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Booker T. Washington NM commemorates the birthplace of
America's most prominent African American educator and orator of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The property evokes an 1850s
middle class tobacco farm, representative of Booker T. Washington's
enslaved childhood at the Burroughs farm. He was born in 1856 to the
Burroughses' cook, Jane and lived on the farm throughout the Civil War.
Compared to their Franklin County neighbors, the
Burroughses were an upper middle class family evidenced by their combined
slave and land holdings. They produced tobacco as a cash crop and grew
other subsistence crops like flax, potatoes, and grains for family
sustenance. Washington lived in the farm's one-room kitchen cabin with his
mother and two half siblings. As a small child he brought water to the men
in the fields, carried the books of the Burroughses' daughters books to
school, and transported grain to the local mill. |
