In 1850, the Davis census listed 35 slaves on the property, 14 males and 22 females. By 1860, 52 slaves, 27 males and 25 females, were living in 14 slave cabins on the Davis property. Most Southern slave dwellings were small, often no bigger than 100 square feet, located near the fields but close enough to the main house and overseer’s quarters to maintain control. Enslaved people worked hard to turn these quarters into homes, keeping them in good repair and making them as comfortable as possible, and many cabins had adjacent gardens where crops were grown to supplement allotted food. The original slave cabins on the Davis farm were sold in the late 1920s to raise money to keep the site open. Later, the Sam Davis Association acquired cabins from Rattle & Snap near Columbia, Tennessee, recognizing the importance of slave cabins to the farm’s history. Large-scale cotton cultivation began in Tennessee in the 1820s, and although the state’s agriculture was never devoted exclusively to cotton, it remained an important regional cash crop. The 1860 agriculture census showed that 100 bales of cotton, 400 pounds each, were grown on the Davis farm.