Seven bales to Scott Carhart & Co. through broker Hardeman & Hamilton — bales numbered J.A.B. 1 through 7, weights ranging 424 to 498 pounds, 10.25 cents per pound — $325.12. The cotton went to Macon. Robert signed for the receipt.

By the end of October, Ross & Co. had supplied bagging, rope, 21 pairs of shoes at 75 cents to a dollar each, and 12 blankets at $1.12½, along with homespun, calico, and iron. The estate received its winter provisioning for the plantation in the same week it sent its first bales to market.

Every bale the estate produced carried the brand J.A.B. — James A. Bryan. Even after his death, the cotton leaving the plantation bore his initials, pressed into the cotton before it left the gin house. Bales were numbered sequentially: #1–7 in October 1847, #56–64 in January 1848, #1–55 in the June 1848 sale.

Robert C. Bryan's personal cotton carried its own mark — R.C.B. — distinguishing what the administrator produced on his own account from what he produced for the estate. The dead man's initials moved down the Sandbed Road to Macon for years after his death.

The largest single cotton sale in the pre-war record: 55 bales to Scott Carhart & Co., brokered through John Jones & Son, 25,117 pounds at 5.5 cents per pound. After storage and commissions: $1,315.93 net.

Cotton was at 4.5 cents per pound in the fall of 1848. By October 1849 it had recovered past 10 cents. The estate that sold 55 bales at 5.5 cents in June 1848 watched the price nearly double by the following fall. The same gin, the same hands, the same road to Macon.

March 21–23, 1848: Thomas Gilbert delivers three days of structural lumber — 46 scantling, 100 weatherboards, planks of varying dimensions. December 18, 1849: Jacob Herring, who signs his receipt with his mark, is paid $133.98 for mechanics labor in building the gin house in the year 1849.

The lumber arrives in March 1848; the construction payment closes in December 1849. The gin house that Samuel Griswold would overhaul in 1853 — filing all fifty saw teeth and fitting a new shaft — was built across that eighteen-month gap.

Parr & Everett at Houston Manufacturing Co. receives from the estate: one ball of cotton, 472 pounds net at 6.75 cents, and two baskets, 80 pounds — $37.26 total. In return, the factory credits back: one bale of yarns, three bundles of yarn, and carding of 32 pounds of wool from November 1847. The net balance the estate owes: $3.46.

The plantation brought raw cotton and raw wool to the Houston Factory and received back spun yarn and carded fiber. The household's cloth was partly made from its own fields, processed a short distance away and returned in usable form.

The Bryan children were taught on the plantation by headmasters who came to instruct them together. Three teachers appear across the founding years: L.A. Hand in 1847 (five students, $76 total); Edward A. Harvey in 1849 (six students, $63.19¼ including books — Flint's Surveying, Webster's Spelling Book, Geography and Atlas, dictionaries); N.A. Hammer in 1850 (four students, $30.83).

Books purchased for Abner in December 1849 include Flint's Surveying and a Geography and Atlas — advanced texts suggesting he was the furthest along. James and Catharine received Webster's Spelling Books. Honora, approximately five or six years old, is enrolled for one quarter.

J.N. Hand's account, December 1847: visit to Servant (Woman) — $1.50. Manual examination — $5.00. Six months after James A. Bryan's death, an unnamed enslaved woman receives a medical examination costing the estate $6.50 — considerably more than Abner's tooth extraction that same year at 50 cents. Her name is not recorded. She is the single most significant undocumented person in the 1847 record.

Nancy boards in Macon at John Darby's school — later Monroe Female College, later Bessie Tift College. Her expenses in 1849 run through six separate vouchers: seven months board with John Pocke ($83), $19 store account, $35 for necessaries from Alfred Frost, $50 board from Alfred Frost, medical attention from E.A. Flewellen in June ($5), and three days of illness in October attended by Dr. P. Timberlake with a tooth extracted ($6). Robert also leaves $20 with a trusted intermediary for her use.

In October 1850, E. Lockwood charges $22 for dentistry — a substantial amount suggesting multiple procedures. Nancy's total documented expenditure for 1849 exceeds $200, more than any other sibling that year.

I.A. & S.S. Virgin, Macon: one rosewood piano with seat and cover, No. 37 — $260.00. The same month: a sofa from William Taylor ($50), a maple bedstead, and Jacob Herring's gin house payment of $133.98. The estate had $3,356.56 at interest that December.

The piano arrives in the same accounting period as the gin house closes out. The year's cotton income funded both the machinery and the music.

Wilson Smith's 1859 account: January 19, one pair of negro shoes, $1.50. September 23, 70 feet of plank to make a coffin, 75 cents. November 16, 30 pairs of negro shoes at $1.25 each, $37.50. The coffin appears between the shoe purchases as a single line. Seventy feet of plank is a full-sized coffin. No death in the Bryan family is documented for that date. The coffin is the only record of whoever was buried.

At their father's death, Troup and Hugh were living in LaGrange, Troup County. Geo. S. Eaton holds separate accounts for each: Troup's runs to gloves, cash loans, shoes, and rubber shoes ($16.65); Hugh's to shot, tobacco, cash loans, and blacking ($13.81). Both accounts are settled by Robert in November 1847. A third account covers Troup's travel expenses from LaGrange to Houston — $4.64 — suggesting he came home after the death. Troup is recorded as overseer in 1850 at $150.

L.D. Holmes marble: $149.40 — James A. Bryan's monument, nearly two years after his death. The same J.W. Holmes supplies cotton seed the following January for $40. The man and his monument and the seed for the next season's crop appear in consecutive years of the same ledger.