For the Love of Place: Paternalism and Patronage in the Georgia Llowcountry, 1865-1898‪.‬

IN EARLY APRIL 1891 JOSEPH JONES, A RENOWNED PHYSICIAN AND THE youngest son of Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, made a pilgrimage from his residence in New Orleans to his childhood home in Liberty County, Georgia. (1) His return was motivated in part by nostalgia. Joseph had not seen the old homestead since leaving in 1863 to serve in the Civil War. (2) His nineteen-year-old son, who accompanied him on the trip, brought a camera to capture Joseph's homecoming in a series of photographs. The snapshots, seven in all, show the places that members of the Jones family held dear--Midway Church, their plantation home at Monte Video, and patriarch Charles Colcock Jones's tomb. (3) Upon receiving copies of the photographs, Joseph's older brother, Charles Colcock Jones Jr., vowed, "I will take good care of them and they will serve to recall memories of localities consecrated by recollections most precious." (4) The brothers shared a nostalgic affection for the places and a way of life that, from their point of view, had been marred by war. The young photographer, however, captured something more than the locales and sentiments of his father's generation. All but two of the pictures included images of African Americans. The appearance of local black residents in a white family's snapshots reminds us that these were their places too. Stepney West, Niger Fraser, and many others caught on film that day lived and worked on the Jones family's plantations both before and after emancipation. (5) Their inclusion in the family's photos, taken twenty-six years after the war's end, whisper of the longstanding connections among the Joneses, their former slaves, and the place both groups called home. (6)