Tag Archives: hall and parlor

Old Philips, w/o Boundaries, Beheadings, the Last Hall-and-Parlor

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Someone stole their heads. Their bodies had been burnt. Police found two axes in the scorched desolation of the shack. Just before Christmas. 1913.

Most of the residents of Philips were the children or grandchildren of former slaves, or were former slaves themselves. Sunken ground in the slope and swale of Philips Cemetery at Craig Swamp might mark older unrecorded graves.

Her husband lived to be 97. She was born in the house in 1922. Surely he’d heard the story when he was young.

New Story: Brooklyn: The Last Buffalo Soldier’s House

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Twice during the Civil War, black Union soldiers occupied Confederate Jacksonville.

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Confederate veteran Miles Price platted this former plantation into lots and sold them to former slaves and Buffalo Soldiers.

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“A house can be boarded up for years,” Paul says, “and it seems uninhabitable. But all you have to do is live in the house and it returns to its human-shaped life.”

New Story: Christmas Eve, Buffalo Soldier’s House and Pseudo-Brooklyn Apartments

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Some of Les Paul Garner’s earliest memories are of running through a line of his friends with the ball, shirtless and exhilarated and sweating in the summer heat, and learning to ride his bike around the corner on Oak Street.

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New condo dwellers walk their AKC-registered dogs past the last Buffalo Soldier’s house in Brooklyn.