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Otey Mansion |
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In 1850 "Madison" and Octavia Otey built a fine plantation house (named, in the southern tradition: Greenlawn) with 2 stories and 9 rooms. It was built on the center hall plan with a front and back hall, 2 rooms on each side off of the halls, an upstairs with a center hall and 2 rooms on either side. There was also a small library off of the parlor and a sleeping room to the north. The kitchen was located in a room of the log cabin separate from the house and of course the house did not have electricity or plumbing at that time.
Today, the Otey Mansion stands as a historic symbol of traditional plantation, southern-style homes of the 1800s.
The Otey Family
William Madison Otey (1818 1865), the son of John Walter Otey and Mary Walton Otey, was a general merchant in Meridianville, Alabama, during the 1830s, and later, a cotton planter in Madison County, Ala., and Yazoo County, Miss. He was married to Octavia Aurelia James Wyche in 1849. Octavia was the daughter of Mary Ann Rebecca Wyche and Dr. William H. Wyche (d. 1835) of Yazoo County, Mississippi, and Madison County, Ala. Most of the land William Madison Otey cultivated in both Alabama and Mississippi between 1849 and his death had been bequeathed to his wife by her parents. Otey also inherited the bulk of his mother's estate, located near Meridianville, in 1854. In the 1840s, before his marriage, he had lived with his mother on her small plantation and worked the land with a handful of slaves belonging to her.
Octavia Wyche's family resided mostly in northern Alabama and Mississippi, and included her uncles Thomas P. Wyche, a planter in Yazoo City; G. A. Wyche and A. A. Wyche, both physicians in Meridianville; John F. Wyche, a commission merchant in New Orleans; Middleton Wyche; Nathaniel Wyche; and her aunt, Elizabeth Wyche.
Octavia was her parents' only child, but had a half sister, Ella Kirkland, and a half brother, William Kirkland, who were the children of her mother and her stepfather, John Kirkland. Kirkland was a storeowner in Meridianville, and later worked in a store in Attalaville, Miss. Ella Kirkland lived with William and Octavia from the early 1850s until her marriage to Dr. James P. Burke in 1861. Ella had a son named Matt Otey Burke. William (Will) Kirkland also lived with the Oteys for a time in the early 1860s, until his death in 1866.
William Madison Otey had at least two brothers, C. C. (possibly Christopher) and A. H., and two sisters, Lucy Ann and Maria. Sometime before 1830, Lucy Ann Otey married Rodah Horton (fl. 1830 185?), a planter and member of the Alabama legislature in 1837 and 1838. They had a son, William, and three daughters, Mary Eliza, Josie, and Fanny (Colcock).
After their marriage in 1849, William and Octavia resided on their plantation, Green Lawn, outside Meridianville in Madison County. They had six children: Imogene (b. 1850), the oldest, who married William Fields in 1884; Mollie (b. 1854), who married John M. Hampton in 1881; William Walter (Buddy, b. 1853), who married Sophia [?] in 1887; Lucille (Lucy) Horton Otey, who married John Beale Walker in the early 1890s; Matt (b. 1858); and Elliese.
After her husband died in June 1865, Octavia Otey continued to live outside Meridianville, and to operate their plantation there.
Source - Biographical and Genealogical Data for William and Octavia Otey:
http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/htm/01608.html |
