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Interactive research map

Plantations Map

This map plots plantation sites and related properties that have surfaced across our research, tiered by how confidently each is connected to the core Avalon/Jones network. Markers with a solid fill and border are precisely located; dashed-outline markers are approximate placeholders pending better location data. Click any marker for sourcing detail.

Dataset note: This map currently shows 24 of 37 originally documented sites. Entries for Lauderdale, Morgan, and DeKalb counties could not be recovered from surviving records and are not shown rather than invented — if you have the original data for these, please get in touch.

Map data & sources. Section and township placements use the original land-survey grid from the Bureau of Land Management General Land Office (BLM GLO), whose patent records are also cited on individual markers. The historic overlay is the 1892 Huntsville sheet, U.S. Geological Survey (topoView). Marker citations additionally draw on UAH Archives (Frances Cabaniss Roberts Collection; 1966 UAH campus topographic map), the Library of Congress (Chronicling America / Huntsville Gazette), Madison County probate and deed records, the Encyclopedia of Alabama, the Huntsville History Collection, the University of Alabama's Alabama Maps cemetery survey, the Alabama Historical Association marker program, and the project's own research dataset. Base map: © OpenStreetMap contributors. Click any marker for its full per-site sourcing.
Why this map draws lines, not just pins. Individual plantations did not operate in isolation. Enslavers married into each other's families, executed each other's estates, witnessed each other's contracts, and bought, sold, mortgaged, and leased enslaved people to and from one another across county and state lines. Historians of slavery's economy have described this interlocking system of credit, kinship, and coerced labor as functioning much like a corporation — a network built to extract and pass on wealth generated by enslaved people's labor, and to keep circulating that same coerced labor after emancipation under new legal names. This section traces that network as far as the evidence currently allows, and names where the trail runs cold.

More Maps in This Project

This county-wide plantation map is one of two interactive maps in the project. The mechanisms of bondage this network relied on — hiring out, post-emancipation convict leasing, and the sexual exploitation and reproductive coercion of enslaved women and girls — are covered in full, with complete citations, on their own dedicated pages rather than inside map markers here.

UAH Campus Map →

A campus-scale map of documented and approximately-located Avalon structures — the main house, enslaved persons' quarters, outbuildings, and the Jones-Perkins cemetery — plotted against the present-day UAH campus, based on the 1966 topographic survey.

Slave & Convict Leasing →

Hiring-out, forced family separation, and Alabama's post-emancipation convict-leasing system, including the Elyton/Jones Valley and Arlington/The Grove context, fully cited.

Sexual Exploitation & Reproductive Coercion →

The documented sexual exploitation and reproductive coercion of enslaved women and girls within the Avalon/Jones network, including the 1820 manumission of Elizabeth and her children.

If you have documents, family knowledge, or leads on any of these mechanisms, please get in touch.