The Potter Estate: Colerain & Tweedside Plantations, 1811-1856

Manuscript Collection 1141 was given to Jones Memorial Library in 2013. The papers had been held by the Pillow family and are believed to have been acquired by a family member who salvaged them in Lynchburg, Virginia. In 2024, Library staff researched the city’s law firms and concluded that the Potter papers may have come from the files of Hester & Hester. The dataset was compiled using 15 of 16 original documents held in JML Manuscript Collection 1141. These documents include copies and originals of wills, deeds, bills of sale, receipts, inventories, and certificates for John Potter (1765-1849), his sons James Potter (1793-1862) and Thomas Fuller Potter (1806-1853), and James Potter’s son-in-law John Devall Langhorne (1824-1915). In the early 1800s, John Potter consolidated several tracts along the Savannah River, approximately seven miles northwest of Savannah, into one contiguous tract of 3,000 acres. The consolidated tracts became known as the Colerain and Tweedside plantations, where the family enslaved people to work cultivating cotton, indigo, and especially rice.