William Isham Cole was born May 7, 1805, married Lovina Clark about the time of the Treaty of New Echota between the U.S. Government and the Cherokee Nation that ended all Native land claims in the State of Georgia, and moved with his new wife to what is now Dade County, Georgia. After first living just north of Morganville, he bought extensive acreage in Sligo Valley in 1850 and established one of the county’s finest plantations on Squirrel Town Creek. The original house was built of logs with two large rooms and a huge limestone fireplace, and a later frame addition added five more rooms, two stone chimneys, and four fireplaces. By the 1860 Federal census he was a prosperous planter living with his wife and three children, and he was one of the best-known slave owners in Dade County. He was regarded as treating his slaves fairly and once paid considerably more to keep a young man from being separated from his family. In the late summer of 1863, fearing that approaching Federal soldiers would force his slaves to leave the plantation or harm them, he sent them to south Alabama for the duration of the war under the charge of a mature woman named Adaline, called Ad, giving her a thousand dollars in gold to keep them together and return after the war. The war devastated the plantation and left Cole destitute, but Adaline later led the group back home and returned all of the gold, which he used to rebuild. A cemetery established on a hillside about a quarter of a mile from the main house became Bethlehem Cemetery, and many small rectangular stones on its upper left side mark the graves of former slaves who lived and worked on the plantation and of their descendants.