Plantation cache (TN)

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Kentucky Kache

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That plantation was owned by Dr. Frederick Harwell, a native of Brunswick County, Virginia. Around 1810 several members of his family had moved to Giles County in middle Tennessee. Twenty years later Dr. Harwell and his wife moved west to District 5 in Fayette County, where they established a large plantation with more than 1,000 acres and approximately 80 slaves. Several intriguing anecdotes about the family still survive. According to one story from late in the Civil War, Dr. Harwell, quite elderly by that time, took a little slave girl along to help him bury his money to protect it from approaching Yankee soldiers. Several descendants of that little girl tell how she wracked her brain for the rest of her life, trying to remember where the money was buried. Over the years many people attempted to find the hidden treasure, but with no success. It was not until the 1940s that Jacob Harwell Junior, whose father had been adopted by a slave from that plantation, was plowing in one of the fields and dug up part of the money! Descendants of John Yarbrough, the driver on the plantation [A driver was a high-ranking slave used as an overseer.], tell a story about Union soldiers who hung Yarbrough upside down from a tree to convince him to reveal where the Harwells' valuables were hidden.

http://tn.gov/tsla/exhibits/blackhistory/bios/gooden.htm
 

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