Horace King (1807-1888)
Georgia's Master Bridge Builder
Horace King was born in bondage, September 8, 1807, in the Cheraw District of South Carolina. His father said to have been a mulatto named Edmund King, his mother a woman of mixed blood named Susan. Horace's maternal grandfather is said to have been a full blooded Catawba Indian who married a slave woman. Death took the King's old master in the winter of 1829. In the winding up of the estate, Horace and his mother Susan became the lawful property of John Godwin, the contractor.
Godwin, his brother Wells, and slave Horace arrived in Columbus in the spring of 1832, having already won the contract for the first public bridge over the Chattahoochee. These men brought to west Georgia the art of lattice bridge building, said to have been taught them by the designer himself, Ithiel Town. During the next several years, King's responsibilities and reputation as a "bridge builder" grew. During the mid 1840's, Robert T. Jemison, a well known west Alabama lawyer and planter, began to call upon Godwin to contract for bridges.
The stigma of slavery appears in no way to have interfered in the relations between King, Godwin and Jemison. Jemison may have been one of the many who offered as much as $6,000 for the purchase of Horace King.
To manumit (to free from slavery) a person prior to the Civil War was not an easy task. The master could not simply give his slave a "paper of freedom." There were many legalities to fulfill, and the process was tedious. Both Godwin and King were eager to accomplish manumission.
It was concluded Ohio would be the best known location in which to manumit King. There, Horace was formally freed under the laws of the State. After returning from Ohio, free from the force of the Federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, King was emancipated by the General Assembly of Alabama, in its last session at Tuscaloosa, February 3rd, 1846.
Freedom did not weaken the affiliation King had with Godwin and Jemison as he moved into an uncertain future. He maintained very close ties with his friend and former master, and Jemison provided challenging projects until his death in 1871.
King moved to LaGrange in 1872 and during the decade prior to his death he increasingly devoted himself to architectural pursuits, leaving the bridge business to his sons. When Horace died on May 27, 1888 he had survived a half century of back breaking yet productive work. Horace the "Bridge Builder," as he was often called, had lived at the right time for his skills and resourcefulness to be fully utilized. It was in a manner befitting him that a historical marker was unveiled on April 22, 1979. The occasion was "Horace King Day" in Phenix City, Alabama. The unveiling was preceded by a most impressive and well researched commentary by Dr. William H. Green, in which he memorialized the former slave as follows:
Horace King was a "Southern Everyman," born a slave but winning his freedom, sprung from the three noble races of the early South (Cherokee, Black & White). Laborer and Legislator his life was an astonishing symbolic bridge - a bridge not only between states, but between men. Like one of his stately Town lattice bridges, Horace King's life soars above the murky waters of historical limitations, of human bondage and racial prejudice. He did not change the currents of social history, but he did transcend them and stands as a reminder of our common humanity, the potential of human spirit, the power of mutual respect.