The Chief Vann House State Historic Site
Download: African American
History at the Chief Vann House
Since 2002 I have been actively engaged in a public history
project focused on the Chief Vann House State Historic Site.
The Chief Vann House, operated by the Georgia Department
of Natural Resources, offers a rare opportunity for the
exploration of African American life among American Indians.
James Vann was a wealthy Cherokee who built a plantation
called Diamond Hill in present-day north Georgia. Vann and
his family possessed nearly 100 of the 583 black slaves
owned by Cherokees in the first decade of the nineteenth
century. The Vann home has been restored and is open to
the public for guided tours and events.
I first visited this site in 1998 while doing research
for my book on the Shoeboots family. I was dismayed to discover
that the tour of the Vann House made no mention of the history
of African American slavery in the Cherokee Nation or of
the human stories of the many black men, women, and children
who had lived and worked on the grounds. I felt concerned
that the slogan of the house museum: “The Showplace
of the Cherokee Nation,” was romanticizing and even
glorifying a place where the abuse of human beings had been
common. And so I became committed to a more ethical interpretation
of the historical significance of this site and to bringing
a multifaceted picture of the Vann House history into public
view. Toward this end, I entered into a sensitive, long-term
dialogue with the committed park rangers who operate the
site about the absence of African American history and about
potential projects that might address this gap.
The most exciting component of my public history work with
the Vann House museum is a research project that I developed
with students in an upper level undergraduate course at
the University of Michigan, titled “Blacks, Indians,
and the Making of America.” With the goal of increasing
awareness of African American history at this historic site,
nearly thirty students in the class from diverse racial
and cultural backgrounds researched the history of the Vann
plantation, relying on sources ranging from Moravian missionary
diaries to Works Progress Administration narratives of former
slaves of Indians, to classic secondary sources on slavery
in the Cherokee Nation. The students shared their research
findings with their classmates and then wrote individual
papers on their chosen topics. The papers were edited, shortened,
combined, and compiled over a summer by a team of African
American and Native American students who worked closely
with me. The result of this work is a booklet titled African
American History at the Chief Vann House, intended
to illuminate, commemorate, and contextualize the lives
of enslaved Africans and African Americans who labored on
the Vann plantation. The booklet is available at the Vann
House and in PDF form on this
page.
I am currently at work on a history titled All That Glitters: The Story of Diamond Hill, a Cherokee Plantation, under contract with the University of North Carolina Press.
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