The Bulloch family lived in an abandoned Cherokee farmhouse while slaves and trained laborers built the house.

Soon Bulloch also owned land for cotton production and held enslaved African-Americans to work his fields.

According to the 1850 Slave Schedules [1], Martha Stewart Elliott Bulloch, by then widowed a second time, owned 31 enslaved African-Americans.

They mostly labored on cotton and crop production; but some would have worked in the home, on cooking and domestic tasks to support the family.

In 1835 while living in Hartford, Connecticut, James' wife gave birth to a daughter, also named Martha.

Though the date of their initial meeting is unclear, we do know that when Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. was 19, he came to Roswell, Georgia with his friend Hilborne West, who was to marry Mittie's oldest half sister, Susan Elliott.

Mittie's friend and bridesmaid, Mrs. William Baker, left a recollection of the wedding in an interview by Margaret "Peggy" Mitchell of Gone with the Wind fame, in the Atlanta Journal, June 10, 1923.

Later Elliott married Anna Rebecca Hall, and his daughter was First Lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Consequently, he waited a few years until the episode blew over and finally visited Bulloch Hall for the first time while touring the South in 1905.