Manuscript Location

Tulane University, Special Collections, Jones Hall, Room 202

Place of Origin

United States ➔ Georgia

Date of Composition

likely ca. 1830s-ca. 1870s

Description

This recipe book is part of the library's collection of the papers of Charles Colcock Jones (1804-1863). Born at one of his father's plantations, located in Liberty County, Georgia, Jones studied to become a Presbyterian minister at Andover Theological Seminary, in Massachusetts, and at Princeton Theological Seminary, before returning to Georgia in 1830 to attend to his father's three plantations. He remained a planter for the rest of his life while also pursuing a multifarious career as a pastor and professor of religion in both the South and the North, as well as a passionate evangelizer to southern slaves, the aspect of his life's work for which he is particularly remembered. He was also the author of numerous pamphlets and several books, including The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (1842).

Charles Jones married his cousin, Mary Jones (1808-1869), in 1830. The couple had three children who survived into adulthood, two sons and a daughter. Despite their father's ambivalence about slavery, both of his sons fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. One son became a physician, and the other a lawyer and well-known historian. The couple's daughter, Mary Sharpe Jones (1835-1839), married Reverend Robert Mallard in 1857 and had four children, three of whom lived to adulthood. During the Civil War, she and her mother struggled to fend off repeated searches and thefts of family properties by Sherman's army, as it marched through Georgia. 

The recipe book as well as loose recipes are located in Box 40, Folders 14-16, of the Jones Colcock Papers.