They did not leave immediately. The years between 1865 and 1870 are not fully documented in the available sources. They had five children, a life in Hammersmith, connections in the British reform movement. Moving back to Georgia was not a simple logistical decision; it was a choice to return to a place where the slavery they had fled had existed within living memory, where the infrastructure of racial control would take new forms even after the legal institution was gone, where the people they had once been enslaved by still lived.
They returned to Georgia in 1870, settling in Bryan County near Savannah. The world they returned to was not the world they had fled. The Confederacy had been defeated. The Fourteenth Amendment had established Black citizenship. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited denial of voting rights on the basis of race. The moment of Reconstruction, for all its violence and fragility, was a moment of genuine political change. The Crafts arrived in that moment.
## Woodville: The School on the Farm
In 1873 — three years after their return — the Crafts acquired approximately 1,800 acres in Bryan County and established the Woodville Co-operative Farm School. The school was funded by northern abolitionists and publishers who had supported the Crafts during the England years. Its mission was to educate and employ newly freed Black Southerners: to give people who had been legally prohibited from literacy the same foundation that the Ivens daughters had given Ellen and William in a Quaker farmhouse in Pennsylvania twenty-five years earlier.