Can these slave cabins linked to a Rebel general be saved?

A slave cabin in "The Quarters," near downtown Columbia, Tenn. It is one of four.

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A version of this column originally appeared in Civil War Times in 2024.

On a cloudless, deep-blue afternoon, I drive 45 miles south of Nashville to Columbia for a visit with one of my favorite people, Campbell Ridley. He’s an 80-year-old semi-retired farmer, U.S. Army veteran, rock-and-roll devotee and storyteller with a wit as sharp as the tip of a new bayonet.

Gideon Pillow,
circa 1870.

“How are you feeling?” I ask moments after stepping into his farm office.

Aside from mourning the recent death of Barney — his nine-year-old barn cat — Ridley says he feels fine, a state he attributes to “clean living and cheap beer.” He’s wearing tan Carhartts, brown work boots, a blue-checkered shirt, and, appropriately, a ballcap that reads “Life Is Good.”

Ridley’s roots run deep in Maury County, once one of the wealthiest counties in the state before the Civil War. He’s the great-great-grandnephew of Gideon Pillow, the Confederate brigadier general, Mexican War veteran, lawyer, politician and before the war one of the county’s foremost slaveholders. Ridley’s paternal great-grandfather, a leading citizen who farmed with mules, earned the nickname “Mule King” — fitting enough in Columbia, long known as the “Mule Capital of the World.”

When I need a history fix and a good laugh, I visit Ridley. We’ve sat together inside magnificent St. John’s Church — the slave-constructed plantation church built under the direction of Leonidas Polk and his brothers. It stands roughly a mile and a half southwest along Mount Pleasant Pike, just across from the field where the Episcopalian bishop and future Confederate lieutenant general once lived in a mansion called Ashwood Hall. There, we’ve admired the two massive gingko trees Polk imported from Japan and poked around the brick remnants of the kitchen of the mansion, destroyed by fire in 1874 and never rebuilt.

Irish visitor Liam McAlister, Campbell Ridley and I during a recent visit to "The Quarters."

'The Quarters' on Gideon Pillow plantation: Time capsules in Maury County, Tennessee

Today, though, we’re exploring far humbler construction. Near Ridley’s office and the east fork of Greenlick Creek stand four ramshackle slave cabins. “The Quarters,” he calls the property. His daughter, who lives in New Mexico, owns it along with a friend.

“I’ll take care of this until she puts me in a nursing home,” he says, half-joking.

Campbell Ridley explores a
slave cabin in "The Quarters."

In a way, these cabins are as much a part of Ridley as the land he has farmed for decades. As late as the 1990s, he tells me, these structures served as homes for poor Black farmhands and others — many of whom worked for the Ridleys.

“The woman who raised me lived here,” he says as we step inside one of the rickety cabins. Her name was Katie, a “wonderful” lady with a gift for frying chicken. The Ridley family employed her for more than three decades.

At the next cabin, ancient white paint clings to exposed exterior logs. Four modern wooden posts prop up the porch overhang above two large, well-worn walkway stones. On an exterior wall, a half-dozen old hangers dangle from a rusty nail. Above us, a corrugated-tin roof keeps nature at bay.

“That’s been there as long as I can remember,” Ridley says.

These antebellum cabins stand in stark contrast to Clifton Place, the brick manor house on the hill about 750 yards away. In the late-fall sunlight, the mansion almost seems to glow. Through the trees along the road to Ridley’s office, its imposing Ionic columns and limestone porch come into view.

From 1839 until the early Civil War years — when the U.S. Army confiscated the property — Clifton Place served as the centerpiece of Pillow’s vast plantation. The slaves who lived in cabins at “The Quarters” produced his wealth by planting and harvesting cotton, hemp, corn and other crops and tending his cattle, sheep and hogs.

As one of Tennessee’s leading citizens, Pillow moved in elite circles. He counted James K. Polk, the 11th U.S. president, among his friends. After Polk left the presidency in 1849, he dined at Clifton Place with Pillow and his wife, Mary. Pillow dabbled in national politics himself, opposing secession at first in 1861 before relenting.

As a military man, however, Pillow consistently disappointed. During the Mexican War, he irritated superiors — including Winfield Scott — with his relentless self-promotion. No surprise, perhaps, given the massive painting of a heroic Pillow in uniform that greeted visitors in the entrance hall at Clifton Place.

In the Civil War, Pillow abandoned his post at Fort Donelson in February 1862, slipping away under cover of darkness before Ulysses Grant accepted the Confederates’ surrender. At Stones River nearly 10 months later, he led a brigade with mixed results. True or not, a story of the 55-year-old officer cowering behind a tree during the fight has stained his record ever since.

Scott — overall commander of the U.S. Army when the war broke out — certainly wasn’t a fan. In his 1864 memoirs, “Old Fuss and Feathers” 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… habitually boastful… at the total sacrifice of moral character.”

Inside the slave cabins: A window into the past (Video)

Apparently used to keep the weather out, ancient newspapers cling to the walls of a slave cabin.

As we move from cabin to cabin (see video), Ridley reflects only briefly on his ancestor and the enslaved people who toiled for him.

“Just part of history,” he says.

We step gingerly into a cabin once home to field slaves. More than a year ago, Ridley had brush cleared from around these structures, making access easier. Each cabin is roughly 15 by 15 feet, with a small loft reached by a rickety ladder. Each has a post–Civil War room added to the rear. I’ve visited the site half a dozen times, yet I always see something new.

Ridley shines a flashlight beam onto a fireplace, revealing bricks and small dirt piles in an otherwise barren room. Fragments of newspaper — used as insulation by post-war inhabitants — speckle the walls. A dour-looking baseball player stares out from a March 1937 sports page. Beneath my feet, a decrepit floor, victimized by time and weather, crunches softly.

An interior view of one of the four remaining 
slave cabins that were occupied well
into the 20th century.

In another cabin, we find more traces of the 20th century: a swinging blade, peeling wallpaper decorated with blue-and-aqua flowers, a chipped ax handle, a single clothes hook on a door. Pasted to a back wall is a fragment of The New York Times from decades ago.

“Life in America,” the partial headline reads.

From the era of slavery, though, there is nothing visible: no pottery fragments, no glass shards, no etchings on the walls, no privy to mine for clues. Much is left to imagination.

So I wonder: Who were these men, women, and children?

What treatment did they receive from Pillow?

What were their names?

The 1870 census offers hints. “Sarah” and “Randall,” listed as farmhands for the Pillow family, appear in deeds from as far back as the 1840s.

I wonder what became of the people enslaved at Clifton Place. Are they buried in the cemetery in the woods at the base of Ginger Hill — the remote graveyard Ridley showed me months ago? Or in the rear section of St. John’s Church Cemetery, away from the graves of white parishioners? Or perhaps in one of the countless family plots scattered across the county.

And I wonder what will become of these cabins near the east fork of Greenlick Creek. Ridley wants to save them, but doing so would require expertise and probably hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What might a professional archaeologist uncover here?

'The most complete 19th-century plantation complex anywhere'

I also wonder about the future of Clifton Place, where Ridley’s paternal grandfather lived until 1949. The family held onto it for years afterward.

“I watched television in there for the first time in my life,” Ridley says, recalling family gatherings under 16-foot-high ceilings in the 12-room Greek Revival mansion.

In 1972, a Kentucky Fried Chicken magnate named John R. Neal bought the property from the Ridley family. He and his wife, Linda, attempted a restoration, but the project proved daunting. “We saw the white columns, the Gone With the Wind atmosphere,” she told a reporter in 1986. “We didn’t see the cracks, the structural problems.”

A view of the long-unoccupied Clifton Place
estate of Gideon Pillow. This is private
property. Do not trespass.

The estate includes the original detached kitchen, carriage house, ice house, law office, spring house, blacksmith shop and quarters for “house” slaves. Inside the Pillow-era smokehouse stand the original poplar chopping block and “ham logs” — hollowed poplar logs once used for salting hams. The smoky aroma still lingers.

A researcher once called Clifton Place “the most complete 19th-century plantation complex anywhere.”

Neal died in 2018, but his family still owns the property. The mansion, however, has stood unoccupied — and inaccessible to the public — for more than a decade. Like the nearby slave cabins, it could vanish without major preservation efforts.

Time may not be on our side. Across Mount Pleasant Pike from Clifton Place, developers plan a massive subdivision: “Seven hundred fifty houses on 450 acres,” Ridley says.

Oh my. What will I see here a decade from now?

Places like these don’t disappear all at once — they vanish slowly, board by board, memory by memory, until all that’s left is what someone bothered to write down. I suppose that’s why I keep returning to them. To witness what remains. And to remember what shouldn’t be forgotten.

---

SOURCES

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

— The Tennesseean, Aug. 10, 1986, Page 113