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Concept art for the potential Weeping Time memorial.
Credit: Provided by Dr. Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson / The Current
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Weeping Time land: Group works to buy, build memorial
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By Ellen Hunter, The Current
History touches every inch of Savannah’s historic district, from the bright neon signs on Broughton Street to the miles of cobblestones on River Street.
But for all the spots heavily visited by locals and tourists, the ghosts just outside the landmark historic zones — the memories of one of the largest sales of enslaved people in American history — for decades have almost been forgotten.
The land where this tragedy, known as “The Weeping Time,” occurred quietly went up for sale. However, the sales page for the property at 204 W. Old Lathrop Ave. came down quietly earlier this year.
Real estate experts familiar with the situation say that parties interested in reviving the memories of these enslaved ancestors are attempting to raise money to buy the land and build a memorial there. It’s the latest in a long line of efforts to restore dignity to the people sold at auction, and build upon Savannah’s reputation as a fulcrum of Black history in America.
But it’s not clear what chances the gambit involving local leaders, academic institutions and Black historian Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson, have in reaching their goal.
“We have created a map — or a landscape plan — that shows what that site could be turned into, basically a memorial site. Museums, lakes, just a place of…commemoration, but also a place of contemplation, a place where people can go to reconcile with this. Where Blacks, and whites, and whoever — we can come to terms with this event and move forward,” said DeGraft-Hanson, a landscape architect and founder of OCEANS, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to commemorating those who were enslaved in the United States.
The city itself has its own vested interest in acquiring the property and working to honor the sacrifices of the slaves who were torn from their families. However, it’s unclear how much support the municipality will give this latest effort. The city, said Mayor Van Johnson, must balance its financial duties to those living in the present before it can attempt to honor the lives of the past.
“Ultimately, we have to make some type of decision. Do we acquire that type of property, or do we provide land for people to have homes and live on?” Johnson stated.
What is The Weeping Time?
Torrential rain soaked the city of Savannah on March 2 and 3 of 1859. Potential slave owners and curious onlookers from Alabama, Virginia, Louisiana, and as far as New York traveled to respond to an advertisement for “a gang of 460 Negroes, accustomed to the culture of Rice and Provisions” being offered for sale on Ten Broeck Race Course.
Pierce Mease Butler, grandson of Founding Father Major Pierce Butler, has 436 of his slaves that he inherited on the auction block. Hailing from the plantations in Darien and St. Simons Island, his stock ranges in age from hardened, sun-worn 56-year-olds to round, fresh-faced 3-month-olds with skin as soft as the cotton they might be sold off to one day pick.
Coming off the heels of a high-profile divorce with Shakespearean actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble and encumbered with gambling debts, Butler, the grandson of a man who signed a document that details the rights and freedoms entitled to every American, is selling other human beings into perpetual servitude for a more comfortable life.
Their faces are all curled in varying shades of despair — some riddled with anxiety for their future, others completely dissociated to make the weight of being sold like cattle ever so slightly easier to bear.
Husbands weep as their wives are torn from their arms and into plantations hundreds — if not thousands — of miles away from their embrace.
Mothers turn into auctioneers in their own right, desperately pleading to potential masters and advertising their children as prime stock in the hopes that they will be bought together as a package deal.
Under the guise of an interested buyer, Mortimer Thomson of the New York Tribune (or more commonly known by his pseudonym, Philander Doesticks), carefully notates his experiences at the auction. He provides a firsthand account of the state of the accommodations provided for the enslaved people as they awaited their fates.
“Immediately on their arrival, they were taken to the Race-course, and there quartered in the sheds erected for the accommodation of the horses and carriages of gentlemen attending the races,” Thomson wrote.
He immediately notes the condition and demeanor of each enslaved person wearily approaching the auction block. He writes of how abjectly downtrodden each one appears at the cruel hand that fate has dealt them.
“On the faces of all was an expression of heavy grief; some appeared to be resigned to the hard stroke of Fortune that had torn them from their homes, and were sadly trying to make the best of it; some sat brooding moodily over their sorrows, their chins resting on their hands, their eyes staring vacantly, and their bodies rocking to and fro, with a restless motion that was never stilled; few wept, the place was too public and the drivers too near, though some occasionally turned aside to give way to a few quiet tears,” he recalled.
The two-day auction would soon be known as “The Weeping Time,” not just for the tears of slaves being sold and ripped from their families, but for the deluge of rain that soaked the city for the entirety of the auction’s duration. Historians note that it seemed as if God was weeping for His beloved, unfortunate children.
Past touches the present
It soon came time for Number 99 to come to the auction block. Known only as “Kate’s John” to distinguish him from the other Johns being sold, he was advertised to potential buyers as a rice planter in his prime. He was sold to A.W. Baird of Nachitoches Parish in Louisiana for $510, or almost $20,000 today.
His descendants gradually made their way from Coastal Georgia’s marshes, to Louisiana’s swamps and bayous, to the beaches of the country’s west coast. One relative, Annette Holmes, is an institutional research analyst at the University of California.
As an “amateur genealogist,” Holmes lapped up stories of her enslaved ancestors from an uncle, and then researched her own grandmother — a Butler — and their family past.
“I was interested in genealogy, and I would just pick up tidbits here and there from my grandmother’s second-oldest son, my uncle Charles,” Holmes explained. “I started putting it together, and I researched my grandmother. I went back and I researched Jim Butler [Kate’s John’s son], and I found him on the census. You know, they were Butlers all the way back to the 1880 census.”
Holmes dove further and further down the Butler Island rabbit hole until she found a startling connection. By pure coincidence, it seemed, she learned that she was a descendant of Kate’s John. Then, watching an episode of the PBS documentary Africans in America, she put two and two together.
“I was sitting, lying on the couch, and I was just thinking about, ‘Oh, wow, they’re Butlers from Butler Island.’ I didn’t think anything of it because I never knew we had a Georgia connection at all,” Holmes recalled. “I went online and I started Googling…The Weeping Time, because I wanted to know who these people are.”
Now, she spends her time compiling data and conducting research to help others figure out if the roots of their family trees spread all the way to Darien and the auction blocks in Savannah. She is eager to see a Weeping Time memorial, something that will knit together the fraying threads between her one family and the past, and other descendents from the tragedy.
Holmes’ interest in her ancestry was the result of her gleaning tidbits of information about her heritage from her uncle. Soon, those breadcrumbs turned into the foundation for finding her connection to the sale in Savannah.
Holmes is not the only person with a direct lineage to the slaves from Butler Plantation.
Griffin Lotson, mayor pro tem of Darien, also traces his ancestry directly to Butler Island and Habersham Mungin, an enslaved man who worked on the Darien plantation.
His time and effort has been on maintaining and restoring the remnants of the plantation itself, rather than the Savannah land where the slaves were sold.
DeGraft-Hanson, who is trying to raise money for a memorial in Savannah, has no personal tie to the Weeping Time. Born in Ghana, the academic still felt called on this mission.
“The reason I got drawn to this was because I recognized that some of the names of the people who are sold at this Weeping Time slave sale include names that I know personally. People from Ghana, people from the Gold Coast, and the surrounding countries with names just like mine were on that list, so then they became kinfolk.”
Despite the time that has passed, the embers of the enslaved still burn bright. Some are still fighting to ensure that the legacy of the enslaved persists into the modern era.
“It affects us today because there are still descendants of those enslaved people still living in the McIntosh County, Darien area, and they are trying to maintain the history and the legacy of the slave sale here in Savannah, Georgia,” Dr. Otis Johnson said.
Ten Broeck Race Course sees another sale
It’s still unclear whose vision for 204 West Old Lathrop Ave. — formerly known as Ten Broeck Race Course — will succeed. Some of Savannah’s most prominent community advocates, not just OCEANS Inc., have contrasting and overlapping visions for the site.
What they have in common, though, are the roadblocks that repeatedly rise up against progress: land acquisition.
West Old Lathrop Avenue for years had been owned by the private lumber company Dixie Plywood, a Tennessee-based shipping company. IMC Logistics bought the land for around $30 million in 2022.
Financing to buy the land has imperiled community efforts so far, said Mayor Johnson.
“It’s all driven by the owner. Georgia is a very strong property rights state, so we can’t theoretically walk in and take somebody’s property,” Mayor Van Johnson explained.
DeGraft-Hanson has been in talks with organizations such as the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation to help garner funding.
Dr. R. Candy Tate, curator of Tuskegee University’s Legacy Museum and executive board member of the Georgia Trust, said the organization gained interest in helping with obtaining the land after it was nominated to be included on the Trust’s Places in Peril list.
The Trust started discussions with DeGraft-Hanson earlier this year to “talk us through some of the possibilities of how to acquire that land,” she said.
The estimated range of money needed to secure the land and start a memorial project, says DeGraft-Hanson, is $35 million.
If that kind of financing can be secured, Tate said, nonprofit partners would need the help of the city to manage the land.
Savannah Alderwoman Bernetta Lanier of District 1 is interested in more direct action: eminent domain — the process of a government taking over private land for a public good.
“I want to be able to say that I did everything that I could possibly do to save the sacred property that we call ‘The Weeping Time property,”’ Lanier said.
“I have asked the city manager to use eminent domain to take the property, and the city attorney is in the process of creating an offer because that is the first step along the eminent domain line, because we’re serious about leveraging our historic and cultural asset.”
Other city leaders are not as optimistic that this is a viable option.
According to Dr. Johnson, the former Savannah mayor, before considering such a divisive move, the people with competing visions and plans to memorialize The Weeping Time need to reach their own consensus about development.
“The real problem now is to get the competing groups together and to have them come to some kind of mutual agreement on how to proceed further,” he said.
Conversely, the city of Darien has the opposite problem. The city owns the land and rights to create memorials and commemorative sites about Butler Plantation and its enslaved people, but the county hasn’t moved forward with any ambitious plan, said Lotson.
“We have the land,” he said. “The city has a 50-year lease on it, so we have 50 years to decide how we are going to commemorate those who were from The Weeping Time and those who were living and working in enslavement for free on that island.”
Wiping tears and moving forward
Savannah’s legacy is not one that is satisfied with remaining idle. It is ever dynamic and ready to power forward at a moment’s notice. That appears to be the sentiment of the city’s community leaders regarding The Weeping Time.
However, most note that it is entirely impossible to move on from such a devastating event. In fact, moving on equates to forgetting what happened. Moving forward, though, is the culmination of generations of work to better oneself and their community.
“I think for us to move past it means it is in our rear-view mirror. I think that we carry it with us,” Mayor Johnson posited.
“When we say we shall overcome, think about what that means. Not only shall we overcome the present issues and challenges of living in the United States, but we have overcome many, many, many challenges and inhumane acts over the decades and over centuries,” Dr. Otis Johnson said.
Similar to the myriad of ideas people have for memorializing The Weeping Time, there are a myriad of ways that people are slipping free of the shackles left behind from the sale’s gruesome legacy.
Some believe that connection is the key to pushing commemorative efforts and education forward.
Mayor Pro Tem Lotson hopes for Darien and Savannah to someday combine their efforts and create a cohesive experience for people to learn about the cities’ interconnected history.
“In an ideal world, we would have tours. People from Darien would go to Savannah and be a part of their Weeping Time program. Tours would be set up to go to The Weeping Time [site], and then after that, let’s go where they actually lived,” Lotson said. “Let’s talk to some of those descendants from the weeping time who live on St. Simons Island, Georgia, where you can touch the flesh of these individuals.”
This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with The Current.
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