Prairie Park/ William Sappington House

Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970, the William B. Sappington House, also referred to as the Prairie Park plantation, is one of the best examples of homes owned by slaveholders in Missouri. Operated by the son of Dr. John Sappington, William B. Sappington commissioned the mansion in 1844. Dr. Sappington was one of the state's wealthiest and most influential entrepreneurs, famed for using quinine pills to treat fevers. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, the property was home to thirty-eight enslaved people. In this regard, Prairie Park was significantly larger than most other slave-holding properties in the region both in acreage and number of enslaved workers. Still, it is worth noting that these figures pale in comparison to the largest plantations of the South, reflecting the state’s overall trend toward small-scale slavery. The people held on the property were exploited for their agricultural labor on Sappington’s 600-acre hemp plantation and domestic chores in the kitchen and home. Behind the home sits a two-room cabin that more than likely housed two enslaved families during the plantation’s years of operation. It is the only remaining “slave cabin” at Prairie Park, although part of another cabin’s foundation was used to construct the property’s current barn. Today, the home is a private residence and museum, available for public tours upon appointment.  

During the first half of the nineteenth century, a wave of white migrants from the Upper American South settled in the central Missouri River Valley. As a result, central Missouri developed distinct and powerful socio-cultural and economic ties to the Southern United States, including the institution of chattel slavery. Located in eastern Saline County, the town of Arrow Rock was one of the state's most prominent slave-owning communities before the American Civil War. In the 1860 census, 1100 enslaved people were recorded in the wider Arrow Rock township. More broadly, enslaved people made up roughly 3 percent of the total population of Saline County. Benefitting from enslaved labor, Arrow Rock was also home to several of Missouri’s most politically and economically powerful families, including the Sappingtons, Marmadukes, and the Binghams. After the Civil War, several formerly enslaved people remained in Arrow Rock, creating a notable Black community that lasted until the middle of the twentieth century. In alignment with your tour of Arrow Rock, this essay will sketch the history of African Americans in the town and its surrounding areas, from the growth of chattel slavery to the ultimate decline of the town’s Black population. 

Unlike the Deep South, slavery in Arrow Rock–as in much of the region–was not characterized by massive plantations and cash crop agriculture. Although “Little Dixie” developed substantive hemp and tobacco industries, enslaved people in Missouri were often cast as live-in servants and farmhands held by comparatively small households. Due to their high-profile residents, Saline and nearby Howard counties developed larger plantations than elsewhere in Missouri, including the Sappington Plantation. In 1860, 97 of the 222 “large-scale” planters, holding twenty or more enslaved people, could be found in the two counties. However, even these holdings lagged behind the most considerable plantations of the Deep South in scale. The smaller-scale nature of the institution in Missouri generated widely-held misconceptions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Proponents and later defenders of slavery in the state, as in much of the Upper South, argued that the absence of large slaveholding plantations translated into an inherently “milder” form of slavery.  

Many of these misconceptions hinge on the perception that instances of direct violence between slaveholders and their enslaved workforce were uncommon. However, as historian Diane Mutti Burke has observed, small-scale slavery in Missouri led to more intense social bonds between enslavers and their enslaved workers. These intimate social relations were expressed in a “continuum of treatment from ‘kindness’ to depraved cruelty”. While noting that these close interactions sometimes resulted in “improved material conditions and physical care” for enslaved individuals, Mutti Burke contends that the personal nature of conflicts between enslavers and the enslaved in Missouri often heightened the degree of violence in small-scale slavery households. An example of such emotionally charged violence can be found in the memories of freedman Richard Bruner. Conducted by the United States Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1937, Burner’s testimony is one of the few surviving interviews with a formerly enslaved person in Saline County. He recalls, “Yes, they thrashed me once, [they] made me hug a tree and whipped me.” Another freedman from nearby Marshall, Missouri recalled one particularly cruel instance of punishment. He told the WPA, “A slave right here in Marshall angered his master, [and] was chained to a hemp-brake on a cold 'night and left to freeze to death, which he did.” Apart from these overt instances of torture or killing, it is also worth considering the ever-present threat of violence that enslaved people experienced. Microsocial interactions between enslavers and the enslaved, more frequent and emotionally charged than elsewhere, held the consistent potential for barbarity.  

Additionally, enslaved labor in this more intimate environment was still highly exploitative. As historian Timothy Baumann notes, “enslaved African Americans provided the primary source of labor for Arrow Rock’s economy.” On agricultural labor in Arrow Rock Township, Bruner told the WPA, “I remember being a water-boy to the field bands before I was big enough to work in the fields.” While holding his hand up to his waist, Burner continued, “I hoed tobacco when I was about so high.” Another interview from Saline County with a freedwoman named Isabelle offers an example of the labor required for domestic tasks. Observers from the WPA noted that Isabelle’s “work as a slave was almost all in the house; she was taught to sew and had to help make the clothes for the other slaves. She also was a nurse-maid for her mistress' little children and at one time was hired out to [another] family to take care of the children when his wife was ill.” Another formerly enslaved woman remarked, “I had to work in the house for them so hard, I did not have time to even look at the field.” When the inherent labor exploitation of slavery and the range of interpersonal interactions experienced by enslaved people are taken together, it is highly reductive to proclaim enslavement in Missouri as a milder form of the institution categorically. 

To learn about the burial traditions of Arrow Rock's enslaved population and their experiences during and after the Civil War, please continue your tour to the Sappington African American Cemetery.

Baumann, Timothy E. “An Historical Perspective of Civic Engagement and Interpreting Cultural Diversity in Arrow Rock, Missouri.” Historical Archaeology 45, no. 1 (2011): 114–34. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23070207.

Gorrell, Kayla. “Missouri’s Little Dixie African American History Tour - Arrow Rock J. Huston Tavern and Main Street.” Historic Missouri. Accessed December 11, 2023. https://historicmissouri.org/items/show/130.

Hannibal Daily Messenger. “Negro Lynching in Sallene (Sic) County.” July 24, 1859. https://www.newspapers.com/article/hannibal-daily-messenger-nero-lynch-in-s/136322006/.

Hurt, R. Douglas. Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie. Columbia : University of Missouri Press, 1992. http://archive.org/details/agricultureslave00hurt.

Kremer, Gary R. ““The Black People Did the Work’: African American Life in Arrow Rock, Missouri, 1850–1960.” In Race and Meaning : The African American Experience in Missouri. University of Missouri Press, 2014.

Missouri Department of State Parks. “Rural and Small Town Schools in Missouri.” Missouri Department of State Parks, n.d.

Missouri Department of Natural Resources. “Sappington African American Cemetery in Arrow Rock Dedicated as New State Historic Site.” Accessed November 16, 2023. https://dnr.mo.gov/communications/news/sappington-african-american-cemetery-arrow-rock-dedicated-new-state-historic-site.

Mutti Burke, Diane. “A Contested Promised Land: Mormons, Slaveholders, and the Disputed Vision for the Settlement of Western Missouri.” The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 36, no. 1 (2016): 13–34. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26316812.

———. On Slavery’s Border : Missouri’s Small Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865. Early American Places. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=nlebk&AN=343600&scope=site&custid=078-820.

Mutti Burke, Diane, and Jonathan Halperin Earle, eds. Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri : The Long Civil War on the Border. University Press of Kansas, 2013.

New York Times. “Affairs in the West.” November 19, 1862.

Phillips, Authorene Wilson. Arrow Rock: The Story of a Missouri Village. First Edition. Columbia: University of Missouri, 2005.

Rainey, Thomas Claiborne. Along the Old Trail ... Pioneer Sketches of Arrow Rock and Vicinity. Marshall, Mo., Marshall chapter, Daughters of the American revolution, 1914. http://archive.org/details/alongoldtrailpio00rain.

Selby, Sandy. “Arrow Rock’s Hidden Black History.” Missouri Life Magazine (blog), November 8, 2017. https://missourilife.com/arrow-rock-black-history/.

———. “In Arrow Rock, the Old Tavern Tradition Lives On.” Missouri Life Magazine (blog), April 8, 2019. https://missourilife.com/j-huston-tavern/.

U.S. Office of the Census. “1850 Slave Schedule, Saline County, Missouri.” Census, 1850. Missouri State Archives. https://s1.sos.mo.gov/records/archives/census/pages/slave.