125 Acres
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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January 21, 1897 started like most nights did for George Denning and his family on their farm in southern Kentucky. George had dinner with his wife Molly and their children. There were seven at home with them. The youngest was four months old, and the oldest was 12. Then George gathered firewood and stoked the stove. It was a cold night.
And then they'd all gotten into their beds and they were kind of crowded together. They slept, you know, several kids to each bed. And after a period of time, many of them had fallen asleep. Somewhere around midnight, the dogs started barking outside and this kind of woke them all up.
Author Ben Montgomery.
And, you know, this is an event that was recalled in court, in depositions, many times by many different people. And so we have lots of different versions of events. But the clearest timeline is that after George Denning and his family wake up from the dogs barking, they then hear voices outside their home.
George Denning and his family had lived in their home for almost 15 years. It was on a plot of 125 acres of land that George had purchased from the family that had enslaved him and his parents. He'd grown up there enslaved by a man named David Denning until he was 10 years old, when the 13th Amendment was ratified and he was emancipated. In the years after the Civil War, he worked to earn enough money to buy the land. And by his mid-30s, he had. He also bought two horses, seven hogs, 24 chickens, four turkeys, and a plow. He grew tobacco, which did well in the soil there, and built the two-story cabin by hand. What did it mean for a black man at that time to be able to buy land and build a house on it?
It was a big deal. He had been born into slavery and was among the first generation, certainly in the South, the first generation of emancipated people to own property. It would have been a huge deal. It was uncommon. None of his neighbors who owned farms around him immediately in his vicinity were black like he was.
When George Denning heard the voices outside his home that night in 1897, he went to the door, but he didn't open it.
He called out, who's out there? And they refused to identify themselves. We're your friends, they said.
There were 25 white men outside, and about half of them were carrying guns.
The men outside... called him by name and said, come outside. We need to talk to you. They demanded he step onto the porch. He's saying, no, who's out there? They're saying, we're your friends. We just want to talk. He says, no, if you're my friends, you'd show your face. By the way, he had seen outside that they had covered their faces. Many of them, they weren't wearing hoods of the Klan, but they were wearing bandanas sort of wrapped over their mouths, disguising. their identity. And so he said, if you were my friends, then you wouldn't be hiding your faces and you'd say exactly who you were.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–7:08
2
What happened the night George Denning's home was attacked on January 21, 1897?
7:08–13:29
3
How did George Denning go from being enslaved to owning 125 acres in Kentucky?
13:29–22:17
4
Who were the masked men outside Denning's house and what did they demand?
22:17–33:50
5
How did the shootout unfold and how was Denning injured?
33:50–37:41