The family that owns the crematory—the Marshes—has been in northwest Georgia since slavery times. Their story may help explain what went wrong at Tri-State.
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The founders of the state of Georgia opposed slavery, but not on principle.
The Spanish were in Florida at the time and offered freedom to any enslaved person who would fight for them.
So the founders believed that bringing enslaved people to Georgia put white colonists at increased risk of attack from the enemies to the South.
But that stand on slavery didn't last long.
The Spanish were defeated in the mid-1700s and stolen people were soon imported from Angola, Sierra Leone and the Gambia.
By the time the Civil war started in 1860, nearly half of Georgia's population, almost half a million people, were enslaved.
People who were enslaved were forced to work under the threat of violence, rape and family separation.
Conditions were so bad that on one plantation in Georgia, 10% of the people enslaved there died every year.
In 1864, a boy named Monroe was born into slavery on a plantation in northwest Georgia.
Monroe was listed as mulatto in a later census, meaning the child of one black parent and one white.
It's unclear who exactly his father was, but most likely one of the white men whose family owned the plantation.
The war ended a year after Monroe was born.
Black people in Georgia were freed.
Slavery was now illegal, but many blacks lived in devastating poverty and still worked on white owned plantations well into the 20th century.
Monroe's mother got married and he took his new stepfather's last name, Marsh Monroe.
Marsh later had six children and one of his sons had a boy named Tommy Ray Marsh, born in 1926.
He usually went by Ray.
By the time Ray Marsh married Clara and they had children of their own, including Brent.