Ponder brothers

The Ponder brothers were four siblings who worked as interstate slave traders in the United States prior to the American Civil War, trafficking people between Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, and the Florida Territory. William G. Ponder was a Georgia state senator and delegate to the 1861 Georgia secession convention. The shops and house of Ephraim G. Ponder in Atlanta, Georgia, were heavily shelled during the Atlanta campaign of the American Civil War; a photograph of the damaged building was widely published as "the Potter House." James Ponder seems to have supervised industrial and agricultural enterprises in Thomas County, Georgia that used slave labor. John G. Ponder was murdered in 1849 while trafficking a group of slaves overland from Richmond, Virginia to Georgia.