The House on Diamond Hill - 9780807834183

"Displaying pitch-perfect sensibility that weaves profound human empathy with piercing scholarly critique, Tiya Miles lays open the suffering: of all those who found themselves enmeshed in the world of Diamond Hill. At once monument and memorial, the Vann House is Cherokee, African, and American slavery writ large."--- I AMi: s F. brooks, author of Captives and Cousins: Shivery, kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands

"This is one of the most thoughtful, beautifully written works of history on any topic that I have read in a long while. Miles has taken a complex set of issues that have been long obscured by a desire for a romantic and guilt-free past, and with grace and sensitivity, has completely re-written history."--- Leslie M. Harris. Emory University

A James Vann, a Cherokee and entrepreneur, established Diamond Hill, the most famous plantation in the southeastern Cherokee Nation. Tiya Miles tells the story of this plantations founding, its flourishing, its takeover by white land-lottery winners on the eve of the Cherokee Removal, its decay, and ultimately its renovation in the 1950s. Indeed, this is the first full-length study to reconstruct the history of the Diamond Hill plantation, a cosmopolitan hub of activity where more than one hundred slaves of African descent lived and labored, contributing significandy to the Vann family's famed wealth.

This moving multiracial history sheds light on the various cultural communities that interacted within the plantation boundaries---from elite Cherokee slaveholders to Cherokee subsistence farmers, from black slaves of various ethnic backgrounds to free blacks from the North and South, from German-speaking Moravian missionaries to white southern skilled laborers. Moreover, the book paints rich portraits of the women of these various communities, including Peggy Scott Vann, mistress of Diamond Hill; Pleasant, an enslaved black woman owned by the Moravian Church; and Anna Rosina Gambold, a Moravian missionary diarist. Vividly written and extensively researched, this history illuminates gender, class, and cross-racial relationships on the southern frontier of present-day Georgia.