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Historical Documents Slave quarters on St. Georges Island |
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click image for close-upThese dwellings, located on Florida's St Georges Island in the Gulf of Mexico, are typical plantation slave quarters. Although Fanny Kemble never visited this island, one can imagine that she was describing these buildings when she wrote about the slaves' homes on Butler Island. . .
Such of these dwellings as I visited today were filthy and wretched in the extreme, and exhibited that most deplorable consequence of ignorance and an abject condition, the inabiility of the inhabitants to secure and improve even such pitiful comfort as might yet be achieved by them. . . . The moss with which the chinks and crannies of their ill-protecting dwelling might have been stuffed was trailing in dirt and dust about the ground, while the back door of the huts, opening upon a most unsightly ditch, was left wide open for the fowls and ducks, which they are allowed to raise, to travel in and out, increasing the filth of the cabin by what they brought and left in every direction.
Image Credit: Collection of the New-York Historical Society
Related Entries:
• Butler Island
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