Lakeport Legacies to Feature Life of Yankee Mistress Discussion
LAKE VILLAGE — "Yankee Mistress of the Old South: Plantation Life in the Arkansas Delta, 1847-1866" will be presented by Dr. Gary Edwards, associate professor of history at Arkansas State University, in the latest Lakeport Legacies monthly history talk Thursday, June 21, at the Lakeport Plantation, 601 Hwy. 142, in Lake Village.
The event gets underway at 5:30 p.m. with refreshments and conversation and the program starts at 6 p.m. The program is free and open to the public. For more information and to register, contact Dr. Blake Wintory, assistant director and facilities manager, at 870-265-6031.
Edwards will discuss his work on Amanda Beardsley Trulock (1811-1891), recently published in Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times(University of Georgia Press, 2018). Beardsley, born in Connecticut, married a Georgia planter in 1837. The couple moved to Jefferson County in 1845, and Amanda was widowed five years later. According to Edwards, “Amanda Trulock is a rare example of a northern woman who eventually became a plantation proprietor and sole mistress of 62 slaves near Pine Bluff.”
Trulock’s surviving letters and papers show her to be a competent financial manager who also delegated many responsibilities to an enslaved man, Reuben. According to Edwards, she, like “a tiny handful of New England women who married into slavery at the time, accepted and selectively advocated for slavery during her 29 years of residency in the South during both war and peace.”
A limited number of copies Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Timeswill be available for purchase for $35.
Lakeport Legacies is a monthly history talk held on the last Thursday at the Lakeport Plantation during the spring and summer. Each month a topic from the Delta region is featured.
The Lakeport Plantation is an Arkansas State University Heritage Site. Constructed in 1859, Lakeport is one of Arkansas's premier historic structures and still retains many of its original finishes and architectural details.
Open to the public since 2007, Lakeport Plantation researches and interprets the people and cultures that shaped plantation life in the Mississippi River Delta, focusing on the antebellum, Civil War and reconstruction periods.
Arkansas Heritage Sites at Arkansas State University develops and operates historic properties of regional and national significance in the Arkansas Delta. A-State’s Heritage Sites include the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center, Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, Lakeport Plantation, the Historic Dyess Colony: Boyhood Home of Johnny Cash, and ASU Museum.
