Betty Allen

The property at stake was an enslaved person named Toney, whom Betsy Love had deeded to her minor daughter Susan in 1829. When the sheriff seized Toney to pay a $200 legal fee owed by Love's husband, James Allen, Susan's brother George posted the bond to protest the sale. In January 1837 the state high court ruled for Susan, and Toney stayed enslaved as her property. Historians such as Megan Benson and Robert Gilmer argue that the 1839 married women's property act mainly let men shield assets from creditors, and four of its five sections concerned enslaved people.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Oxford Square — 18 mi
  The courthouse square laid out in 1837 on land bought from a Chickasaw woman, rebuilt after the 1864 burning and home to Square Books and a memorial to Lafayette County's lynching victims.
• Rowan Oak — 18 mi
  William Faulkner's Greek Revival house in Oxford, bought in 1930 and kept by the University of Mississippi, with the outline of A Fable still written on his study wall.
• The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi — 19 mi
  The 1848 Greek Revival building at the center of the Ole Miss campus, where federal marshals held off a mob on 30 September 1962 and James Meredith registered the next morning.
• Chickasaw Council House — 25 mi
  A roadside exhibit on the Natchez Trace Parkway marking the Chickasaw capital of the 1820s and the council house where the 1832 treaty of Pontotoc Creek ended Chickasaw title to Mississippi.

More markers nearby

• Maj. Gen. William Colbert — 13 mi
• Jim Weatherly — 13 mi
• Pontotoc County Blues — 13 mi
• Pierre D'Artaguiette — 13 mi