In this oral history, Mr. John Rowe, and his brothers, Marcellus and Lawrence, discuss their family history, including this excerpt where they discuss their father’s work as a sharecropper on Jamestown Island before it became a federal park:

Q: How much acreage did your dad have to farm...?

A: I imagine [our father] had about 25 acres to farm himself, around that…corn, peanuts, soybeans, things like that was his main things.

Q: How much of that did he have to give to the people who owned the land?

A: One-third….He used to sell a little bit of the peanuts. He was selling them peanuts, that’s where he got the most of his money from. As far as the corn, the horses would eat that up. The horses got a little bit.