LAKE VILLAGE — “The Polks’ Plantations and the Creation of Cotton Kingdom in the Old South” will be presented at the Lakeport Legacies history talk.
Kelly Houston Jones, Ph.D, an assistant professor of history at Austin Peay State University, will be the presenter at 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 28, at the Lakeport Plantation at Lake Village. The event begins at 5:30 p.m. with refreshments and conversation. The program is free and open to the public.
Jones specializes in the history of slavery. She received her doctorate from the University of Arkansas in 2014. Her most recent work will appear later this year in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840-1950, edited by Guy Lancaster, according to a news release.
Jones will discuss her research on the Polk family’s cotton plantations in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
James K. Polk served as U.S. president from 1845 to 1849. He purchased a plantation in Yalobusha County, Mississippi in 1834, according to the release.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
“A nephew, William Wilson Polk, owned a large plantation at Walnut Bend in Phillips County, Arkansas and financed his uncle’s presidential run. George W. Polk, a cousin of President James K. Polk, co-owned the Hilliard Plantation on Grand Lake in Chicot County. Polk with his brother-in-law, Isaac Hilliard, owned 151 slaves and 550 acres of improved land in 1850. In 1845, he built a magnificent Greek Revival home near Columbia, TN, he named ‘Rattle and Snap,’” according to the release.
“The prominent family moved at the center of the historical processes that created King Cotton in the newest parts of the Old South,” according to the release. “James K. Polk himself invested in cotton, while his relatives ran cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta. The Polks’ and their business network represent patterns of cotton investment that characterized the late 1840s and early 1850s and built the slave empire of the Old Southwest.”
Lakeport Legacies is a talk held on the last Thursday during the spring and summer. A topic from the Delta region is featured. The Lakeport Plantation is an Arkansas State University Heritage Site.
To register for the presentation and for details, contact Blake Wintory at Lakeport Plantation at Lake Village, at 870-265-6031.