Exploring slave cabins with a descendant of a slave owner

A slave cabin — one of four — on the old plantation of Confederate General Gideon Pillow
 in Maury County, Tennessee. (CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.)

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We focus the narrow beams of light from our flashlights on the walls of the abandoned cabin, hoping to find a date on newspapers used as insulation by its long-ago occupants.

Bathed in red light, my friend Campbell Ridley —
a direct descendant of Confederate Brigadier General
Gideon Pillow — sits in an abandoned
slave cabin on his property.

The light reveals a photo of a dour baseball player and partial headlines. “Johnstown police battle strikers,” reads one. “Pirates win fifth straight,” reads another. “Look here,” I tell my fellow explorers, “there’s a date: June 18, 1937.”

But this decrepit cabin — one of four standing near the east fork of Greenlick Creek in Maury County, Tennessee — far pre-dates the 20th century.

Before the Civil War, slaves of Gideon Pillow occupied these log structures. In nearby fields, they toiled for the wealthy politician, lawyer, and speculator. Clifton Place, Pillow’s magnificent mansion, stands unoccupied nearby on a hill astride Mount Pleasant Pike. During the war, the slave owner served, inauspiciously, as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army.

Long-ago occupants pasted newspapers on
the walls as insulation.

We’re here on this brisk Saturday morning at the invitation of direct Pillow descendant Campbell Ridley, a farmer whose family has lived in the area for seven generations. 

Months ago, 80-year-old Ridley had trees and brush cleared from around three of the cabins on his property. The interiors were cleared of trash and made more safe. 

After the war, sharecroppers occupied the structures on the ground Ridley calls “The Quarters.” Their last occupants left in the 1990s. Our focus is on those who first lived here. We have many questions.

Who were they and what lives did they lead?

How did Pillow treat them?

What became of his slaves?

And, perhaps most importantly, can these remarkable time capsules be preserved and interpreted for future generations?

Let’s keep history alive. 👊

The brick fireplace to a slave cabin

The exterior of a slave cabin near Columbia, Tenn.

We explored three of the four remaining slave cabins.

A fragment remains from The New York Times on a ceiling in the cabin. The newspaper
was used as insulation. 

Jack Richards examines the fragments of newspaper clippings on a cabin wall.

Newspaper clippings -- some ancient, others not -- on a cabin wall.

Newspaper clippings, apparently World War II era, are pastered to a wall.

A view of the interior through a broken window on a front door.

A fireplace in the interior of a slave cabin.

The remains of an outhouse behind a slave cabin. It's not wartime.

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An NFL captain's roundabout connection to a Rebel general

Farmer Campbell Ridley stands near a slave cabin where sharecropper Katy Yokley,
great-grandmother of NFL standout Dont'a Hightower, lived.

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While a barn cat named Barnee roamed his workshop, farmer Campbell Ridley and I swapped Civil War stories, discussed cracklings, chitlins and bean planting, and reminisced about recent visits to his Columbia, Tenn., farm. Then we and two historians walked 75 yards or so to examine rare, historic treasure with a roundabout connection to an NFL standout.

On Campbell's property, near a small bridge over the East Fork of Green Lick Creek, stand four slave cabins — survivors on the remarkably intact plantation of Confederate Brigadier General Gideon Pillow, a wealthy planter and a Ridley ancestor. (Private property. Read more here.)

Within site of Pillow's mansion called Clifton Place, we explored inside one of the cabins — gingerly stepping on the creaky wooden floor, picking through artifacts, and wondering about the lives of the enslaved. The visit to "The Quarters," slave row, was fascinating ... and humbling.

Turn up the volume high for optimal experience.

Rachael Finch, senior director of preservation and education at the Heritage Foundation
 of Williamson County, explores the inside of a slave cabin — one
of four standing on farmer Campbell Ridley's property.

A brick fireplace in one of the cabins.

Ancient logs of the slave cabin where sharecropper Katy Yokley lived. She was
NFL star Dont'a Hightower's great-grandmother.

Long after the Civil War, a sharecropper named Katy Yokley lived in another one of the small dwellings. Abandoned today and nearly obscured by trees and undergrowth, the slave cabin was partially encased decades ago with cinder blocks. On the decrepit porch stood two plastic chairs, an old grill, and a wooden rocker—I wonder if it belonged to Ms. Katy. Outside, we examined the ancient, log walls.

The porch of the slave cabin where NFL standout
Dont'a Hightower's great-grandmother 
lived. The home is abandoned.

“Katy raised me,” said Ridley, whose family has lived in the area for generations. Then he dropped another gem: Ms. Yokley, long gone, also was the great-grandmother of Dont’a Hightower, the New England Patriots' linebacker and team captain, who starred at Alabama. He’s from Lewisburg, Tenn. Hightower’s dad recently visited the cabin.

Now this is a connection worth exploring further.

If he were alive today, Gideon Johnson Pillow would post a daily selfie to Facebook, craft look-at-me entries on his blog about his Corvette collection, flood Instagram with images of his circa-1840, 12-room, Greek Revival-style mansion, and tweet thousands of times about his hemp crop, which made him one of Tennessee's wealthiest men.

On Clifton Place tours on YouTube — the planter would be an influencer, of course — Pillow surely would brag about the full-length painting in the foyer of ... Gideon Pillow in a military uniform. (Hmmm, whom does this remind us of...?  😄)

The scouting report on Pillow from my historian friends Tom Price and Rachael Finch was not kind.

"Huge chip on his shoulder."

"Vain." 

A painting of Gideon Pillow at the Tennessee State
 Museum in Nashville.

"Would knock down whoever he needed to to get what he wanted." 

"Anything he posted to Instagram would be perfectly curated," which is probably the first time those nine words were typed referencing any Civil War general. 

Pillow's contemporaries also were scornful. In mid-February 1862, Ulysses Grant threw massive shade Pillow's way while discussing terms of surrender of the Confederate garrison at Fort Donelson with Rebel General Simon Bolivar Buckner, his old friend. The previous night, Pillow — whom Grant knew from the Mexican War — escaped across the Cumberland River in a small boat.

Buckner: “He thought you’d rather get ahold of him than any other man in the Southern Confederacy.”

Grant: "Oh, if I had got him, I’d let him go. He will do more good commanding you fellows.”

In his 1864 memoirs, Winfield "Old Fuss and Feathers" Scott — commanding general of the U.S. Army when the Civil War broke out — described Pillow as "amiable, and possessed of some acuteness, but the only person I have ever known who was wholly indifferent in the choice between truth and falsehood, honesty and dishonesty; ever as ready to attain an end by the one as the other, and habitually boastful of acts of cleverness at the total sacrifice of moral character."

Not a ringing endorsement.

At Fort Donelson (Feb. 13-16, 1862) and Stones River (Dec. 31, 1862-Jan. 2, 1863), Pillow’s generalship was underwhelming at best. After Stones River, he spent much of the rest of the war  recruiting.

Clifton Place, the circa-1840 mansion built for Gideon Pillow. I took this mansion
image during an escorted visit in February 2021.

The brick stable (foreground) at Gideon Pillow's plantation. The 12-room Clifton Place mansion
 appears in the left background. PRIVATE PROPERTY: Do not trespass.

Like most wealthy men in the South, Pillow owned slaves. Seventy toiled at his plantation, about a day's ride from Columbia back in the day. Ten or so served their master's domestic needs (cooking, cleaning, caring for children), and were housed in crude cabins near Clifton Place. The rest, who lived on slave row, worked the fields. Enslaved labor made Pillow a millionaire.

The exterior of one of the four surviving slave cabins.

Befitting his personality, Pillow spared little expense to create a showplace plantation. He added flourishes such as a brick stable and detached law office. The slave cabins we examined included brick fireplaces, an extravagance not seen at most other plantations, according to Finch. 

"He wanted everyone to know he had money," she said.

For Pillow, the effort to impress was partly to keep up with the Joneses... or Polks, in his case. Just down Mount Pleasant Pike were the impressive plantations of the Polk brothers — Ashwood Hall, perhaps the most fabulous plantation mansion in Tennessee, was originally built for Leonidas Polk, who also became a Confederate general. ("The Fighting Bishop" lived until June 14, 1864, when he was nearly sliced in two by Yankee artillery at Pine Mountain, Ga.)

Pillow, who went bankrupt after the war, died in 1878. If he were able to post, blog or tweet today, he could brag about something else — the state of his plantation complex.  

"One of the most intact ... in Middle Tennessee," Finch said of the private property. 

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SOURCE

• Hamilton, James. The Battle of Fort Donelson. T. Yoseloff, South Brunswick, N.J., 1968. 

A visit to 'The Quarters,' cabins of Gideon Pillow's enslaved

Farmer Campbell Ridley explores one of the slave cabins on his property.

The exterior of a log slave cabin.

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Gideon Pillow

Steps from the east fork of Green Lick Creek in Columbia, Tenn., stand log cabins where the enslaved of Gideon Pillow lived. A wealthy politician, lawyer, speculator and underwhelming Confederate major general, Pillow resided at Clifton Place, a magnificent mansion that still stands astride Mount Pleasant Pike. 

On Thursday afternoon, farmer and friend Campbell Ridley—a Pillow descendant—showed me and Cliff Roberts of the General Barton & Stovall History/Heritage Association the interior of one of the slave cabins, tucked on his property behind trees, brush and weeds. We didn’t go inside another slave cabin, but examined its brick chimney and deteriorating porch.

Pillow was one of the wealthiest men in Maury County—one of the wealthiest counties in the country before the Civil War. Much of that wealth was accumulated because of those who toiled for him—the enslaved who lived in these cabins.

Ridley, whose family has farmed in the area for generations, has long called these structures “The Quarters.” In addition to slaves, the cabins housed workers on the farm into the 20th century. Ridley also farms the land where Ashwood Hall—one of the most magnificent residences in Tennessee—once stood. The fabulous plantation mansion, owned by Leonidas Polk, “The Fighting Bishop” of the Confederacy, and later his brother, was destroyed in an 1874 fire. I wrote about it for Civil War Times magazine. 

Farmer Campbell Ridley slips inside the door.

Ridley examines the interior of a cabin, once occupied by slaves and later by workers
on his family farm.

Evidence of a fireplace in the cabin.

The deteriorating porch on another cabin.

The original, brick chimney.

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A slice of (hog) heaven at General Gideon Pillow’s plantation

Gideon Pillow was a mediocre Civil War general, but he lived large at Clifton Place plantation,
five miles from downtown Columbia, Tenn. (CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.)

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On a gloomy, overcast Saturday rambling about rural Maury County (Tenn.) with two excellent local guides, my friend Jack Richards and I learned: 

• Columbia, the county seat, is the "Mule Capital of the World." (The town is famous for its annual "Mule Day," which began before the Civil War.)
• The difference between chitlins (yuck) and cracklings (double yuck).

• 

  Gideon Pillow's spacious back porch.

  Gideon Pillow was a lousy Civil War general — see Exhibit A, Fort Donelson fiasco — but the Confederate commander sure lived the high life on a lavish plantation called “Clifton Place” astride Mount Pleasant Pike, five miles southwest of downtown Columbia. (He also was high on Gideon Pillow — the Mexican War veteran/politician/lawyer/planter/slave owner displayed a full-length painting of himself in his mansion.)
  
  In his 1864 memoirs, Winfield Scott -- commanding general of the U.S. Army when the Civil War broke out -- described Pillow as "amiable, and possessed of some acuteness, but the only person I have ever known who was wholly indifferent in the choice between truth and falsehood, honesty and dishonesty; ever as ready to attain an end by the one as the other, and habitually boastful of acts of cleverness at the total sacrifice of moral character."
  
  In other words, "Old Fuss and Feathers" was not a fan.

Original knocker on mansion
front door. (Photo: Jack Richards)

Privately owned but unoccupied for decades, Clifton Place includes a 12-room mansion built in 1838 as well as the original ice house, stable, Pillow office, slave quarters, kitchen, and smokehouse. (More on the greatness of the smokehouse in a bit.) Good for us that the Yankees didn't torch Clifton Place when they had the chance. Well-known for its impressive antebellum plantations (Ashwood Hall, Rattle And Snap, Rippavilla, etc.), Maury County was the wealthiest county per capita in Tennessee at the outbreak of the Civil War.

Thankfully, Richards and I had exceptional Pillow plantation guides — Maury County Archives director Tom Price and 78-year-old Campbell Ridley, a longtime Columbia resident, farmer, quipster, and a Pillow descendant. Ridley’s grandfather, who enjoyed eating hog brains, owned Clifton Place when Campbell was a kid. The plantation remained in his family until the early 1970s. (Ridley and Price also showed us the interior of historic St. John's Church and the site of Ashwood Hall, a spectacular mansion that was destroyed in an 1874 fire.)

Clifton Place sorely needs some TLC, but what multimillionaire wouldn't be tempted to invest in a mansion that features stone steps trod upon 11th U.S. president James K. Polk, a spectacular back porch, and a front door with a swan figurine on the original knocker?

Ridley enjoyed showing us around the plantation, regaling us with stories of hog butchering and crackling creation. (Earlier, he kept at least one of his guests spellbound with tales about Mule Day and his Aunt Sarah Ann, the first Mule Day queen.) But nothing grabbed our attention like the visit behind the mansion to the smokehouse, a 2 1/2-story, brick building with peeling yellow paint on its exterior. 

A 1936 view of the mansion's interior (Historic American Buildings Survey,
Library of Congress | VIEW MORE.)

The back side of the Greek Revival-style mansion features an impressive porch.

Gideon Pillow had a short walk from his mansion to his office.

The smokehouse stands behind the mansion.

Campbell Ridley holds a wooden slat from which hogs are hung.

Salt residue coats the brick floor.

Behind smokehouse Door No. 1 Ridley showed us a wooden slat used to hoist a dead hog onto a metal rail so it could be gutted. After the hoisting, a bucket was placed below the head for the innards to fall into after after the gutting. Warning: Not intended for viewing by faint-hearted city folks.  

Behind Door No. 2 was the pigs-de-resistance (sorry): the room where the hogs were smoked and cured in this country ham “factory.” I'm told there's nothing quite like a great country ham -- it's much better than any ham at Kroger.

A massive, ancient wood block in smokehouse.

To our left in the darkened room stood a massive wooden block -- undoubtedly from the Pillow era, Price said — upon which hams were chopped. Two 19th-century "ham logs" -- logs hollowed out to form a trough for salting of the hams -- rested against the wall. Salt from decades of country ham making coated the brick floor. 

Lawd, mere words can’t do justice to the spectacular, smoky aroma lingering in the place. No wonder Pillow's privies were strategically placed in two small rooms attached to the smokehouse. Who knows how many thousands of country hams have been smoked and cured at Pillow's plantation? 

After a few minutes in the smokehouse, I was half-tempted to roll on the ground like a giddy puppy just to bring home some of that wonderful smell on my bicycle pants (don't ask) and longsleeve sweatshirt. But, seriously, there was no point in hamming it up. :)

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SOURCES: 

-- National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, Ashwood Historic District.

-- Scott, Winfield, Memoirs of Lieut.-General Scott, New York, Sheldon and Company, 1864, Vol. II

'Garden of Eden' to Arkansas: Patrick Cleburne's final ride

Killed at the Battle of Franklin, Confederate General Patrick Cleburne was buried at a cemetery
behind St. John's Church near Columbia, Tenn.  The Irish-born officer's remains were disinterred  
and re-buried in Arkansas in 1870. (CLICK ON ALL IMAGES TO ENLARGE.)

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For nearly six years, Confederate General Patrick Cleburne's remains rested among the oaks and magnolias in a church cemetery near Columbia, Tenn. A comrade of the Irish-born officer called the spot as "beautiful as the Garden of Eden — seemingly a fit place for pure spirits to dwell, and for the haunts of angels."

In late April 1870, a delegation from Arkansas arrived at St. John's Church Cemetery for the disinterment of Cleburne's body for reburial in his adopted state. The division commander had been killed during a charge against Union breastworks at Franklin on Nov. 30, 1864 — one of six Confederate generals to die of wounds suffered in the battle. Two of them — Otho Strahl and Hiram B. Granbury — also rested at the cemetery with Cleburne before they also were removed and re-buried elsewhere.

The delegation found Cleburne buried in a gray uniform in a "good state of preservation," according to a local newspaper, but the "coffin was very much decayed, and not a particle of flesh was remaining on the skeleton."

       PANORAMA: Patrick Cleburne was buried at left, by the trees nearest the church.
                                    (Click at upper right for full-screen experience.)

Until 1870, Cleburne was buried in the cemetery behind historic St. John's Church, built from 1839-1842.

Historical sign and Civil War Trails marker in front of St. John's Church.

On April 28, while en route to Helena, Ark., Cleburne's hometown, the group stopped at the train depot in Memphis for a procession through the city with his remains. If anyone doubted the popularity of the "Stonewall Jackson of the West," those doubts were erased that spring afternoon. While a band played a funeral march, Cleburne devotees placed the coffin containing "Arkansas' greatest soldier" in a hearse for a procession called "perhaps the finest ever witnessed in the city."

"The cosmopolitanism of an interior city was never more thoroughly illustrated than in the conduct of Memphis ... when its whole population went forth to tender a deserved tribute of respect to the memories and virtues of a great soldier," the local newspaper said, omitting any reference to its Black population.

"Helena and Memphis, Arkansas and Tennessee, yesterday wept side by side over Cleburne's bier," the Daily Appeal wrote, "and if Helena did not claim the body of the illustrious soldier, that it may find its final resting place within the city which was his home, Helena would concede to Memphis the trust of giving worthy sepulture to the most famous of all citizen soldiery of Arkansas."

War-time image of Confederate
 president Jefferson Davis, 
who was in the procession with
Patrick Cleburne's remains
in Memphis in 1870.
.

Through the heart of Memphis, the city's leading citizens — politicians, lawyers, merchants and others — joined the procession with Cleburne's hearse. Members of the city fire department, Confederate veterans' organizations, the Irish Literary Society, Fenian Brotherhood and Hibernian Mutual Relief Society also attended the solemn event. In an open carriage sat the most notable attendees, including ex-Confederate generals Frank Cheatham and Gideon Pillow and the former president of the Confederacy himself, 61-year-old Jefferson Davis.

His head uncovered, Davis stood at attention "straight as an Indian" as he watched Cleburne's coffin carried from the depot to the hearse. "The whole history of the past ten years," a reporter noted, "ran like a flash of lightning over Mr. Davis' expressive face. There was an intensity of feeling and thought written upon the strongly marked lineaments of his eloquent features that unfolded the profoundest emotions."

Added the reporter about Davis:

There were tears in his eyes and his face expressed sympathies, emotions and strong memories, seemingly shared by none of those who sat beside him. As a statesman and soldier — we read it there — Mr. Davis was relentless in direct paths of duty. The duty of the hour often drew a veil over the heart and the inner man, while the fate of an empire was dependent on his words and acts [and] was rarely revealed to the outer world. His heart was on his lips yesterday, and there was the tenderness of woman's love in his soulful eyes when Cleburne's encoffined body was borne into his presence."

Other ex-Confederates and a few U.S. soldiers followed the hearse, decorated with black plumes, crepe and green ribbon. Cleburne's remains lay in a "handsome metallic case, the lid of which was closely screwed down so that even a glance at the remains through the glass was impossible." A large cross wreath and white flowers rested atop his coffin.

Grave marker for Patrick
 Cleburne at Confederate Cemetery
 in Helena, Ark.
(Find A Grave)

A reporter found a crowd "composed of every nationality, all anxious to pay the last tribute of respect to the departed hero," an Arkansas newspaper noted. "The whole white population shared in the imposing demonstration. The streets along the line of march were thronged with people.

"Balconies and windows were everywhere filled with people who watched the hearse and its multitude of silent followers with eager interest," it added. "The bells were tolled, and skillful musicians burdened the air with mournful melody."

Street cars became hopelessly stuck along the route because of the huge crowd. "There were countless vehicles," the newspaper reported, "in which were seated the matrons and youth and beauty of the city."

After the procession ended, pallbearers removed Cleburne's coffin from the hearse and placed it aboard the steamer George W. Cheek, docked in the Mississippi River. Before the vessel departed for the trip downriver to Helena, hundreds of Cleburne's former army comrades crowded to view the coffin that contained "the sacred dust" of the beloved Confederate general.

 "At Helena the same ceremonies will be gone through with," the Arkansas newspaper noted, "when all that is left of the immortal Cleburne will be conveyed to their final resting place.

"Peace to his ashes."

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SOURCES

• Memphis Daily Appeal, April 29, 1870
• The Southern Standard, Arkadelphia, Ark., May 14, 1870
• Public Ledger, Memphis, Tenn., May 3, 1870
• The Herald and Mail, Columbia, Tenn., April 28, 1870