Goodwood: Cotton, Copper, and the People Who Built It All
Near Tallahassee, Florida
Content note: this track discusses the specific human cost of plantation slavery.
The white-columned manor house you can see from the road looks exactly like what a certain kind of Southern mythology wants you to see: the gracious antebellum plantation, columns gleaming, magnolias overhead. But Goodwood's actual history is stranger and darker and more honest than that image.
In eighteen thirty-four, the Croom family arrived from North Carolina, wealthy tobacco planters who purchased twenty-four hundred acres of a land grant originally given to the Marquis de Lafayette when France was courting American revolutionary gratitude. The Crooms brought sixty enslaved people from the Carolinas. Those sixty people cleared the forest, dug the wells, erected the cisterns, tended the livestock, and grew the cotton and corn that made the plantation viable. They built Goodwood, in every literal sense of that word.
The Croom era lasted barely twenty years. The family patriarch and most of his immediate family died in a shipwreck in eighteen thirty-seven when a steamship called the Home sank in a hurricane off the Outer Banks. A prolonged court battle over the estate followed, ending in the sale of both the property and the enslaved people who had created it.
New owners came and went. After the Civil War, the property passed through several hands until a New York socialite named Fannie Tiers purchased it in nineteen eleven and transformed it into a winter estate. She is largely responsible for the architectural appearance you see today. Tiers replaced the original Italianate facade with the grand columned portico. The Gone With the Wind look that people associate with antebellum plantations was, in Goodwood's case, a nineteen-tens renovation by a Northerner who wanted her winter home to look the part.
Senator William Hodges and his wife Margaret acquired the property in nineteen twenty-five and were the last private owners before it became a historic house museum. The rooms inside hold original furniture and personal effects from those later eras. What they cannot fully hold is the story of those sixty people and all who came after them, whose labor made everything else possible. The museum is working to tell more of that story.
