Joseph Tooke & Son supplies 13,000 wood shingles at $2.50 per thousand — $32.50. The shingling itself covers 31 squares at $2.50 per square — $77.00. Thirty-one squares is 3,100 square feet of roof. This is not a repair. This is a full re-roofing. Planks, boards, and nails accompany the shingles. Total account: $120.24, settled January 1859.

The 1832 house had a wood shingle roof from its construction. The 1858 Tooke account is the documented moment of that roof being laid again after decades of wear. Every piece of shelter the house has provided since 1858 rests on this account. Tooke also picked up a bottle of quinine in the same order — two dollars and twenty-five cents, probably for a patient on the road between the mill and the Sandbed Road.

Henry Chancey takes down and rebuilds a chimney on the estate — $15.00. The main house chimneys are original to the 1832 construction. This chimney belongs to one of the outbuildings — a kitchen, a dependency, or a work structure on the property. The work is structural: taking down the old masonry, relaying the brick, reshaping the flue.

Alex M. Thigpen — who repaired the estate's 50-saw cotton gin for $6.25 in June 1855 — receives $95.44 for a complete fifty-saw gin. He is not repairing this time. He is selling. The old gin, overhauled by Samuel Griswold for $48.50 in 1853 and patched by Thigpen himself three years later, has reached the end of its useful life. A new 50-saw gin in April 1858. The largest crop in the record — 92 bales — follows in the fall.

John Campbell receives $45.45 for ditching Bear Pond — the first named water feature to appear in the returns. The pond sits in the valley below the Sandbed Road, fed by Bear Branch, the small creek that crosses Bear Branch Road and runs south. The creek carries its name forward to the present: Bear Branch Road follows the line of the old Buzzard Roost Road through the same valley. In July 1858, Campbell cuts drainage channels to maintain the pond. The ledger records it and moves on.

The account current, between the Bear Pond ditching in July and the school money handed to Honora in September: For Apprehending Slave — $10.00. This is the first and only such entry in the estate returns across thirteen years of records. Ten dollars is the standard fee in Georgia for returning a captured freedom-seeker. The person's name is not given. The circumstances are not stated. The ledger records the amount. The amount is the fee. The fee is paid. The ledger moves to the next item.

Cash for Boy Henry as per Bill of Sale — $1,170.00. The second-highest purchase price in the archive, behind only the $1,250 paid for Bob from Alabama in April 1855. The bill of sale is referenced but not transcribed. Henry does not appear elsewhere in the 1858 record. In January 1865, Thomas P. Bates is paid $8.00 for making shoes for Henry — possibly the same person, seven years later, still on the property. The $1,170 and the shoes: that is the full extent of what the documents record about him.

A.M. Crowder, Superintendent, receives 15 bales of J.A. Bryan cotton directly at the Houston Factory — $803.55 at 11 cents per pound. The same mill that cards the plantation's wool into yarn is also buying its cotton. The same superintendent who receives these 15 bales will serve as one of five commissioners in the 1866 estate distribution — certifying the final accounting of the same estate whose cotton he bought eight years before. The commercial relationship between the Bryan plantation and the Houston Factory runs in both directions and across the full span of the estate record.

C.H. Heywood's pharmacy account names three patients in a single entry: pills dispensed for Hill, for Killen, and a mixture for Stokes — who received sarsaparilla from the same pharmacy in 1857. Robert is buying medicine for named neighbors and either delivering it himself or having it sent. The instrument list continues to expand: a glass pessary in August for uterine prolapse, ergot in January as a uterine stimulant for labor management, blistering ointment in a custom 18-ounce preparation, tartar emetic ointment twice across the year. The estate pays for the instruments. Houston County uses the physician on Sandbed Road.