Croom Family and Goodwood Plantation: Land, Litigation, and Southern Lives [Paperback]

William Warren Rogers (Author)
WILLIAM WARREN ROGERS is professor emeritus of history at Florida State University.

Erica R. Clark (Author)
ERICA R. CLARK is a volunteer researcher at Goodwood Museum and Gardens, Inc.

One of the most elegant mansions in Florida, Goodwood was built over a century ago and stands today as one of Tallahassee’s grandest historical monuments. It was once the center of a thriving plantation founded by the Croom family of North Carolina, who in the 1820s sought to revive their fortunes in the newly opened Florida territory. William Warren Rogers and Erica R. Clark tell the story of this family and their legacy, shedding new light on many aspects of antebellum family life, plantation management, and race relations. They describe how brothers Hardy and Bryan Croom developed Goodwood Plantation to over four thousand acres with nearly two hundred slaves before Hardy and his family were killed in a shipwreck, and how a twenty-year lawsuit, complicated by questions of survivorship and residency, denied Bryan control of the estate. This meticulously detailed account, drawing extensively on family correspondence and court records, is a story of humaneness, hard work, and family values—but also of selfishness and greed—that reveals an intriguing chapter of southern history.

Detailed and well-written . . . An important contribution to family, legal, agricultural, religious, and cultural history.

Rogers and Clark give us an excellent treatment of the Croom family in southern history and of one of Florida’s most interesting plantations. But they have done much more than that. They have also portrayed the larger story of the development of what became the cotton kingdom of the South. They have made a valuable contribution to the literature of antebellum southern history which will stand the telÓU