View From the Front Porch- July 23, 2012

On two sides of our home acreage here in Middle Tennessee, there is beautiful rock walls. Walls like these are located all over this part of Tennessee and up into Kentucky. The old timers call ...them "slave walls" and say they were built by slaves brought over from Africa who cleaned out the fields of this area of the rocks and used them to build the boundrey wall of the early farms. I've always been fascinated by the walls, from the first ones I saw on an early trip to Kentucky to buy horses in the 50's.
I have studied the history of the region of Sumner County, Tennessee where we live and was struck by some differences between this region and the region of the deeper South toward Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama. Those regions were big Cotton plantations with many slaves to do the work of the fields and the plantation owner living in the big house and never actually working the fields with the slaves, but having an overseer who rode their horses through the fields directing the slave work and merely reporting back to the big house on the progress.
You don't see the rock "slave" walls in that part of the country. The history of our area differs in this way; the early settlers in Sumner County who came to carve out their place in the wilderness were almost always of Scots-Irish ancestry. Yes, some of them had slaves, one or two slaves that lived more like an extended part of their families. In all accounts that I have found, these early settlers worked right alongside of them and that is where I find the difference. When you study the rock work of native Africans, in the areas where different tribes lived, you find very different type of rock walls. They are more like piles of rock that serve as fences, not at all like the precision rock walls of our area. However, when you study the rock work of Scotland and Ireland...you find the exact same type of precision rock work that is evident in Middle Tennessee and Kentucky. Which leads me to believe that my rock walls were a combined effort of two very different cultures, Scots-Irish and African, the native ability of the African Slave and the precision fitting ability of the Scots-Irish settlers. There is historic evidence that, working in the fields to build such structures, when the Indians would attack, both slave and settler would be killed, working side by side. Today, maybe 200 years later, these walls stand just as straight and true as they did when built. And to me that is a great achievement of two cultures working together in harmony, even under the dark cloud of slavery. I salute the families of those black and white builders who still live in the Sumner County region and who have a connection to rock walls that created a monument of lasting craftsmanship.    -Stan