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.
When you walk through the University of Montevallo’s campus, what do you notice?
Perhaps, the well maintained flowerbeds scattered around campus with brightly colored flora.
Or, maybe you will notice scattered groups of students socializing and studying on the brick walkways.
If you are particularly observant, you might notice Humanities Hall, recently given that moniker after removing former Governor B.B. Comer’s name due to his connection to Alabama’s racist history.
What you might not notice is right across the street from Humanities Hall. Settled in the middle of campus, many walk past King House, the oldest building on campus, unaware of its obscured history.
"The only thing I learned from my orientation tour was that King House is haunted."
— Margaret Dunmire
"How can we understand the history of King House when not even half the truth has been told? I had no idea what King House was until I learned about it in my Peace and Justice Studies class."
— Ashlei Piazza
Many believe King House is haunted. However, Edmund King was a real man who came to Alabama by way of Georgia in 1817 with his family, escorted by a Muscogee Creek leader named William Weatherford, settling in what is now Montevallo.
King was a businessman and a leading white settler of Shelby County. He was involved in many industries, including farming, mining, and the railroads. King was a philanthropist who donated heavily to educational causes and was a devout baptist.
His house, built of local clay bricks, was acquired by the Alabama Girls Technical Institute (now the University of Montevallo) in 1908, 85 years after the house was originally built.
What most students now think of when they think of King is not his life, but his death: images of specters walking out of the graveyard that holds many of the King Family, supposedly King coming back to look for his buried gold. Unseen phantoms shining lights through the house’s windows and midnight Halloween séances.
King Cemetery
If you are given the opportunity to explore King House, one of the only remaining mentions of King is a large portrait over the fireplace in the sitting room that says “Edmund King - Builder of this House 1782-1863.”
"But wait, no credit whatsoever for the enslaved builders is in the house, no pictures or portraits?"
— Josie Sturdivant
"He is not the builder of the house. It was built by 'his men' with clay from the land and water from the lakes."
— Jakayla Wright
What people leave out of the legend of Edmund King is that he directly benefited from people he enslaved, exploited, and treated as property.
Montevallo Legacy Project Board of Directors Kathy King, Anitka Stewart-Sims
There are gaps in our knowledge about the enslaved men and women that King forcibly moved from Georgia to Alabama.
We do not know how they got here while the King family rode in carriages. We do not know how many families were separated because of King.
We do not know the final resting places of those men and women, so their families cannot come to pay their respects.
"When I stop to think about this topic, it gives me a lot of sadness and pain. It is not often we sit down and think about that it was like to be sold as if you were property."
— Juan Diego Celis
We do not know those men and women’s thoughts and feelings, as it was illegal for them to learn to read and write.
We do not know where they lived, worked, and slept.
We do not know many of their names, the very thing that allows their memory to be spoken.
We do know that men, women, and children were victims of a legal system that stripped them of their freedom and personhood.
We do know that King’s will and estate papers treat people like property.
Even recent accounts of King House fail to mention the enslaved people that once resided on the King Plantation. In fact, the legend of Edmund King often downplays his role in the plantation system and his agricultural enterprises. Mentions of his wealth omit how he gained that wealth, mentions of his benevolence do not acknowledge those who had to give up their land that King would build his wealth on, mentions of his elegance and sophistication ignore those who worked his land and cotton gins.
"Enslaved people fired the bricks, hand-cut the wood used to construct the rafters and floor support, and hand placed every brick that made up that house. Current narratives such as 'The King House at 200' do not mention them once."
— Madyson Moye
Pictures of bricks, wood, floors and walls taken during King House’s restoration around 1973
What message is the campus sending by having this monument to massacre and slavery? It could be seen as an endorsement of King’s acts.
"Why is the truth of King House untold? Is it because we are ashamed?"
— Hanna Persson
What is the university saying with its silence?
If the campus community can acknowledge the complicated history of Comer and Bibb Graves, why can we not do the same with King? Maybe the history of King simply flew under the radar, but interpretation is as important as intention, so what does King House say to those who walk by on King Quad or on King-Harman Street?
Walking the fine line between honoring those in our past and remembering the past in its complexity is difficult, we live in a time of historical revision that makes some scared to explore the past, but important. We shouldn’t try to hide the unforgivable history on campus at Montevallo, as that history has been hidden for far too long. We should acknowledge and work to understand the enormity of the effects of slavery, lest we fall victim to the cliche “those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it.”
So what is to be done about King House? I think that answer should be found from the wider Montevallo community.
"Those enslaved by Edmund King do not have a cemetery. They are buried without markers on Montevallo's property."
— Margaret Dunmire
I propose hosting deliberative discussions and moderated conversations with the student, faculty, staff, and community at large about what will become of King House. In these discussions, people would be given information about the history of King and King House, what other communities have done in similar situations, and given the opportunity to share and listen to feelings and thoughts about King House and how we can reckon with and remember the history of this land before the University was here.
After discussions and wider education, we would gain an understanding of what the community wants. Only after the problem and issue are defined, and solutions proposed, can action be taken.
Montevallo Legacy Project Board of Directors Kathy King, Anitka Stewart-Sims
"We can honor the enslaved persons by planting a memorial garden outside King House. This would make King House not only a place of ghost stories but also a place of remembrance. We weren't there, but we can still honor them by telling their story."
— Hanna Persson
Will they propose removing the modern elements of the house and make it a historical exhibit a la American Village? Will they propose turning it into a research center about his land before the University was here? Will they propose keeping it as a guest house, but renaming it?
"A garden to honor those who we do not know who built the house. With flowers like baby's breath, which is tied to faith. Enslaved people had to have faith to keep going."
— Hanna Persson
The only way to know is to ask and to listen.
Students from the Blackburn Institute from the University of Alabama visit Montevallo to learn about the Montevallo Legacy Project, the Lynching in Montevallo Community Remembrance project, and King House
The prevailing stories around the King House are those of ghosts and specters, but we must acknowledge the true history of the King House. Melanie Morrison, a direct descendent of Edmund King, believes that ghosts are here to remind us of things we have tried to forget.
"A day to remember them is a great way to start, and as more research is done we may be able to honor them by name."
— Taylar Barganier
We must come together as a community to rediscover, discuss, and address.
“Could it be that the bodies of Black men, women and children are lying in unmarked graves on this campus, perhaps under buildings, redbrick roads, and parking lots?”