Then Keen did something that would define the county's relationship with the Pardio family for the next half century. He wrote at the bottom of the deposition the following notation received and read: “No action to be taken at this time. The situation described, while irregular, falls outside the jurisdiction of this office, as the parties involved are not known to be in violation of any statute currently enforced in this county.” And that was it.
Greer's testimony about chained human beings in a clearing in the swamp was received, noted, and filed with no follow-up, no investigation, no dispatch of a constable or deputy, no letter to the sheriff's office, nothing. One researcher who later examined this document, a legal historian affiliated with the Mississippi Department of Archives, noted that Keen's jurisdictional claim was entirely fabricated. There was no legal basis for his refusal to act. The restraint of persons in chains, even in 1856 Mississippi, was governed by specific statutes that required either proof of ownership in the case of enslaved persons or evidence of lawful detention in the case of criminal suspects.
An unknown family chaining unidentified individuals to posts in an uncharted swamp did not fall into any recognized legal category. Keen's notation was not a legal opinion. It was an excuse. But why did Keen refused to act?
The answer to that question remained buried for nearly 50 years until Thomas Callaway, the railroad surveyor, pulled it into the light quite by accident. Let us return to Callaway because what he found when he entered the Pardio compound in September of 1905 was not merely an updated version of what Greer had described half a century earlier. The compound had not simply persisted. It had evolved and the evolution was in every meaningful sense a descent.
Between 1856 and 1905, the Pardio family had grown from the roughly 23 people Greer counted to what Callaway estimated after careful observation was between 60 and 70 individuals. The compound had expanded from nine structures to more than 20, spreading outward from the original clearing into the surrounding tree line. Some of the newer structures were built on stilts above the waterline. Others were half buried in the ground with earthen walls and roofs of woven palmetto.
One of the structures which Callaway described in meticulous detail was built entirely underground accessible only through a trapdoor covered with moss and leaf litter. But the physical growth of the compound was not what Callaway wrote about most extensively. What consumed the majority of his 46 pages was the social structure he observed: the system of control, hierarchy, and punishment that governed every aspect of life inside the Pardio world. Callaway arrived at the compound's perimeter on the afternoon of September the 14th.
Unlike Greer, he was not immediately noticed. The approach from the south, which the railroad survey route followed, led through a dense stand of tupelo gum that provided heavy cover almost to the edge of the clearing. Callaway heard the compound before he saw it. He heard hammering.
He heard the sound of a hand-grinding corn. He heard a child crying, followed by a sharp sound he later identified as a slap, followed by silence. He moved to the edge of the tree line and looked into the clearing. What he saw first was the main building.
It had been expanded from the original 40-foot structure Greer described into a long low hall that Callaway estimated at nearly 80 feet in length. The walls had been reinforced with additional layers of logs and the roof had been replaced with handsplit cypress shingles. The building had no windows. The single door that Greer had noted 50 years earlier had been replaced by a set of heavy doubled doors, and those doors were flanked on either side by what Callaway recognized with considerable alarm as gunports.
Narrow horizontal slits cut through the log walls just wide enough to accommodate the barrel of a rifle. This was not a home. It was a fortification. Around the main hall, the cabins and outbuildings spread in concentric rings, each ring slightly farther from the center and slightly smaller in construction.
Callaway noticed that the quality of the buildings decreased as the distance from the main hall increased. The innermost ring of cabins had solid walls, shingled roofs, and raised floors. The middle ring had crude construction with gaps in the walls filled with mud and moss. The outermost ring was barely shelter at all: lean-tos made of stacked branches, dugouts carved into the slope of the ridge, structures that an experienced outdoorsman like Callaway would have been reluctant to call habitable.
He understood immediately what this architecture meant. The distance from the main hall corresponded to status within the family. Those closest to the patriarch lived in relative comfort. Those farthest away lived in conditions that Callaway compared in his journal to the worst quarters I have seen on any plantation in my travels, and I have seen many.
Callaway spent the remainder of that first afternoon observing from the tree line. He noted the movements of the compound's inhabitants with the same precision he applied to his survey measurements. He recorded times, directions, activities, and the approximate ages, and physical conditions of every person he could see. His notes from that first afternoon include the following observations.
At approximately 5:00 in the evening, a bell was rung inside the main hall. The bell had a flat, dull tone, not the clear ring of a church bell, but the heavy clang of iron struck against iron. At the sound of this bell, every person in the compound stopped what they were doing and moved in what Callaway described as orderly procession without speaking toward the main hall. They filed through the double doors single file.
The last person to enter was a woman who appeared to be in her 60s, and she pulled the doors shut behind her. For the next 40 minutes, Callaway heard nothing from inside the main hall. No voices, no movement, nothing but the sounds of the swamp, the frogs, the insects, the occasional splash of something large moving through the water. Then the doors opened, and the people filed out again in the same order they had entered.
They returned to their respective buildings without speaking. Within 10 minutes, the clearing was empty. Callaway wrote in his journal that this scene reminded him of something, but he could not immediately identify what. Later that night, sitting in his camp a half mile from the compound, he realized what it was.
It reminded him of a prison yard. The way the inmates moved at the sound of the bell, the silence, the orderly compliance, the return to quarters. It was not the behavior of a family. It was the behavior of an institution.
And the institution it most closely resembled was a penitentiary. But this was no penitentiary. There were no guards in uniform. There were no walls or fences.
The bayou itself served as the barrier. And the warden was not an appointed official with a badge and a statute book. The warden was a single man, and every person in that compound answered to him with a deference that Callaway found, in his own word, terrifying. The man was Augustine Pardio, or rather the man who held the name Augustine Pardio because Callaway would soon discover that the patriarch he observed in 1905 could not possibly have been the same Augustine Pardioia who purchased salt and gunpowder and a trading post in 1841.
The dates did not allow it. The man Callaway observed was perhaps 55 or 60 years old. The man who signed the receipt in 1841 would have been well over 100. The name Callaway eventually realized was not a name at all.
It was a title, a position, and it was passed from one generation to the next through a process that the journal entries describe in terms that make the blood run cold. The following morning, September the 15th, Callaway made a decision that would determine the course of his life and the fate of the Pardio family secret. He decided not to skirt the compound and continue his survey. He decided to enter it.