Madison-Morgan Cultural Center Receives Portrait of Early Madisonian Thomas P. Saffold

    The Madison Morgan Cultural Center has recently received and mounted a portrait of Thomas Peter Saffold (1821-1881).  Mr. Frank Saffold of St. Marys, Georgia, a 101 year old descendant of Saffold, donated the art on behalf of the family. The Saffold family was significant in the development of Morgan County in the 19th Century. 

  The medical equipment of Dr. Seaborn J. Saffold, Thomas’s father, is on display in the Cultural Center’s museum. In addition to being one of the county’s first physicians, Seaborn Saffold acquired considerable land. His sons Adam and Thomas became large-scale planters. Adam’s holdings once comprised much of the land now composing the Canaan neighborhood of Madison. He was among those who sold right-of-way to the Georgia Railroad, which reached Madison in the early 1840s on its way from Augusta to Atlanta. The Saffold home still stands on 2nd Street.

Thomas Peter Saffold was a lawyer who became a circuit judge in 1855. T. P., as he was generally known, acquired considerable land south of Buckhead near the road from Madison to Eatonton (now Bethany Road). There he established the type of large and complex agricultural operation characteristic of the lower Piedmont region’s plantation economy. His grand and elegant home (now in ruins) was considered one of the finest in the area.  

In January 1861 T. P. Saffold and Augustus Reese were elected by the voters to represent Morgan County at the state’s secession convention in Milledgeville. Saffold’s Unionist sentiment was evident in early procedural votes designed to block secession; but when it became clear that secession was inevitable, he voted on record with the overwhelming majority for Georgia to leave the Union and join the Confederacy. Saffold served in the Georgia Home Guards during the Civil War.  His second wife Sarah managed the plantation operation, and three of his sons died of natural causes while he was away. After the War, the Saffold place, like other pre-war plantations, converted from slave to free labor, mainly through share-cropping and tenancy.  

     During the Reconstruction Period, Saffold, unlike most former Confederates and planters, became a political ally of Joshua Hill and others in the Republican Party, which was at the time more favorable to the freedmen than the Democrats.  Saffold supported suffrage rights for formerly enslaved Georgians and backed Gen. Ulysses S. Grant for President in 1868.  Grant honored Saffold with an appointment to the 1871 Board of Visitors for the Naval Academy in Annapolis.

     Oral history from the Saffold family attributes the painting to Thomas Sully circa 1840s, although the attribution has not been fully confirmed. Sully was a highly-regarded portraitist who painted over 2,500 portraits of prominent Americans and wealthy patrons like Saffold. The Cultural Center’s portraits of Eliza Fannin Walker and John Byne Walker, builders of Bonar Hall, also have tentative but unconfirmed family attribution to Sully.

   The portrait can be seen on the first floor of the Cultural Center, Tuesday through Saturday, 10AM-5PM. For more information on visiting Madison-Morgan Cultural Center please visit: MMCC-ARTS.ORG/visit