Overview

Location

Adams Co., MS. The plantation was at the following land coordinates: T7N-R2w, section 5; and T8N-R2W, section 53. This coordinate may be found at the Mississippi Department of Transportation website "county highway maps." This land now belongs to the Adams County Airport. Descendants of the Dunbars have restored the Oakley Grove cemetery used by the owners of the plantation which can be accessed from the airport property. The original land survey is at the Government Land Office website run by the Bureau of Land Management.

Date Constructed/Founded

1800 - 1805

Associated Surnames

Dunbar, Ferguson, Hunt

Historical notes

Robert Dunbar (not the same family of Sir William Dunbar) owned Oakley Grove Plantation. He emigrated from Scotland with his parents in 1770 first to North Carolina. Then he moved to the Natchez area where he settled on Ivy Place Plantation (later renamed Lansdowne by a great grandaughter). He next moved to Oakley Grove Plantation.

David Ferguson married Robert's daughter Jane Dunbar. David Ferguson grew up on Mount Locust Plantation. His family also owned Mount Locust rest stop on the Old Natchez Trace. It still exists and is a stop on the modern Natchez Trace Parkway. David and Jane lived on Oakley Grove Plantation. Their daughter, Ann, married David Hunt of Woodlawn Plantation MS.

Oakley Grove Plantation is listed by a David Hunt biographer as belonging to David Hunt. What happenned is that David's wife Ann (Ferguson) Hunt and her sister inherited Oakley Grove when Ann's mother Jane (Dunbar) Ferguson died near the time of the Civil War.

Probably some time after the Civil War Ann Hunt's sister willed the plantation to her descendants; however an Abijah Hunt is mentioned as a defendant in a court case brought by one of these descendants in the late 1800's (after the Civil War). So probably part of the land went to a descendant of Ann (Ferguson) Hunt - maybe to her grandson Abijah Hunt who was the son of George Hunt who died during the Civil War.

The land is now the site of the Adams County Airport.

Associated Slave Workplaces

• Robert Dunbar's other properties: Homewood Plantation, Lansdowne Plantation, Wilderness Plantation, and others
• David Ferguson's other properties
• David Hunt's other plantations: see Woodlawn Plantation MS
• Possibly Oakwood Plantation if the Archers owned this plantation

Associated Free Persons

• Robert Dunbar - first owner
• David Ferguson and his wife Jane Dunbar - second owners
• David Hunt and Ann Ferguson (possibly inherited Oakley Grove from Ann's parents)
• The Archer family (David and Ann's daughter Mary Ann married James Archer - so one possibility is that Oakley Grove passed into the Archer Family)
• The McCaleb family owned Oakley Grove sometime after the Civil War and before the Adams County airport bought it.

Associated Enslaved Persons

• none recorded yet

Research Leads and Plantation Records

• none reported yet

Miscellaneous Information

• none

References

• Plantations of David Hunt, by Andy McMillon. http://www.rootsweb.com/~msjeffe2/davidhunt.htm
• The Hunt Family of Jefferson County, by Andy McMillion. http://www.rootsweb.com/~msjeffe2/hunt_family.htm
• "Robert Dunbar. The Ancestral Root of This Family Tree," Natchez Area Family History Book, Natchez Historical Society, 2004.

Users Researching This Workplace

• none recorded yet

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