DARIEN, Ga. (AP) — A person has been charged with beginning a fireplace that destroyed an almost century-old dwelling on the location of a coastal Georgia rice plantation that’s related to the most important slave public sale in U.S. historical past, authorities mentioned Friday.
Firefighters raced to the Huston Home in McIntosh County on Wednesday after smoke was seen billowing from the spacious white farmhouse. However flames fully destroyed the house, in-built 1927 by former New York Yankees co-owner T.L. Huston.
Witnesses described a person they noticed leaving the home after the fireplace started, and a sheriff’s deputy detained a suspect becoming that description, McIntosh County Sheriff’s Lt. Mike Ward mentioned in a information launch Friday. He mentioned the 33-year-old man had objects taken from the home and was charged with arson, theft and different crimes after being questioned by investigators.
Lengthy earlier than Huston constructed a house there, the location had spent many years as a rice plantation earlier than the Civil Warfare. In 1859, proprietor Pierce Mease Butler infamously took greater than 400 enslaved individuals to Savannah and offered them in what’s thought-about the most important slave public sale in U.S. historical past. Held amid a torrential downpour, the sale turned often called the Weeping Time.
By the point of the fireplace, the Huston Home and the encircling property have been owned by the Georgia Division of Pure Sources. The house was unoccupied and had fallen into disrepair.
The Georgia Belief for Historic Preservation included the home on its 2019 listing of Georgia’s most threatened historic websites.
“Regardless of the location’s affiliation with a troublesome interval within the historical past of our state, the property is nonetheless an necessary historic useful resource that enables us to inform Georgia’s full and full story,” W. Wright Mitchell, the Georgia Belief’s president and CEO, mentioned in a information launch. “Sadly, when historic buildings are allowed to sit down vacant and uncared for for lengthy durations of time, fireplace is just not unusual.”
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