 Slavery was illegal, but peonage was not. They became sharecroppers, not landowners. And many of them died of dysentery and malaria, and the conditions were so horrible that their parish priest, Father Pietro Bandini, decided that we got to get out of here. He located some land in the foothills of the Ozarks near Springdale and named it Tawny Town. There had been a depression in the late 1800s,