Aventine Plantation on Second Creek in Adams County, Mississippi, was once part of Francis Surget’s vast cotton barony. It became the property of Major Gabriel B. Shields, Esquire, who married Surget’s daughter. Shields was the wealthiest of four sons of William Bayard Shields, a former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice. He resided at his mansion estate Montebello near Natchez, and Aventine furnished food and goods for him there, as well as shoes for Confederate soldiers. In recent years, historian Winthrop Jordan documented the now-famous slave conspiracy along Second Creek in Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (revised edition, 1995). Charles Sauters, a native of the Netherlands, worked as overseer on the plantation partway through the Civil War.