Three hundred and fifty-seven enslaved Africans—men, women, and children—spent much or all of their lives in forced labor on land once owned by James McGilvery Troup. After his death in 1849, they were divided among his heirs, including his daughter Ophelia (Troup) Dent, who inherited 57 enslaved persons, and by 1860 a federal slave census listed 185 enslaved persons at Broadfield. Enslaved Africans resisted the stripping away of their identities by continuing to use “country names” among themselves, preserving kinship ties and African cultural traditions, and some who adopted surnames chose names independent of their owners. During the Civil War, most of the enslaved Africans at Hofwyl-Broadfield went with their owners to Tebeauville, Georgia, and in 1865 they were told they were free and left, though when rice planters returned to the coast they found many had already returned and settled again in their old quarters. During Reconstruction, many African Americans became literate, bought and worked land, engaged in free enterprise, and were aided by the Freedman’s Bureau, which operated from 1865 to 1872; some from Hofwyl-Broadfield remained in or returned to their home communities, continued working for wages, and built homes, businesses, schools, and the nearby African American communities of Needwood, Petersville, and Freedman’s Rest. Southern black codes and later Jim Crow laws then restricted freedoms, enforced segregation, and created new forms of exploitation, and it took nearly 100 years after the war for legalized racial discrimination to end through the Civil Rights Movement. The intelligence, creativity, ingenuity, and forced labor of Africans from West Africa made possible a prosperous rice plantation, while they also preserved and passed on foodways, language, storytelling, music, agricultural knowledge, basket weaving, and other traditions that endured in African American and American culture. Despite enslavement and continued oppression, their descendants built families, businesses, religious and educational institutions, and lasting communities, and the wealth drawn from Hofwyl-Broadfield’s rice fields depended on the knowledge and labor of enslaved Africans and later of free but still exploited African Americans.