Slave Quarters UpstairsIn the antebellum era, the second-floor room of the Slave Quarters building would have served as living or sleeping space for enslaved individuals in the service of Abner Cook, the Hills, the Blind Asylum, and the Stockdale family. The room did not have a fireplace for heat or cooking. Ambient heat from the set kettle chimney might have warmed the room. Relief during the hot summer and fall months would have only been possible by opening the unscreened door and windows.
In the postbellum era and under the ownership of the Neill and Cochran families, this room would have continued to serve as living quarters but for the white and Black domestic servants that the institutions or families who rented and owned the property employed. In the 1930s, the second-floor room served as a place of respite for laundresses Margarete Johnson and Clarence Robinson. Mary Cochran Bohls, one of the Cochran grandchildren, recalled visiting the women and taking naps in that space. 1940, Lillie Kelley was a cook for the Cochran family; she and her husband Hillery lived on the second floor in an efficiency apartment-type situation, albeit one without plumbing.
