The account current opens its first named payment entries on March 8, 1857. Two items, side by side: Negro Redick for coal — $2.40. Claiborne for horse collars — $3.25. Redick was appraised in the 1847 inventory at $800 — the highest individual value on that page. He has been in the estate for a decade, working the coal kiln through every season. March 8, 1857 is the first dated entry for him in the returns. He is paid $2.40.

Claiborne has been making horse collars since March 1852 — his first appearance in the returns. His rate then was $2.00. Now it is $3.25. Same skill, five years on, higher payment. The ledger records them both on the same day without remark and moves to the next entry.

Cornelius Bryan signs a single receipt for two payments: $290 for the hire of Claiborne, Charles, and Matilda for the year 1857, and $260 for overseeing the plantation the same year. Hire and overseeing paid together, to the same man, in the same transaction. Cornelius managed the plantation's operations and three of its people worked under his arrangement, and the ledger records both as parallel facts.

This is the first voucher in the file that names all three together with a dollar amount. Claiborne, Charles, and Matilda will appear again in the 1860 return in nearly identical language — the same three names, the same overseer, the same structure. Five years, same group, same arrangement.

Jno. S. Jobson, Ordinary of Houston County, receives $18.90 in court fees — the largest single court payment in the 1857 return. The breakdown: recording vouchers for the return of 1847, $2.27; the returns of 1848 and 1849, $4.53; the return of 1850, $4.25. Total back-filing: $11.05. Then the 1856 return itself: $7.85.

The returns of 1847 through 1850 had been kept as physical voucher bundles — receipts collected, accounts balanced — but not formally recorded with the court. The 89 documents in the Old Vouchers file are those years. Robert had been administering the estate correctly all along. When the formal distribution came in March 1856, regularizing the record became necessary. He caught up on nine years in a single July payment, and the Ordinary recorded it all.

C.H. Heywood's pharmacy account across 1857 — $37.44 — reads like the dispensary of a working physician. A speculum purchased April 23. Chloroform in June. Three syringes of different materials across the year. Dover's Powder for fever, colchicine for gout, iodide of potassium across multiple months, copaiba balsam and sarsaparilla, sulphur, senna and jalap, guaiac and columbo.

Two entries name patients. July 30: sarsaparilla purchased specifically noted as going to Stokes — medicine bought in Macon for a named patient, delivered separately. October 29: liniment delivered to Wimberly — almost certainly Ezekiel Wimberly, the blacksmith who appears in the 1853 return. Robert is treating neighbors and sending medicines. The estate pays for the instruments and supplies. The county uses the physician.

H.R. Nye, publisher, Star in the West, Cincinnati, Ohio: subscription from January 31, 1848 to January 31, 1858 — $20.00, settled in a single lump sum. Ten years of a Methodist newspaper from the city where Robert had studied medicine and been offered a faculty appointment, billed and paid at the end of the decade. He left Cincinnati in March 1847 to bury his father. The newspaper followed him home to the Sandbed Road and kept coming for ten years.

In the Russell Thompson & Co. account for June 1857, between ordinary household purchases: one Pattern Mourning Muslin, $3.50. Mourning muslin is black cloth produced and purchased specifically for bereavement dress. The estate records document no Bryan family death in June 1857. The person mourned — in or connected to the Bryan household that summer — is not named in any surviving document in this file. The muslin is the record.

John B. White supplies one road wagon and chains — $165.00, settled January 21, 1858. A road wagon is not a carriage. It is a heavy-framed work vehicle built for loads — timber, cotton bales, grain, the weight of a working plantation. The chains secure the loads. In September the estate also purchased a lighter buggy for $155 — Robert's vehicle for moving between patients and courthouse. Two vehicles in one fall season: one for the physician, one for the harvest. The 56 bales that left for market in January would have needed something to carry them.

Laura Bryan is ten years old. Her mother Catharine is declining. Her father has been dead for ten years. The estate places her with W.M. Whitehurst — Nancy's husband, the man who took the piano in 1856 — for eight months at $50. She is enrolled at L.S. Jenkins' school for the Second Book, Third Book, Fourth Book, Arithmetic, a Testament, copy books — $12.08 total. The estate also purchases calico, shoes, drilling, and a Geography textbook for her use. Among the household accounts at Russell Thompson & Co. that year: one china toy tea set — the first toy recorded in the estate returns. The youngest of the ten Bryan children, living with her sister's family, the estate paying her way.