Vann House Public History Project
To learn more about the Vann House, check out my book, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story.
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.
Margaret Ann Crutchfield Memoir
The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story contains a transcription of the religious memoir of Peggy Scott Vann (also known as Margaret Ann Crutchfield), mistress of the Diamond Hill plantation and wife of James Vann. As the first convert to the Moravian faith in the Cherokee nation, Peggy should have written, or had written for her, a religious biography called a "Memoir." However, archivists expected that a memoir had never existed for Peggy Vann because no such text had been found. A copy of the original text has now surfaced. Learn more.
Laura Smith Haviland, Michigan Abolitionist
The Underground Railroad (UGRR) in Michigan has become a topic of increasing public interest during this sesquicentennial anniversary of the Civil War. While on sabbatical in 2010-11, I had the opportunity to engage in local research on the topic. I became especially interested in the biography of the daring abolitionist, Laura Smith Haviland, whom historian Catherine Clinton has compared to Harriet Tubman. Like Tubman, Haviland felt authorized by her faith in God to attempt radical action on behalf of those who were held as slaves. Haviland is also the only white woman known to have developed and followed her own plan to cross the Ohio River in an attempt to free an enslaved person. In the rescue effort that ultimately failed, Haviland masqueraded as a light-skinned African American to gain access to the black woman she had hoped to help. Active in both Canada and the U.S., Haviland became a prominent 19th-century abolitionist, educator, author, human rights advocate, and women's rights proponent. Laura Haviland's personal diary from the 1890s, which has yet to be cited by historians, is available to researchers at the Lenawee County Historical Museum in Adrian, MI. In that diary Haviland refers to her friendship with Sojourner Truth and expresses her support for women's suffrage.
To read some of what I discovered about Laura Smith Haviland, see my recent article in Michigan History Magazine as well as my co-edited recipe booklet on abolitionist women's recipes in which Haviland's passion for graham flour is highlighted.
To read a detailed overview of the UGRR in Michigan, see Carol Mull's new book.
I took these photographs during a visit to Haviland's home town (now Adrian) near the Raisin River. They picture Haviland's headstone, a historical marker near her Quaker Meeting House, a document related to her husband's will, and a contemporary Haviland impersonator at Adrian's Art-A-Licious Festival in 2010.
