Sweetwater Mansion

Sweetwater Mansion was built by the people it enslaved. General John Brahan — War of 1812 veteran, 4,000 acres in Lauderdale County — had the bricks manufactured by the enslaved workers on the plantation, and the eight-room Georgian house was finished in 1835 for his son-in-law Robert Patton, who would become Alabama's Reconstruction governor. Up to three hundred enslaved people were tied to the property; the house's Flemish-bond facade and end-wall chimneys are their craft, the plantation's beauty literally made by its captives.

The haunting grew in the abandoned rooms — the caretaker who came down to find a phantom casket with a Confederate soldier inside, believed to be one of Patton's sons whose funeral was held in the house; the shadowy figures, the 19th-century women, the children's laughter in empty rooms. The house sat empty and decaying for years, the trespassing ghost hunters breaking the windows and the cemetery falling to ruin — the folklore damaging the very house it claimed to honor.

The restoration is the file's present — the Sweetwater Foundation working to save the house, the descendants of the enslaved contacted as far as Arizona, the cemeteries being found and the names recovered. The file keeps the plantation's full register: the governor's mansion the enslaved built, the dead son's phantom casket in the parlor, and the descendants now helping restore the house their ancestors were forced to make.

Sweetwater Mansion is the archive's enslaved-builders file — the 1835 Alabama plantation house made of bricks manufactured by the enslaved, governor's home and phantom-casket legend, now being restored with the descendants of the people who built it.