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A History of Columbia County Florida (1996) Edward F. Keuchel 63/340

A History of Columbia County, Florida
Smaller farms, which were more common for Columbia
County, had few if any slaves and the entire family was usually
involved essentially in a self-sufficient life. The women of the
family made homespun cloth of cotton and wool. The men provided
the bulk of agricultural labor and worked along with any slaves
the family might own. In terms of house, food, drink, furnishings
and work many of the small farmers did not live all that dif­
ferently from the slaves on the large plantations—in some cases
worse. A double-pen log cabin (two separate room structures
under one roof) with a passage through the middle and sheds
attached, or a log hip-roofed house were common dwellings. Cane­
bottom chairs, a cedar or tin water pail, a tin or gourd dipper and a
tin washpan could be found inside along with split pine bedsteads
and mattresses filled with straw, Spanish moss or cotton. When
increasing prosperity permitted a frame house and “storebought”
furniture it was likely to be modeled on the earlier log dwellings
with a hallway down the middle, rooms on either side, and porches
on as many as three sides.8
Some insights into plantation life in Columbia County in the
period before 1865 are provided by the Federal Writers Project of
the 1930’s. Interviews were conducted with those people still alive
who could recall their slave experiences. Douglas Dorsey was
born a slave in Columbia County in 1851 on the plantation of Lewis
Mattair where he lived until he was freed in 1865. Dorsey’s parents
were free blacks who lived in Maryland until they were shang­
haied in Baltimore by “nigger traders” and taken to Florida where
they were sold as slaves. Mattair’s plantation had twenty-nine
slaves in 1850 although Dorsey recalled that it ran as high as
eighty-five by the early 1860’s. Mattair was called “Colonel”
because of his participation in the Second Seminole War.9

Ibid., pp. 184-87.
9George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Vol.
17, Florida, (Westport, Conn., 1972), p. 93; Columbia County Slave Owners 1850,
“The Early Years of Columbia County.”
62

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