With some pretty sorry shacks along that one unpaved block. All the other streets with houses owned by white families were paved, but that one block with homes owned by blacks was not. Frenchtown, the historically black neighborhood a little further away had mostly paved streets, mainly because they were thoroughfares cutting through the neighborhood.
Since then that one sad block has been demolished to build state offices, but I remember it. I wish I had pictures of it, but I didn't have a camera back then.
A few miles down the road from my farm are some old tenant shacks that may have originally been slave quarters. They are on one of the plantations and most of the people who live in those shacks work on the plantation or maybe their parents did and the plantation owners are allowing them to still live there. Although the plantation owner do maintenance, as those building get past repair, they are letting them go and demolishing them. I should take my camera and drive down the road to document them. There used to be lots of those old shacks scattered around this area, but they have mostly been lost to time.
Clifton Paisley in his book about this area covered the period as it transitioned from "Cotton to Quail" - the plantations changed from growing labor intensive cotton to hunting plantations that grow trees and wildlife. He documented how after the Civil War the plantation owners set the prices for the tenant farmers who had been their slaves. It was one of the ways they kept the laborers on the land without having to pay much more than than keeping the slaves had cost them. Once the agricultural economy in this area collapsed most of the plantations were sold to wealthy people from up North who used them for hunting vacations and as a side effect could grow valuable timber. But those uses provide few jobs and the jobs they do have pay little.
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