Julia R. King (1863-1952) was the granddaughter of Roswell King Jr (1796-1854), the notorious overseer of Butler Island Plantation in McIntosh County and later owner of the South Hampton Plantation in Liberty County. Julia King revered her family heritage and that of the White planter class of Liberty County. Later in life she sold her inherited property in the Colonel’s Island area and moved to Florida, where she had planned to write a history of Liberty County using the materials she and her brother had gathered.
The history was apparently never written, but she was a prolific letter writer, and after her death, many of her letters were donated to the Midway Museum of Liberty County. In 2020, as a member of the Midway Museum Board, I applied for a grant from the Digital Library of Georgia to have them digitized, which was done in 2021. The digitized letters are available to the public at the DLG website. Cathy Dillon and I also transcribed the letters, which you can see below.
Julia King also was a photographer. Many of her photos are now on the Digital Library of Georgia website as well; most of those are unidentified, as she did not write the identifications on the photos. Her photos can also be found in Meredith R. Devendorf’s “Images of America: Liberty County,” book, which is available at the Midway Museum.
Why include these letters on this site? Julia King was the very definition of a white supremacist for her entire life. However, she both gathered a large amount of historical information about Liberty County and had an enormous amount of family knowledge in her head, and this is one of the few ways to access that. The White families she wrote about had almost all been enslaving families, and so the locations of their property and their family intermarriages are important in terms of helping the descendants of the people they held in slavery find their ancestors.
The letters can be difficult to read. They are from a different time, and in particular she writes offensively about the African Americans who took over what became the First African Baptist Church (formerly the North Newport Baptist Church, which had both White and Black members) in the Crossroads area. The letters have not been edited. Any piece of information in them that helps a descendant of those held in slavery find out more about their ancestors will be worth the discomfort that comes from reading them. Wouldn’t it be interesting if this turns out to be her legacy?