John F. Baker

John F. Baker Jr. was born in 1962, in Springfield, Tennessee near Nashville. Baker is the author of his first and recently published book The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation: Stories of My Family's Journey to Freedom, published by Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster.

When Baker was in the seventh grade, he saw a photograph of four former slaves in his social studies textbook. When he learned that two of them were his grandmother's paternal grandparents Emanuel and Henny Washington, he began the lifelong research project that would become The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation.

Baker tells the story of his ancestors, who were enslaved on Wessyngton Plantation owned by the Washington family as well as the story of the hundreds of other African Americans connected with the plantation for more than two centuries. It is a story of family, faith, and community.

Founded in 1796 by Joseph Washington, a distant cousin of America's first president, Wessyngton Plantation covered 15,000 acres and held an enslaved population of 274 African Americans (the largest in the state of Tennessee) whose labor made it the largest tobacco operation in America, and the second largest in the world.

Only two slaves were ever sold from Wessyngton Plantation so the African Americans there formed family groups that remained intact for generations. Many of their descendants, including Baker, remain in the area close to the plantation. Others, now numbering in the tens of thousands, live throughout the United States.

For more than twenty years, Baker conducted genealogical research on Wessyngton families along traditional lines. In 2003, he incorporated DNA testing to expand his research and founded the Wessyngton DNA Project.

The Wessyngton DNA Project included descendants of enslaved families from Wessyngton Plantation from 1796-1865 and descendants of the plantation owner.

The Washington Family Papers have been Baker's primary source of research. In the course of more than thirty years of research, he has viewed more than 11,000 documents countless times to unravel his ancestry and the other Wessyngton families.

In addition to collecting information from his own family members, he has had the honor of interviewing more than twenty-five children and grandchildren of former Wessyngton slaves (ranging in age from 80 to 107). They shared many first-hand accounts of life on the plantation told by their ancestors who were enslaved there.

Descendants of the plantation owners were very instrumental in this ongoing research of the plantation's history. Many of them shared their remembrances, as well as photographs and portraits of former Wessyngton slaves.

Wessyngton Plantation, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is a working farm. The mansion, built brick by brick by its slaves, still stands as does a slave cabin and its slave cemetery.

Research into his family's past has been a groundbreaking work of history and a deeply personal journey of discovery. The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation is an uplifting story of survival and family; it honors the memory of our ancestors, their struggles and their achievements.

For more on the author's research: www.wessyngton.com