Jones-Florence Plantation, Odessadale Georgia
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The Jones-Florence Plantation is a good example of an antebellum plantation as well as postbellum farm. Rather than cotton, it produced primarily corn, wheat and vegetables. Its products would have primarily been used to sustain the owners and their slaves or tenants.
The remaining outbuildings and the rural setting reflect the isolation and self-sufficiency of the plantation. It is an intact example of a Plantation Plain-style plantation house with Victorian additions. It reflects in its wainscoting, mantels, and hardware the fine details such a place could contain, while being significant also for its unusual separated areas on the second floor approached through two stairways. Its owners, first Willis Jones (1782-1840), who had moved to this newly opened territory by 1830 and built an earlier house, and later William Florence (1805-1879), who built the larger house there today, and whose family owned it until 1981. The Florence family's plantation was considered one of the finest in the county, and they continued farming until the 1950s. By remaining in the same family, the plantation suffered few changes. Both the Jones and Florence families reflect the migration of Georgians from older, eastern Georgia to the new territory opened for settlement in 1827. They came seeking new, fresher land on which to raise their families and their crops.
Willis Jones (1782-1840), who built the first house on this property, came into the section around 1830. The area was opened in 1827 for white settlement. He bought the lot in 1834. He built a one-and-a-half-story house where the house stands now. At his death in 1840, William Florence bought the house and land for $3,746. Land included lots number 90, 104, and 105, totaling 607½ acres.
William Florence (1805-1879) built the present two-story house, incorporating the first one-and-a-half-story house as the ground floor, and a basis for the upstairs in the front portion.
Besides the Joneses, who built the first house and are buried in the nearby Jones-Florence cemetery, there were three generations of Florences to live here. William Florence was born in Washington County, Georgia, in 1805, but he later moved with the family to Wilkes County, Georgia. There he married Millie Ann Arnett (1808-1891). They had thirteen children, some born in Wilkes County and some in Meriwether, where they moved in 1839.
In 1850, William Florence was forty-four years old. His plantation consisted of 250 acres of improved lands and 350 of unimproved land. The cash value of the farm was $3,000; the farm equipment, $250, and livestock, $1,082.
There was a modest production of forty-four bushels of wheat, 1,250 bushels of corn, 300 bushels of oats, fifteen bushels of peas and beans, fifty bushels of potatoes, and fifty pounds of butter. Three bales of cotton were ginned. His estate was valued at $11,500, and he owned seventeen slaves. There were eight children living at home at that time.
When the Civil War came, William Florence's four sons took an active part. Two were taken prisoners of war, while one died during the war. The fourth served throughout the war, although wounded three times.
Bill Florence was the son who came home to the Florence Plantation to care for his parents and run the farm. He succeeded with hard work in keeping the plantation running. When he was almost thirty-four, in 1872, he married Mary Jane Russell, daughter of another Meriwether pioneer family. The Bill Florences had seven children, the oldest of whom married William James Parmenter. Parmenter boarded at the Florence Planation while he was a paymaster for a rock-quarrying company. The rock quarry was originally part of the Florence Plantation. The rock was carried out on a spur of the Macon and Birmingham Railroad, which ran through Odessadale, a community close by. The Florence Planation was considered one of the finest farms in the countryside. It continued to be farmed by the Florence family until the 1950s. Of the seven Florence children, only one, Lottie Florence Parmenter, left heirs. Hugh, Dozier, and Lena Florence remained on the farm until their deaths. James returned from Decatur some time after his wife's death and also died at the homeplace. Lena Florence was the last Florence to live there. She died in the late 1970s. A great-niece, Mary Florence Thrash, sold the remaining acres to William Mathews in 1981.
Site Description
The Jones-Florence Plantation consists of an Antebellum plantation house, numerous outbuildings, and associated rural acreage.
The main house is a two-story Plantation Plain-style clapboard house with a double-tiered veranda on the front, a kitchen-dining room wing on the east, and a one-story back porch. The main house has an unusual configuration: it has four rooms over four but with two stairs leading to two separate sections of the upstairs. A narrow front hall was created by a partition in the late 1800s. The house retains its original paneled wainscoting, mantels, pine floors, doors, and door hardware. The house rests on brick-and-stone piers infilled by cement blocks. There are twin brick chimneys on either end of the main house; parts of these have been stuccoed. The kitchen-dining room wing has a similar chimney of brick and stucco. Mantels vary in style from a very fine Federal-style one in the first-floor parlor to similar, but simpler ones, in the front rooms of the second floor, to even less elaborate ones in the rear rooms on both levels. Much of the house's original paint survives with some hints of graining. Some of the original locks also remain. The house is constructed of heavy, heart-of-pine timber. Doors and wainscoting are pegged together. The floors are tongue-and-groove. Very little modernization has taken place here, including a minimum of electricity and a pump for the well.
The house is situated within a grove of oak trees in a rural setting off a state highway. Its former fields are mostly wooded. There are remnants of a flower garden in front and a vegetable garden on the side, as well as a pecan grove in the rear. Numerous historic outbuildings survive, both adjacent to the house and across the road. Near the house are the chicken house and yard, smokehouse, covered well, and tool shed. Across Tiggs Road are three barns. There is a tenant house on the northwest edge of the property.
The main house is remarkably intact and has had very few changes. The double-tiered veranda was added in 1898 and the bathroom in the 1920s.