Louisa Russell Conner was born about 1840 at Berkeley, a plantation located on Second Creek, seventeen miles from Natchez, Adams County, Mississippi. Her parents were Henry LeGrand and Susan Evelina Baker Conner. Henry LeGrand Conner was a wealthy planter who owned property in Adams County, Mississippi, and in Tensas Parish, Louisiana. Louisa Conner was the youngest of five sisters: Mary Savage (called Sister Puss in the memoir), Susan (Sister Sue), Evelina, and Anna Frances (Fannie). The Conners were related by blood or by marriage to some of the wealthiest planters in the area: the Bakers, the Duncans, the Kers, and the Metcalfes, among others. One cousin, Lemuel P. Conner, was a lawyer and a planter in both Louisiana and Mississippi. He was also an ardent secessionist and a colonel in the Confederate army.

Conner’s father died in 1849. After her mother’s death in 1858, she inherited Berkeley plantation. Rather than live on the plantation alone, Conner left it in the care of a housekeeper and went to live with her oldest married sister, Mary Savage Conner Blake (Mrs. Benson Heighe Blake) at her plantation, Blakely, located near Vicksburg, Warren County, Mississippi. Over the next several years, Conner periodically went back to Berkeley to supervise operations.

During the Civil War, Conner continued to live with her sister at Blakely. In May of 1862, as the Union troops approached Vicksburg, Benson Blake fled to Georgia with the majority of his slaves, stores, and silver. Together, the sisters negotiated truces with the invading Union troops and transient groups of escaped slaves. They first met with General Joseph A. Mower and eventually gained clemency from General Lorenzo Thomas, a former classmate of their father at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. Their property was also under the protection of General William T. Sherman, and the general even gave Mary Blake a wagon and a team of mules so that she could market the vegetables she grew on the plantation.

For the remainder of the war, Louisa Conner and Mary Blake continued to manage their plantations, hoping to avoid confiscation by the Union army. During the period from August 1864 to April 1865, Louisa Conner traveled with some of her sister’s family to Albany, Georgia, to stay at the plantation owned by her brother-in-law, Benson Blake. There she remained until just before the end of the war, when the Conner family returned to Vicksburg on the railroad.

Louisa Russell Conner never married. The date of her death is unknown.

This collection contains a typescript (and a photocopy of it) of a memoir dictated circa 1905 by Louisa Russell Conner of Berkeley plantation. Her descriptions of the plantations, Berkeley, Grove (owned by the Metcalfes), Laurel Hill, and Oak Hill in Adams County and Blakely in Warren County, are notable for their architectural detail. Conner painstakingly traces family relationships and property ownership. She is equally precise in recounting her Civil War experiences at Blakely plantation near Vicksburg and at another plantation near Albany, Georgia. The battles she describes include Chickasaw Bayou and the siege of Vicksburg. A genealogy at the end traces the Conners to the Gaillard family of South Carolina. The cover page of the journal is actually a letter written by Frances Blake, the wife of a descendant of Conner’s sister, Mary Savage Conner Blake. This letter suggests the provenance of the collection.

1. Memoir. ca. 1905. 0.10 c.f.