Plantation was a property of the Barrow family in Oglethorpe County, Georgia. In 1860, before Reconstruction it consisted of a gin house, master’s house, and slave quarters. By 1881, there were 26 additional houses, a church, and a school. The new houses belonged to tenant farmers, as did the church and school. On the 1881 map of 
Barrow’s Plantation, found in Charles S. Aiken’s 1985 article, “New Settlement Pattern of Rural Blacks in the American South,” there are asterisks located next to several of the tenant farmers’ houses. These asterisks indicate the residents who were former slaves on the plantation. These indicated changes were due to the developments that came with Reconstruction. The plantation was also divided into small farm units, each belonging to a different tenant farmer who worked their section of the plantation for a share of the crops that it yielded.
We originally found Barrow Plantation by searching for historical maps of Oglethorpe County, Georgia. The main source of this was the Carl Vinson Institute of Government website, a part of the University of Georgia. The most critical part of the investigation was locating Syl’s Fork on the 1883 and1885 maps of Oglethorpe County. The major error which we discovered on the plantation map was that the maps of Barrow Plantation were rotated about 90 degrees counter clockwise, in other words, the orientation was skewed. If the original maps provided to us were accurately drawn, the plantation is located extremely close to Philomath and Maxey's, Georgia. This discovery was also helpful in uncovering the major map error.
Barrow Plantation is located approximately at the coordinates 33.694 North and 82.997 West. We managed to find the coordinates by searching for Syl’s Fork on TopoZone.com, a topographical map site. Once the coordinates were found, it was easy for us to transfer them to a satellite image, which led us to terraserver.com. The area that was formerly the Barrow Family Plantation is now heavily wooded and no sign of civilization can be seen from the satellite image.
The map of Barrow’s Plantation originally appeared in an article written by David C. Barrow, Jr. “A Georgia Plantation” was published in March 1881 in the fifth issue of the twenty-first volume of Scriber’s Monthly, a literary journal published by Charles Scribner. David C. Barrow, Jr. was the younger brother of Middleton Pope Barrow. Middleton Barrow is buried in a private cemetery on the family plantation in Oglethorpe County. He served in the Senate and was a Confederate soldier during the Civil War. These two Barrows are the great-grandsons of Wilson Lumpkin, who served in Congress for four terms and was elected governor of Georgia for two terms (1831-1835). The Barrow family and its relatives were very active in politics and the welfare of their country. (Original Appearance )
Based on the several different maps found during research, we found that the Barrow family plantation changed greatly between 1860 and1881. The map showed the changes that occurred during the Civil War and after Reconstruction. The abolishment of slavery changed the plantation from a slave-driven farm to several different tenant farms. Remarkably, the satellite image shows a clear shape very similar to the shape of the original maps we have. Such an occurrence showed us that the plantation had had a strong impact on the ecology of the area, and that the plantation could very well still be in use to this day. Whether or not it’s still producing the same crop is debatable, but nonetheless quite impressive that it has withstood the test of time for so long. (Current Satelitte Image ).
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