Our History
The Rabun County Historical Society
The Story of African-Americans in Rabun County Slaves, Segregated Work Camps and a Grandmother Who Was Purchased By Dick Cinquina
Village for Black workers at the Terrora hydro plant construction site
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frican-Americans were among the earliest residents of Rabun County. They were slaves.
Rabun County was created by an act of the Georgia legislature in 1819. The new county’s land was offered to white settlers through the Land Lottery of 1820. Unique to Georgia, this lottery system distributed 250-acre parcels in the county’s river valleys, which contained the most arable land. Parcels in the mountainous portions of the county were surveyed into holdings of 490 acres. Regardless of location, both 250 and 490-acre lots were acquired for pennies an acre. Like most mountain counties, Rabun’s topography prevented the formation of many large farms, which largely eliminated the need for a significant amount of slave labor. However, the availability of cheap land nevertheless attracted slave owners, many from South Carolina. 205 Slaves in 1860 According to the “1860 Slave Schedule” compiled by James Bleckley, 49 families owned 205 slaves in Rabun County. This stands in stark contrast to the vast slave populations on the sprawling cotton plantations farther south in Georgia. The county’s largest slave owners farmed large tracts of arable land in the Little Ten-
nessee River Valley north of Clayton and the Warwoman Valley east of Clayton. Captain Samuel Beck owned 18 slaves, making him the largest slaveholder in Rabun County. He was followed by Hiram Gibson (17), G.A. Greenwood (16), John W. Scruggs (14) and Edley Powell (13). The county’s other slaveholders owned far fewer slaves. The Slave Schedule reported that many families owned only one or two, most likely for domestic work or house chores. Many of the county’s 205 slaves were children. The oldest was listed as 72. Most were in their 20s and 30s. Samuel Beck came to Rabun County from Pickens, South Carolina without slaves to participate in the 1820 land lottery. He won 490 acres along Dick’s Creek in the Warwoman Valley. After serving as captain of a battalion of Georgia volunteers in Florida’s Seminole Wars during the 1830s, Beck started acquiring large tracts of land. He eventually owned more than 2,000 acres, stretching east from his initial homestead to the Chattooga River. To meet his labor needs, Beck acquired slaves. Slave Owner Voted Against Secession Beck and Horace W. Cannon were chosen to represent Rabun County at Georgia’s secession convention in then-capital Milledgeville in January 1861. Reflecting the county’s generally pro- Union sentiment due to the absence of widespread slavery and their fear that war would wreak havoc on Rabun’s economy, slaveholder Beck and Can-
Dick Cinquina holds graduate degrees in history and journalism, making his work for the Rabun County Historical Society a natural fit for his interests. He is the retired president of Equity Market Partners, a national financial consulting firm he founded in 1981. In addition to writing monthly articles for the Georgia Mountain Laurel, Dick helped produce the Society’s new web site and is involved with the renovation of the group’s museum. After vacationing in this area for many years, he and his wife Anne moved to Rabun County in 2018 form Amelia Island, Florida.
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