One of North Georgia’s few surviving slave dwellings stands in Nacoochee Valley as a focal point for understanding the lives of black people held in bondage in Appalachia before the Civil War. Framed by nineteenth-century landscaping and associated with antebellum artifacts, the Nacoochee slave cabin reflects a dark period in which African Americans’ lives and labor were exploited by power and privilege. In 1860, nearly 4 million African Americans were enslaved in the United States, including more than 460,000 blacks and mulattoes in Georgia. On the eve of the Civil War, White County had a population of 3,315, including 11 free black residents and 263 enslaved people claimed as property by 47 prominent white citizens. In Nacoochee Valley, 124 enslaved people lived there, half owned by E.P. Williams and his brother Charles. The valley was not part of the South’s Cotton Kingdom of vast plantations worked by thousands of slaves. Beginning in 1822, enslaved people came with early white settlers from the Carolinas and in northeast Georgia they cleared and cultivated land, labored in mines and mills, served as domestics and skilled craftsmen, and toiled in foundries and fields. The region’s heritage includes the African American experience and the enduring legacy of slavery, a history that descendants have urged be preserved alongside the stories of Jim Crow and Civil Rights so future generations can appreciate achievements won against hardship.