City: Greenville   County: Madison   Year: 2022
Location: 1583 Livingston Road (access only via public event)

Side One: Before the Red Hills became a mecca for quail hunters, the region was used for cotton growing. William Bailey moved to Jefferson County by 1822, and amassed a 4,000-acre plantation, The Cedars. As the region’s largest enslaver, Bailey also owned plantation lands in Leon County. In 1850, some 269 enslaved African Americans were forced to labor at The Cedars. They harvested 550 bales of cotton and 8,000 bushels of corn, which added to Bailey’s vast wealth. Bailey served as an officer in the U.S. Army during the War of 1812, and later in the Seminole Wars. During the Mexican-American War, he was elected Major General of the Florida state militia. In 1848, Bailey ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic candidate for governor. Bailey’s first wife was Elizabeth Mary Bellamy, daughter of engineer John Bellamy who along with the Finlayson family owned plantations nearby in the Aucilla River area. In debt after the Civil War, Bailey sold The Cedars to nephew Burton W. Bellamy who continued cotton cultivation with tenant and sharecropper farmers. Side Two: By 1920, The Cedars site along with adjacent land was sold to a group of businessmen from Macon, Georgia, who created the 8,000-acre Georgia-Florida Farm Corporation. While the farm experimented with crop diversification like kudzu hay, its cash crop, cotton, was subject to low prices and the damaging effect of the boll weevil. The scale and intensity of the farm’s operation left the landscape more open than a typical Red Hills plantation. In 1926, investors from New York City, including Gerald M. Livingston, bought the land with plans to subdivide it into smaller farms to be sold to German American farmers from Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. The scheme never materialized, and Livingston bought out his partners’ interests. Livingston accumulated over 18,000 acres with adjoining Georgia land to form his quail hunting preserve. One of the last structures of the pre-Civil War plantation, a 14-room, columned mansion located on the hill east of the present dairy barn, was destroyed by a fire in 1926. The entire Livingston Place site, now 9,125 acres, was listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places.