Routh family

The Routh family were early settlers of the Natchez District of British West Florida who managed to preserve and extend their wealth continuously through the American territorial period and into the period of Mississippi statehood, up until the American Civil War, an unusual feat of financial endurance otherwise only accomplished by the Surgets, Bingamans and the Minors. By the time of the 1860 U.S. federal census, the heirs of Jeremiah Routh, who had accumulated and monetized large land grants from the British and Spanish, collectively held one of the largest slaveholdings in the U.S. South, including at least 1,295 people enslaved in Tensas Parish, Louisiana.

These 1,295 people, legally held by four members of the Routh family, collectively produced "nearly 5,000 bales of cotton" in 1859, placing them in the top tier of cotton growers nationwide, which at that time was the single-most valuable agricultural product of the United States.

The family owned a number of grand homes around Natchez, Adams County, Mississippi, and before the war, the family owned at least a dozen plantations bordering Lake St. Joseph, an oxbow lake in Tensas Parish (roughly opposite the Claiborne and Jefferson counties of Mississippi, immediately north of Natchez), including properties of Routh grandsons-in-law Samuel Worthington Dorsey of Elk Ridge plantation and Haller Nutt of Winter Quarters and Evergreen Place plantations. In addition to Winter Quarters, the Routh fortune built the historic antebellum mansions Dunleith and Longwood. According to one account he was granted 500 acres near Boyd's Creek in 1776. Other early settlers scattered through the countryside at that time included Anthony Hutchins, Richard Ellis and John Ellis, Bernard Lintot, William Marshall, John Turner, William Vousdan, and the sons of Rev. Jedediah Smith (Calvin Smith, Philander Smith), whose father had died within a week of landing in the Natchez.

Edith Wyatt Moore, a 20th-century Natchez booster and untrained local historian, retold a colorful version of the true story of Jeremiah Routh having hauled planed, finished lumber down the Mississippi River to Natchez via flatboat. Insufficiently moored at Natchez-under-the-Hill, the cargo-laden boat drifted away or was stolen by a "rascal" named John Olivary. Many years after the fact, and after the death of Jeremiah Routh, the Routh heirs received a court judgment compensating them for his lost lumber.

Jeremiah Routh Sr. and Margaret Matilda Routh had at least six children: Job Routh, Jeremiah Routh II, Mary Matilda Routh, Zaccheus Routh, Francis Routh, and Elijah Routh. The 1792 Spanish census of the Natchez District listed Elias Routh, Jeremias Routh, Job Routh, and Margaret Routh of Villa Gayoso, and Juan Routh (John Routh) of Bayou Pierre. "Routh's Old Place" was described in 1809 as being 550 acres on the north fork of Cole's Creek, three miles from Old Greenville and five or six miles from the Mississippi River.

Job Routh Job Routh of Mississippi and Louisiana (d. December 12, 1834) Job Routh (1762–1834) was born around 1762 in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. When he was eight years old, he reportedly almost drowned in the Potomac River and was saved by a family dog. In honor of this, Routh commissioned a cast iron sculpture of a Newfoundland dog for the family cemetery.

Routh came to Natchez from Kentucky in March of 1790. On September 7, 1792, he received a land grant of "a thousand arpents" at Natchez from Francisco Luis Héctor de Carondelet. The grant "covered a vast area, comprising the lands of some of our most noted mansions, such as Dunleith (formerly Routhlands) Richmond, Lanfollan, Arlington, Ashburn, Kenilworth, and Oakland, now known as Routhlands. Antedating these mansions by fully fifty years was the first Routhland (Dunleith) and Hope Villa. Job Routh became one of our earliest nabobs and not only gave his children lordly estates, but willed them slaves and cattle." Job Routh was granted a tract in what is now Tensas Parish in 1803, in vicinity of three oxbow lakes that were former bends in the Mississippi River: Lake Bruin, Lake St. Joseph, and Yucatan Lake. According to a 20th-century account, Job Routh also "obtained a large grant of land across the River in Louisiana near Lake St. Joseph, and there he and his children cultivated 20,000 acres with 5,000 slaves as labor. Part of the year they lived in their town houses in Natchez, and the rest of the time on the plantations on Lake St. Joseph. There were fifteen homesteads belonging to the Routh family in Tensas Parish, Louisiana, where life was one long series of balls, dinners, picnics, horse races, and boat races. Just prior to the outbreak of the War between the States John Routh, a son of Job Routh, made a cotton crop of 8,840 bales in one year."

In the 1790s, he constructed a mansion called Routhland. This mansion was described as one of "Natchez's grander structures, with two stories and galleries on at least two sides. The setting was a 1700-acre estate near the southern edge of the city." The first recorded burial at Routh Cemetery adjacent to Dunleith on Homochitto Street in Natchez dates to 1818; there are a total of 46 known burials in the cemetery, including three formerly enslaved people.

In 1805, Routh established a residence at a place he called Winter Quarters in Tensas Parish, Louisiana. The plantation was so-named because the residents lived elsewhere during most of the year but came south for the winter. The house at Winter Quarters was originally a three-room hunting retreat built out of logs felled and hand-hewn on site by the enslaved community on the property, and eventually expanded to 19 rooms, five of which were added in the 1820s by the Ogdens.

Routh died on December 12, 1834, and was buried in the family cemetery near the present-day site of Dunleith. The couple had nine children: Anna, Caroline Matilda, Elizabeth, Francis Routh, Jane, John, Mary, Sarah, and Stephen. Mary Routh Ellis Dahlgren lived there only two years before she died of heart disease in 1858; Dahlgren rapidly remarried and built Llangollen, which burned in 1932.

John Routh m. Nancy Smith Winter Quarters was the only plantation house in the vicinity of Lake Saint Joseph to survive the American Civil War. According to an account of the war passing over the lakeside settlement, "Haller Nutt claimed that between burnings by Confederates and burnings by Federals he had lost more than 4,500 bales of cotton in the war. If this is true, at 1863 cotton prices it was a loss worth in U. S. gold." Julia Nutt lived at the unfinished Longwood ("Nutt's Folly") on the Mississippi side of the river after her husband's death in 1864. Dr. Ogden bought the defaulted Routhlands from the sheriff in 1842, and sold it back to his mother-in-law. Upon Job Routh's death, the Ellises sold Hope Farm (also known as Hope Villa) to Eli Montgomery, whose family occupied it for the next 90 years. In 1806, Jeremiah Routh "sold to Lewis Evans his plantation consisting of two hundred acres situated, lying and being within the limits of Natchez, bounded on the east by lands of Job Routh, on the west by John Girault's lands and on the north by William Barland's. The latter owned the Elms and much land in the heart of Natchez." His wife Ann died at age 30 in 1810.

Jeremiah Routh Jr. was said to have once owned a place called Midway Plantation near Waterproof in Tensas Parish, Louisiana.

John Routh John Routh (1791–1867), eldest son of Job and a grandson of Jeremiah I, was a major cotton planter and enslaver. He was known as the king of Tensas Parish.

He was present at the Battle of New Orleans. In 1824, Job Routh deeded 10 acres of land to his son John Routh. In 1838 he was an investor in the Mississippi Towboat Company and the Natchez Steam Packet Company along with fellow company officers Stephen Duncan, James Wilkins, Levin Marshall, Alvarez Fisk, Adam L. Bingaman, and William J. Minor.

In 1850, he enslaved 276 people on a cotton plantation in Tensas Parish, Louisiana, and was one of the top 20 slave owners in that state. In 1851 he and his nephew-by-marriage Thomas Dorsey were appointed executors of the estate of William Adams Jr. Adams' father sued to prevent the estate from manumitting of an enslaved woman named Nancy Adams and giving her a bequest of $3,000. The court ruled in favor of the father.

By 1860 he legally owned 300 people. The property he held in Tensas Parish that year was worth an estimated . His plantations were said to have produced more than 6,000 bales a year at times. In January 1861 he was called "one of the largest planters in the Union," and ran as a "co-operationist" candidate for the Louisiana secession convention and was "beaten eight to one by his fellow planters."

He was said to have been financially ruined by the war and/or his plantation near Lake St. Joseph was sacked by the Yankees, robbed of silver plate, and burned.

John Routh was married to Ann Smith, a niece of Philander Smith and Calvin Smith. One of their sons drowned or was present for the drowning in Second Creek of two of their Gillespie cousins in 1836. John Routh died 1867 at Natchez.

Francis Routh

Francis "Frank" Routh (1804–1878), son of Job Routh, was reportedly the builder of Kenilworth plantation. In 1827, Francis Routh began buying up land in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. By the mid-1830s Francis Routh was a co-owner with slave-trade baron Isaac Franklin of a large parcel of plantation land along the Mississippi River. Routh declared bankruptcy in the wake of the Panic of 1837, which disrupted the entire local economy: "When President Jackson ordered that public lands be paid for in specie, a general demand for cash brought on a great crash. Banks failed all over the country and 1837 ushered in a depression known as 'Hard Times'. There actually seemed to be no money. Chancery records show that hundreds of homes and plantations were sold at public auction. The price of land had dropped to zero, so that men, rich in lands and property, could neither sell or raise cash on them. The Vicksburg Whig of 1839 published a list of Mississippi banks that failed between 1837 and 1839, and the length of the list is appalling. Rich men were beggared by the thousands." He had a daughter, Rosaltha Francina Routh, who married John Ker II in 1848. He died at a son-in-law's house in 1878 in Catahoula Parish, Louisiana.