PULASKI, THE COUNTY SEAT OF GILES COUNTY, TENN., birthplace of the original Ku Klux Klan, is a town of about four thousand population, situated on the L. and N. Railroad, eighty miles south of Nashville, Tenn., and at the crossing of the highways extending from Nashville to Birmingham and from Chattanooga to Memphis.
The town was in antebellum days and still remains the seat of much culture and wealth. It’s citizenship is, and has always been composed of representative old families of the South. Many of their beautiful, old colonial homes have passed away and are passing day by day to decay.
Many still remain as monuments to the classic architectural ideas of their builders and to the high-bred, hospitable people who once possessed them and whose spirits still seem with aristocratic, stately mien to tread their vaulted corridors, with “the tender grace of a day that is dead.” Early settlers of this country came largely from North Carolina and Virginia, and there has been very little immigration from elsewhere.
Most of these rare old homesteads had splendid plantations connected with them. The situation was ideal for these plantations occupying as they did. in the language of another Tennessee writer, the “Dimple of the Universe.”
The owners of these homesteads and plantations were also owners of large numbers of Negro slaves whose occupation it was to work in these fields of cotton and of corn. The relation between slave and slave holder here in Middle Tennessee was nearly always one of mutual trust, kindness and friendly interest. It may not be generally known, but it is a fact, that Tennessee freed her own slaves and was not included in the emancipation proclamation.