People outside Enslaved Quarters at Hermitage Plantation, near Savannah, Georgia, circa 1930

Hundreds of enslaved people worked on the Hermitage Plantation near Savannah, Georgia, before the Civil War. They cultivated rice, raised livestock, made bricks, and operated a sawmill and foundry. After the war, depictions of the "old slave huts" and the now-freed people who lived in them appealed to tourists seeking the last vestiges of the "Old South" and intent on romanticizing times of enslavement.