped win the battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens, but with helping to keep the Indians' position neutral and from siding with the British troops during those crucial battles. Historians agree that the settlers' success at these two battles signaled the turning of the tide of the Revolutionary War—in favor of the Americans. Martin was born in Caroline County and lived at Albemarle County and at Henry County, Virginia, at his plantation, Belmont, on Leatherwood Creek in Martinsville, not far from the plantation of his friend Governor Patrick Henry, Leatherwood Plantation. General Martin held many positions during his public life; as a young man he first tried his hand at farming, next he worked for three years as an overseer on the huge plantation of his local Virginia kin, next he was a longhunter, an explorer on the frontier for friend Patrick Henry an early pioneer and builder of Martin's Station in the "wild west," a surveyor of the KY/NC and TN/VA borders, an Indian agent/Indian fighter for Patrick Henry, a member at peace treaties with the Indians, along with Dr. Thomas Walker, Joseph Martin named the Cumberland region and the Cumberland River, he served as a member of the legislatures of Virginia and North Carolina, he was lifelong friends with Gen. Thomas Sumter, he was friends and brothers-in-law with Col. Benjamin Cleveland, he was unsuccessfully nominated by Patrick Henry to the position of the first governor of the Southwest Territory, was the holder of some 80,000 acres across the Southeastern U.
S. at one point. The city of Martinsville, was named in his honor during his lifetime; the son of planter Capt. Joseph Martin Sr. and his wife Susannah Chiles, great-granddaughter of Colonel John Page, Joseph Martin Jr. was raised in a Virginia gentry family in Caroline and Albemarle Counties. His father, Joseph Martin Sr. was the son of wealthy British merchant William Martin in Bristol, who sent his son to Virginia as supercargo aboard his ship the Brice. Martin Sr. wrote to his English father that he planned to marry the daughter of a common Virginia colonist. Though she was from the Chiles family and was a descendant of Virginia's Col. John Page, to Martin's wealthy father back in England all American colonists were inferior to the English. William Martin of Bristol was himself Lord Mayor of Bristol and owner of a ship building company, a glass manufacturing plant and exporter with the new world; the father wrote back disinheriting young Joseph Martin Sr.. Joseph Martin Sr. was "a perfect Englishman", recalled his grandson "large and athletic.
And in him was depicted, as my father has told me, the most complete form of the aristocracy of the British government." Capt. Martin arrived in Albemarle County in one of the original patentees. Joseph Martin Sr. left some 300 acres of his landholdings to son Joseph Jr. at his death in 1762. Nearby neighbors Dr. Thomas Walker, Peter Jefferson, James Madison, the Lewis and Clark clans and kin including Lewis, Waller, Hammock, etc, but Joseph Martin Jr. the son of the English immigrant, was not cut out for a Virginia gentry planter's life. "Gambling was a favorite pastime." Martin's son, Revolutionary War officer Col. William Martin, in his accounts of his father's life in the, "Lyman Draper Manuscript Collection," writes that although his father gambled, he was not much of a drinker and let his son in on his secret; as a youth, Joseph Martin ran off from an apprenticeship during the French and Indian War of 1756, joined the army at Fort Pitt, where he served alongside another Virginia youth, Thomas Sumter.
Following his early army service, Martin lit out for the rigors of the frontier, where he dressed in buckskin and was an early real estate speculator and fur trader and Indian fighter. But this time on the frontier was after Martin had bought a large plot of land in Henry County with his earnings working for three years as an overseer for an uncle. Martin gained 20,000 acres of land from Patrick Henry in a surveying contest at Powell Valley. Martin's youthful adventures on the frontier were grist for stories... some of which were written by Martin's political foes and were slanted to paint a picture of him in an unkind light. One writer, a fan of Martin's political enemy, called him lazy and refused to describe him by his military ranking. General Joseph Martin may have been many things in his lifetime, but a quick study of his history and his accomplishments show that he was far from lazy; the soldiering and Indian fighting transformed the young Martin into a fearsome explorer. Among Martin's earliest excursions on the frontier was one made on behalf of family friend Dr. Thomas Walker.
Martin's son, Revolutionary War officer Col. William Martin, describes the naming of the area and the river in a letter to historian Lyman Draper, "A treaty with the Cherokees was held at Fort Chiswell, Virginia on New River a frontier. On the return of the chiefs home, Dr. Walker, a gentleman of distinction, my father, Joseph Martin, accompanied them; the Indians being guides, they passed through the place now called Cumberland Gap, where they discovered a fine spring. They still had a little rum remaining, th
Muscogee
The Muscogee known as the Mvskoke and the Muscogee Creek Confederacy, are a related group of indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands. Mvskoke is their autonym, their original homelands are in what now comprises southern Tennessee, all of Alabama, western Georgia and part of northern Florida. Most of the original population of the Muscogee people were forcibly relocated from their native lands in the 1830s during the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory; some Muscogee fled European encroachment in 1797 and 1804 to establish two small tribal territories that continue to exist today in Louisiana and Texas. Another small branch of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy managed to remain in Alabama and is now known as the Poarch Band of Creek Indians. A large population of Muscogee people moved into Florida between 1767 and 1821 and these people intermarried with local tribes to become the Seminole people, thereby establishing a separate identity from the Creek Confederacy. Muscogee people in these waves of migration into Florida were fleeing conflict and encroachment by European settlers.
The great majority of Seminoles were later forcibly relocated to Oklahoma, where they reside today, although the Seminole Tribe of Florida and Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida remain in Florida. The respective languages of all of these modern day branches and tribes, except one, are all related variants called Muscogee and Hitchiti-Mikasuki, all of which belong to the Eastern Muskogean branch of the Muscogean language family. All of these languages are, for the most part, mutually intelligible; the Yuchi people today are part of the Muscogee Nation but their Yuchi language is a linguistic isolate, unrelated to any other language. The ancestors of the Muscogee people were part of the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere, who between AD 800 and AD 1600 built complex cities and surrounding networks of satellite towns centered around massive earthwork mounds, some of which had physical footprints larger than the Egyptian pyramids; some Mississippian city populations may have been larger than colonial European-American cities.
Muscogee Creeks are associated with multi-mound centers such as the Ocmulgee, Etowah Indian Mounds, Moundville sites. Mississippian societies were based on organized agriculture, transcontinental trade, copper metalwork, artisanship and religion. Early Spanish explorers encountered ancestors of the Muscogee when they visited Mississippian-culture chiefdoms in the Southeast in the mid-16th century; the Muscogee were the first Native Americans considered by the early United States government to be "civilized" under George Washington's civilization plan. In the 19th century, the Muscogee were known as one of the "Five Civilized Tribes", because they were said to have integrated numerous cultural and technological practices of their more recent European American neighbors. In fact, Muscogee confederated town networks were based on an 900-year-old history of complex and well-organized farming and town layouts. Influenced by Tenskwatawa's interpretations of the 1811 comet and the New Madrid earthquakes, the Upper Towns of the Muscogee, supported by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh resisted European-American encroachment.
Internal divisions with the Lower Towns led to the Red Stick War. Begun as a civil war within Muscogee factions, it enmeshed the Northern Creek Bands in the War of 1812 against the United States while the Southern Creeks remained US allies. General Andrew Jackson seized the opportunity to use the rebellion as an excuse to make war against all Muscogee people once the northern Creek rebellion had been put down with the aid of the Southern Creeks; the result was a weakening of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy and the forced cession of Muscogee lands to the US. During the 1830s Indian Removal, most of the Muscogee Confederacy were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory; the Muscogee Nation, Alabama-Quassarte Tribal Town, Kialegee Tribal Town, Thlopthlocco Tribal Town, all based in Oklahoma, are federally recognized tribes, as are the Poarch Band of Creek Indians of Alabama, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas. Seminole people today are part of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, Seminole Tribe of Florida, the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida.
At least 12,000 years ago, Native Americans or Paleo-Indians lived in what is today the Southern United States. Paleo-Indians in the Southeast were hunter-gatherers who pursued a wide range of animals, including the megafauna, which became extinct following the end of the Pleistocene age. During the time known as the Woodland period, from 1000 BC to 1000 AD, locals developed pottery and small-scale horticulture of the Eastern Agricultural Complex; the Mississippian culture arose as the cultivation of maize from Mesoamerica led to population growth. Increased population density gave rise to regional chiefdoms. Stratified societies developed, with hereditary religious and political elites, flourished in what is now the Midwestern and Southeastern United States from 800 to 1500 AD; the early historic Muscogee were descendants of the mound builders of the Mississippian culture along the Tennessee River in modern Tennessee and Alabama. They may have been related to the Tama of central Georgia. Oral traditions passed down by the ancestors of the Creeks have alleged that their nation migrated eastward from places West of the Mississippi River settling on the east bank of the Ocmulgee River.
It was here that they waged war with other bands of Native American Indians, as the Savannas, Wapoos, Yamafees, Icofans
Roberta, Georgia
Roberta is a city in Crawford County, United States. The population was 1,007 at the 2010 census, it is part of the Macon Metropolitan Statistical Area and is the birthplace of singer/songwriter Meiko. In the early nineteenth century, Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins built his plantation on the Flint River near Roberta; this was a trading post and the Creek Agency. In Crawford County, Knoxville was the only stop in the county, until the A&F Railroad bypassed it by about a mile to the southwest when it was built in 1888. A train station was built, a new town sprang up. People migrated towards this new town, called "New Knoxville." Hiram David McCrary allowed the railroad to use part of his land, was given naming rights to the town, which he named "Roberta" for his 7-year-old daughter. McCrary became the owner of the first general store in Roberta, was its first elected mayor, co-owned its first motel, served as tax collector and a railroad station agent. In 1910, Roberta was expanded in every direction by 1200 yards.
In 1949, the original trail depot burned. It was replaced about a year by a smaller concrete block building. A replica of the original depot was built in 2003 and houses the Chamber of Commerce Welcome Center. With the construction of the A&F Railroad and U. S. Highway 341, Roberta became a growing tourist town, with restaurants and hotels springing up. However, in the 1940s, passenger rail service ended in Roberta, ending one of the two main traffic flows. A decade Interstate 75 bypassed Roberta to the east, directing lots of traffic that way. After these events, Roberta relaxed into a more small-town setting. Roberta is located near the center of Crawford County at 32°43′17″N 84°0′45″W. U. S. Route 80 passes through the city, leading west 69 miles to Columbus. U. S. Route 341 crosses US 80 in the city center, leading north 27 miles to Barnesville and southeast 27 miles to Perry. According to the United States Census Bureau, Roberta has a total area of 1.5 square miles, of which 0.02 square miles, or 1.11%, is water.
As of the census of 2000, there were 808 people, 304 households, 200 families residing in the city. The population density was 544.3 people per square mile. There were 330 housing units at an average density of 222.3 per square mile. The racial makeup of the city was 48.76% White, 48.27% African American, 0.12% Native American, 0.74% Asian, 0.50% from other races, 1.61% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.62% of the population. There were 304 households out of which 32.6% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 33.9% were married couples living together, 29.9% had a female householder with no husband present, 34.2% were non-families. 31.6% of all households were made up of individuals and 16.4% had someone living alone, 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.36 and the average family size was 2.96. In the city, the population was spread out with 26.9% under the age of 18, 6.9% from 18 to 24, 22.5% from 25 to 44, 22.5% from 45 to 64, 21.2% who were 65 years of age or older.
The median age was 40 years. For every 100 females, there were 76.0 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 66.9 males. The median income for a household in the city was $25,625, the median income for a family was $33,125. Males had a median income of $32,125 versus $18,625 for females; the per capita income for the city was $14,536. About 25.1% of families and 29.1% of the population were below the poverty line, including 39.6% of those under age 18 and 32.6% of those age 65 or over. The Crawford County School District holds grades pre-school to grade twelve, consists of one elementary school, a middle school, a high school; the district has 127 full-time teachers and over 2,090 students. Crawford County Elementary School Crawford County Middle School Crawford County High School The city has a restored 1962 Seaboard Coastline caboose next to the railroad depot in the downtown area; the caboose holds a small history of Roberta's railroad heritage and a memorial to employees of Southern Railroad.
In the downtown block is the Benjamin Hawkins Monument, constructed in 1931. City of Roberta official website
History of slavery in Georgia (U.S. state)
Slavery in Georgia is known to have been practiced by the original or earliest-known inhabitants of the future colony and state of Georgia, for centuries prior to European colonization. During the colonial era, the practice of Indian slavery in Georgia soon became surpassed by industrial-scale plantation slavery; the penal colony of the Province of Georgia under James Oglethorpe banned slavery in 1735, the only one of the thirteen colonies to have done so. However, it was legalized by royal decree in 1751, in part due to George Whitefield's support for the institution of slavery. Georgia figures in the history of American slavery because of Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793; the gin was first demonstrated to an audience on Revolutionary War hero General Nathanael Greene's plantation, near Savannah. The cotton gin's invention led to both the burgeoning of cotton as a cash crop and to the revitalization of the agricultural slave labor system in the southern states; the Southern economy soon became dependent upon cotton production and the sale of cotton to northern and English textile manufacturers.
Georgia voted to secede from the Union and join the Confederate States of America on January 19, 1861. Years in 1865, during his March to the Sea, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman signed his Special Field Orders, No. 15, distributing some 400,000 acres of confiscated land along the Atlantic coast from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. Johns River in Florida to the slaves freed by the Union Army. Most of the settlers and their descendants are today known as the Gullah. Slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, which took effect on December 18, 1865. Slavery had been theoretically abolished by President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which proclaimed that only slaves located in territories that were in rebellion from the United States were free. Since the U. S. government was not in effective control of many of these territories until in the war, many of these slaves proclaimed to be free by the Emancipation Proclamation were still held in servitude until those areas came back under Union control.
In 2002, the City of Savannah unveiled a bronze statue on River Street in commemoration of the Africans who were brought to this country as slaves through the city's port. In 2005, Wachovia Bank apologized to Georgia's African-American community for its predecessor's role in the use of at least 182 slaves in the construction of the Georgia Railroad. Indian slave trade in the American Southeast African Americans in Georgia Human trafficking in Georgia Jennison, Watson. Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. Wilson, Charles Hooper. "Slave Ownership in Early Georgia: What Eighteenth-Century Wills Reveal". Historical Methods. 44: 115–126. Doi:10.1080/01615440.2010.506423. Retrieved 22 February 2018. Wood, Betty. Slavery In Colonial Georgia, 1730-1775. "Slavery in Antebellum Georgia" from the New Georgia Encyclopedia Georgia's Slave Population in Legal Records, by David E. Paterson 1861 Georgia slave map from Harper's Weekly. Sherman's Special Field Orders, No.
15, January 1865 Accessed on 1 April 2015
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