Missouri Humanities Council News
Missouri Little Dixie Slave Cabin Project
Contributed by Gary Fuenfhausen-Project Director, Arrow Rock Historian
During six typical changing spring days this April, over one hundred dedicated attendees and followers met with the Slave Cabin Project’s celebrated founder, Mr. Joseph McGill, and members of the newly formed
Missouri’s Little Dixie Heritage Foundation (MLDHF), to learn about and honor the often forgotten slave cabin. The event, Missouri’s Little Dixie Cabin Project, grew out of a desire to create an awareness of these overlooked and often misunderstood architectural testaments of our State’s antebellum African American slave history.
As a background reference, the “slave cabin,” or slave dwelling, was once a common feature of the rural and urban antebellum landscape in Missouri’s Little Dixie region. To give you an idea of its presence, in 1860, nearly 52% of Missouri’s slaves were located in the 17 county region of this Southern enclave (out of total 114 counties).
In that same year over half of Missouri’s slave owners were located in Little Dixie on some 11,009 farms, plantations, manufacturing and urban settings. Little Dixie held the greatest concentration of large slave owners, with 16% of the Little Dixie estates holding 10 or more slaves and 7% owning 15 to 200 slaves. It is estimated that in 1860, “Little Dixie’s” slave owners, farmers, planters, and urban dwellers, owned some 60,311 slaves living in 13,300 “slave houses.” Of the total number of “Little Dixie” slave quarters or cabins built by 1860, only about 130 (or 1%) survive.
Missouri’s slave culture and history is one of the most under studied and under researched aspects of our State’s past. Many Southern and state scholars overlook or dismiss our Missouri’s “Peculiar Institution,” regarding it as unimportant when compared with slavery in the Deep South. It is often forgotten that Missouri’s diverse agricultural system, in particular Little Dixie’s hemp, tobacco, corn, and livestock production, were an essential component of the Southern slave system.
This lack of understanding and research of Missouri’s and Little Dixie’s slavery has in many ways lead to an atmosphere of misinterpretation of slavery within our borders. In particular, with a lack of proper research, information, and funds to document Missouri’s historic slave related sites, museums and preservation organizations can not properly manage slave history and sites. A few historical organizations have met or excelled in this field, such as the Friends of Arrow Rock in Arrow Rock, Missouri, who over a course of several decades have sponsored several important African American research and archeological investigations in their area.
http://www.mohumanities.org/news-up...-4/missouri-little-dixie-slave-cabin-project/