The Croom Family and Goodwood Plantation

Detailed and well-written . . . An important contribution to family, legal, agricultural, religious, and cultural history.

Rogers and Clark give us an excellent treatment of the Croom family in southern history and of one of Florida’s most interesting plantations. But they have done much more than that. They have also portrayed the larger story of the development of what became the cotton kingdom of the South. They have made a valuable contribution to the literature of antebellum southern history which will stand the test of time.

* author of Florida Portrait: A Pictorial History of Florida *

There is a vast literature—family records, correspondence, newspaper accounts, depositions and lawsuits—but the authors have mastered it all, and, for the first time, given us the complete picture.

The authors have provided an exhaustive narrative of an important legal case.

[A]n excellent work to our too-short shelf of studies on migration and settlement in the antebellum South.

The authors clearly show the importance and role of extended family in helping to shape the saga of the Crooms, as well as the story of Florida's early development, growth, and history. . . . This book is well documented by use of census records, manuscript collections, newspapers, and tax rolls. It succeeds at placing this particular planter-class family and its twisted web of kinfolk within the overall context of southern society from the 1800s to the Civil War. Students of Southern, Florida, and American history, and those interested in slavery will find this study of the life and times of Hardy and Bryan Croom to be of significant interest.

A major theme of the book is based on the description of this extended litigation, which offers some interesting insights into the legal procedures of that era in the South.