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Research map — staged

Avalon Plantation Boundary (working map)

This page holds the core spatial claim of the project — and is honest about what it does not yet have. No boundary is drawn here. A guessed polygon would invent evidence, so this page states the boundary question, lists the documented anchors, and names exactly what records would resolve the boundary.

How to read this map. There is no map image on this page yet — by design. A boundary polygon needs surveyed legal descriptions, and the project's deed-book descriptions have not been fully read. What follows is the working evidence inventory: the anchors that are documented, the conflicts flagged, and the exact record types that would close the gap.
Boundary status: UNPINNED. No surveyed boundary coordinates for the Avalon plantation tract exist in the research files. The anchors below are documented facts — they do not substitute for a boundary, and no polygon has been drawn from them.

The boundary question

Alexander P. Jones's 2,827-acre share of Lewellen Jones's estate — per the annotated will transcription — sits on the present-day UAH campus plus Redstone Arsenal, in the Northwestern Division of Madison County. Tracing the deed chain from the plantation's land to the modern campus is how the project pins where enslaved people's lives were actually lived: the 1860 slave schedule manuscript gives 96 enslaved people on this holding (the 1850 schedule gives 139), and UAH's 2019 announcement documented 35 associated structures on the site.

The boundary is the single spatial claim everything else depends on — where the quarters stood, where the burial grounds are, what UAH built over. Until it is resolved from the records below, any boundary on this page would be a guess, and this project does not publish guesses as findings.

Documented anchors

Boundary data needed

Exactly what would resolve the boundary. Each item names a record type, where it lives, and what it would give the map:

If you hold deed-book copies, survey plats, or GIS data for the Avalon tract, please get in touch.

Map data & sources

Sources needed but not yet used on this page: BLM GLO survey plats (overlay), City of Huntsville GIS parcels, Madison County Probate Office deed indexes. They are named in the "Boundary data needed" panel above — not credited as sources because they have not yet been used.

More Maps in This Project

GLO Patent Map: The Jones Patents →

Schematic township plats of the Jones-family federal land patents, 1814–1833, from BLM GLO records.

Cemetery Map →

Burial grounds with verified locations — and an honest list of the ones that can't be pinned yet.

Convict-Leasing Geography →

Jefferson County mine sites and the Madison County origin question, drawn as a clearly-labeled schematic.

Migration Path: Virginia to Alabama →

Louisa and Bedford counties, Virginia → Madison County, Alabama → Tuscaloosa, tracing the Jones/Anderson/Donnell/Perkins network.