King House
King House is a required stop on any tour of the University of Montevallo campus. The house, 200 years old in 2023, is on the National Register of Historic Places.
A plaque honors the structure as the first brick house in central Alabama and the first with glass windows.
We learn elsewhere that it was built by…
King’s own men.
Yes, King House was once the "big house" of a slave-holding plantation.
Recent research has shown that Edmund King enslaved on a large scale. He owned at least two generations of people of African descent -- as many as 50 at a given time. Their stories are all but untold.
What do we do about this?
“Mr. King’s own men.”
What is to be done with this knowledge? What, if anything, does UM owe to people who once lived and worked on its campus? Is the university obliged to investigate itself in relation to the history of slavery in this place? To tell the truth about a cherished campus landmark with a troubling past? Who is entitled to create fuller stories about King House and its enslaved community?
What is to be done with this knowledge? What, if anything, does UM owe to people who once lived and worked on its campus? Is the university obliged to investigate itself in relation to the history of slavery in this place? To tell the truth about a cherished campus landmark with a troubling past? Who is entitled to create fuller stories about King House and its enslaved community?
What is to be done with this knowledge? What, if anything, does UM owe to people who once lived and worked on its campus? Is the university obliged to investigate itself in relation to the history of slavery in this place? To tell the truth about a cherished campus landmark with a troubling past? Who is entitled to create fuller stories about King House and its enslaved community? What is to be done with this knowledge? What, if anything, does UM owe to people who once lived and worked on its campus? Is the university obliged to investigate itself in relation to the history of slavery in this place? To tell the truth about a cherished campus landmark with a troubling past? Who is entitled to create fuller stories about King House and its enslaved community?
Several students, researches, and citizens of Montevallo have attempted to address these questions.
Melanie Morrison
Since 2019, Melanie Morrison has been engaged in intensive research and writing about her Montevallo ancestors, Edmund King, and his daughter, Elizabeth King Shortridge. The two gained wealth from the two systems of theft: the dispossession of Native people from their homelands and the enslavement of African Americans.
King House: The Real Story
This podcast, researched, written, and created by Cady Inabinett, Sean Bloemetjie, Lucy Frost-Helms, and Xander Swain, aims to orally retell the King House narrative through three podcast episodes.
The series addresses the ethics of the house’s local ghost stories by empowering stories that have been historically silenced by white supremacy. In conclusion, the students ask the University to repurpose King House as a community research center for Montevallo’s marginalized stories.
The project is the culmination of a semester-long exploration of truth-telling and reconciliation within a Fall 2022 University of Montevallo Peace and Justice studies class
UM students reckon with untold stories of enslaved people on campus
Editors Note: Students in the Introduction to Peace and Justice Studies course offered Fall 2023 by the University of Montevallo learned about the little-told history of King House. Some wrote essays challenging inherited narratives that left out the enslaved people who built it. Veronica Kloss looks at this obscured history and proposes community collaboration in a project of remembrance. Excerpts from essays of her classmates highlight the collective nature and various perspectives of the effort.
“The moment we refuse the idols of history, we are faced with the question of whether we ignore that it ever was, or turn to crafting a memory of it.”
— Imani Perry, South to America