Preserving History: The Jarrell Plantation and Its Unspoken Past

The Jarrell Plantation State Historic Site is a state park in Juliette, Georgia. As mentioned on the Georgia State Parks’ Website, “It is located in the red clay hills of the Georgia piedmont, the site stands as one of the best-preserved examples of a middle class Southern plantation.” Also said on the website is that the Jarrell Plantation buildings and artifacts all came from one source, the Jarrell family, who farmed the land for over 140 years. Jarrell Plantation became a National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

Alongside with The Jarrell Plantation, The Jarrell House is a part of the Jarrell Family Historic Site. The family vacated the house in the year 1920. The house is now owned by Dick's grandson, who operates the Bed and Breakfast. The existence of the Jarrell Family in Jones County dates back to 1820.

According the website for Jarrell House, “For almost 200 years they drew sustenance, and sometimes prosperity, from this begrudging land. Their ingenuity and tenacity are evident in all they accomplished here.

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” Most of the land on The Jarrell Plantation site was donated by the Jarrell family to the State of Georgia in 1974 to form the Jarrell Plantation Site.

Prior to the Civil War, the Jarrell's farm was one of the half-million cotton farms in the South that collectively produced two-thirds of the world's cotton. Similar to other planters, the Jarrell family benefited from the development of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, which made it easier to capture cotton in even the most difficult areas of Georgia.

Dating back to the time before Benjamin Richard Dick Jarrell, his father, John Jarrell built the first permanent structure on the site in 1847. Like most cotton plantations, John Jarrell ran the farm with his family and slave labor. This statement in itself is very contradicting. It will be explained in a later paragraph. The farm survived several disasters such as the typhoid fever outbreak, General Sherman’s March, emancipation, and Reconstruction (jarrellhouse.com). With the help of former slaves, John Jarrell increased the farm to almost 1,000 acres. The “help” dispersed when John Jarrell passed away.

After the death of John Jarrell, his son Benjamin Richard "Dick" Jarrell, returned home to build his family home in 1895. Dick Jarrell expanded the industrialization of the farm by adding several machines like a steam-driven sawmill, cotton gin, and shingle mill. According to tour guides from The Jarrell Plantation Historic Site, Dick Jarrell built his family home with only the help of sons and nephews. The Jarrell Home was completed built solely of heart pine. In 1974, the family donated the plantation site to the State of Georgia for the preservation of the farm and the education of future generations about their heritage.

Upon my first visit to the Jarrell Plantation, it was a breathtaking yet observation. The historic site still resembled an 1800’s style, still showing the importance of the cotton gin, sawmill, and other industrial products. The tour guides were very knowledgeable in the plantation and shared some interesting facts about the plantation with me.

I was informed the site as well as the area was used in the film “Fried Green Tomatoes,” and that the site received a lot of publicity because of it.From my personal perspective, the added information about the movie “Fried Green Tomatoes” was used to stray away from the potential topic of a harsh reality of what that historic site entailed.

Aside from that, much of the information that could be found on the website was repeated by the tour guides stating information regarding the Jarrell Plantation being “one of the last remaining examples of a vanishing culture with its authentic nineteenth and early twentieth century plantation buildings typical to Middle Georgia representing the change from an agricultural to an industrial based economy.” Moreover, despite the repetition of information presented to me by the tour guides, their enthusiastic personalities definitely made the tour a lot more intriguing.

After doing further research on The Jarrell Plantation, I discovered that there was a lot of information missing from the tours that that particular site provided. From there, I made a second visit to the Plantation, this time asking questions instead of just observing. Yet again, I felt empty handed. I’d decided that I would give the site one more visit but this time, bringing the information that I’d acquired from research and asking questions from the research.

Also, I visited the Jarrell House as well on the last try to the Jarrell Plantation. It was then that I was able to come to a conclusion. The tour guides were knowledgeable in presenting the information to me however, failed to mention the presence of slavery in the Plantation. My research as mentioned above serves as pieces of evidence that the tour guides do not provide an adequate amount of information relating to slavery to possibly avoid modern day controversy.

Despite the tour guide’s own personal choice to leave that information out, or their rational ignorance to the correlation between slavery and the plantation, I still was able to identify that there was definitely a presence of slavery due to the research I’d constructed as well as the fact that the guides could not tell me who maintained the machinery on the farm. All in all, The Jarrell Plantation Historic Site and its correspondent, The 1920 Jarrell House, both are significant sites that preserve its history but deny the correlation it has with slavery.