page_title: Boykin, Alabama
section_title: Early history
hierarchical_section_title: Boykin, Alabama / Early history
caption_attribution_description: School children rehearsing Maypole festivity, in Gee's Bend, Alabama, 1939.
context_page_description: Boykin, also known as Gee's Bend, is an African American majority community and census-designated place in a large bend of the Alabama River in Wilcox County, Alabama. As of the 2010 census, its population was 275. The Boykin Post Office was established in the community in 1949 and remains active, servicing the 36723 ZIP code.
  Gee's Bend was named for Joseph Gee, an early large land owner from Halifax County, North Carolina who settled here in 1816. Gee brought 18 African American slaves with him and established a cotton plantation within the bend.
context_section_description: Boykin is a block of land enclosed on three sides by the Alabama River, within a horseshoe shaped turn of the river named Gee's Bend. It is  within the Black Belt of Alabama.  The plantation started by Joseph Gee passed to his nephews Sterling and Charles Gee upon his death, along with 47 slaves.  The brothers then sold it to their relative Mark H. Pettway in 1845 to settle a $29,000 debt. About a year later, the Pettway family moved from North Carolina to Gee's Bend, bringing about one hundred slaves with them.  When slavery was abolished many of them continued working for the Pettways as sharecroppers.  Many of the black tenants Arthur Rothstein photographed were named Pettway. The white Pettway family owned the property until 1895, when it was sold to Adrian Sebastian Van de Graaff.  Van de Graaff, a lawyer from Tuscaloosa, then operated it as an absentee landlord.
  The Resettlement Administration reports of the 1930s emphasized the isolation of the community, describing the unreliable ferry that approached from the east and the muddy road that entered from the west.  The community had received public assistance from the Red Cross in 1932 and federal and state aid in 1933 and 1934. Beginning in 1935, the Resettlement Administration made agricultural loans and offered farm and home management advice. In 1937, the average rural rehabilitation loan to Gee's Bend families was $353.41, and the agency reports speak of possible cooperative undertakings; a building campaign for houses, barns, a schoolhouse, and a sawmill. Residents were also encouraged to replace oxen with more efficient mules.
  The agency's programs at Gee's Bend continued after Rothstein's visit. During 1937, the agency purchased the old Pettway plantation, and two adjacent farms, totalling over 10,000 acres, for $122,000. The agency then sub-divided the land and rented it to 92 families. The following year, a nurse began working in the community, and construction began for a school, store, blacksmith shop, and cooperative cotton gin. By 1939 enough visible change had occurred for Roy Stryker to send Mary Post Wolcott to the community to photograph the signs of progress—to get the "after" pictures. During the 1940s, many families at Gee's Bend bought their farms from the government for an average of $1,400 each. This was about $2,600 less per farm than the eighty-eight units had cost the government, a subsidy that seems to have been fairly typical for Farm Security Administration projects of this type.
  Gee's Bend continued to fascinate outsiders. In 1941, New York City speech professor and folklore collector Robert Sonkin recorded music, recitations, discussion, and a Fourth of July program at Gee's Bend.
caption: Children rehearsing around a maypole for health day exercises, 1939.  Photo by Marion Post Wolcott.
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