Enoch (Ensley) Plantation

Enoch Plantation was a large 19th-century plantation complex located roughly 12 miles (19 km) southwest of Memphis, Tennessee.

Born to a prominent family of Nashville lawyers, Ensley would grow up in Nashville, expressing great interest in horses. He would follow the family tradition, graduating from Lebanon Law School in Lebanon, Tennessee.^[1] He would then enter the business of trading horses and managing stables. Ensley would move away from law and go on to be a prominent figure in the development of the coal and iron-making industry in Alabama, primarily the Birmingham District.^[2] He was responsible for the construction of numerous large blast furnaces as well as the planning and development of the industrial area surrounding Birmingham, Alabama.^[3]

Ensley would enlist to fight for the Confederate States during the Civil War, enlisting as a private in Hunter's Indian Volunteers. They would be enrolled as the 1st Chickasaw Infantry. After the war, he would be given the honorary title of "Colonel" by his alma mater.^[4]

After his father's death in 1866, Ensley would manage to acquire a number of properties in Memphis, Tennessee, one being a somewhat vacant area used for some slave labor based around planting, as well as stakes in a number of Memphis-based companies.^[5] This would include the nearly 90 slaves that his father had acquired after starting out with nearly 20 slaves in 1854.^[6] It is not necessarily known what become of these slaves during the transition to Reconstruction, although many slaves stayed in the area and worked in sharecropping. Ensley was largely an absentee manager for the plantation, focusing largely on his development of coal and steel industry in Alabama. Many of his assets in Memphis would be divided and sold after his death, including the plantation.

Enoch Plantation was a large 19th-century plantation complex located roughly 12 miles (19 km) southwest of Memphis, Tennessee. The plantation was created by Enoch Ensley, the son of a wealthy Nashville attorney. The plantation would see thousands of convict-laborers, often faced with poor living conditions and relatively awful working conditions. The plantation consisted of a barracks, as well as over 2000 acres of farmland which would run form the barracks to the Mississippi River. Those working the plantation were responsible for harvesting agricultural products, largely cotton, as well as moving the products to and from the river for transportation. The plantation relied heavily on convict-labor, a practice detrimental to reconstruction-era communities that would have generational consequences for its subjects. Ensley himself would travel to Nashville to retrieve convicts, then transport them back to the plantation for labor.^[7]

There is nearly nothing left of the building and stockade of the original planation. The Mississippi River has changed course significantly since the 19th century and the water level has risen, claiming parts of the land between the stockade and the river. Today, much of the land is owned and managed by the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa^[8] while the previous property is also the current home to vast industry, such as xAI and FedEx.^[9] A large portion of the plantation was sold in order to develop and establish a park specifically for African Americans, one of the first of its kind in the U.S.^[10] The park, which opened in 1938, would cover nearly 1,000 acres (400 ha) of Enoch land.^[11]

35°3′41″N 90°8′9″W / 35.06139°N 90.13583°W / 35.06139; -90.13583