Home

The Keith Plantation of Cherokee County The overgrown entrance to the Keith Plantation. Note the main house in the background According to local sources, the Keith Plantation near Canton, GA, in present-day Keithsburg* during the Civil War. The property held over 3,300 acres along the Etowah River two miles north of Etowah. (Note: At one point in the past, Canton was named Etowah) The plantation had a large brick house made from a kiln with red clay from the Etowah River.

Convict Camp laborers were held in iron cages between 1923-1938 The system was born of the southern states' emergent need for free labor at the end of the Civil War. Within a decade of the end of the war, 12 southern states had adopted what became known as the Convict Lease System. This article will primarily focus on the camps in Georgia, with an emphasis on those in Pickens County. Of the few existing prisons at the time, many had suffered damage from arson during the Civ