I’m honored and excited to join a virtual roundtable presented by DEC-VA, Descendants of Enslaved Communities at the University of Virginia. Register here and pop in!
Signal Boost: DEC-VA’s Historic Black Cemeteries Roundtable.
Harris, again, makes highest corn yield.
Private Alonza G. Creech, in “the French battle area.”
Plantation House Series: James Reddick Barnes house.
The James Reddick Barnes house, built between 1850 and 1860, stands well back off the road in Saratoga township, southeast of Wilson. It is not registered with the National Register of Historic Places.
In the 1860 slave schedule, James R. Barnes reported enslaving 41 people and controlling another 32 as trustee for minors. (Though unnamed in the census, those minors included the Isaac Scarborough heirs.) In June 1856, two people he jointly owned with others, Cate and Sherard, were sold at auction at a toll house on White Oak Swamp. As high bidder, Barnes was able to buy them back.
In 1950 and 1960, the Wilson Daily Times ran articles on historic Wilson County houses, most of which had anchored plantations. The James R. Barnes house was featured twice.
Wilson Daily Times, 10 January 1950.
Ten years later, the house’s history had stretched a bit. Now the claim was that the house itself, rather than the land, had passed through seven generations from John Barnes. However, Barnes died in 1789 and his grandson Reddick Barnes in 1835, and great-grandson James Reddick Barnes actually built the house. (Also note the incorrect suffixes added to the names of the owners, i.e. III, IV, and VI. They are the result of the reporter’s incorrect interpretation of the owner’s generation of ownership, as spelled out in the 1950 Times article.)
Wilson Daily Times, 8 January 1960.
Signal Boost: ribbon-cutting ceremony for Smithfield’s Freedmen’s Schoolhouse.
Wake County mines historic data.
Launched in 2021, Wake County Register of Deeds Office’s Enslaved Persons Project culled the names of enslaved people from thousands of pages from Wake County deed books. As soon as that gargantuan task was completed in 2023, the Register of Deeds undertook a new project — cataloguing and mapping Wake County’s historic racially restrictive covenants. Using Optical Character Recognition to scan more than a half-million documents, the Register of Deeds Office, its partners, and volunteers identified 15,000 deeds whose terms shaped Raleigh in ways that persist to this day.
We’ve seen racially restrictive covenants in Wilson, where they were activated in the subdivisions that unfolded along West Nash Street in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Wilson did not rely on deed restrictions as heavily as Raleigh, but the impact of historic residential segregation patterns continues to resonate.
Wilson Colored High School awards its first diplomas.
“For the first time in the history of Wilson students of the colored high school will be awarded diplomas ….”
Wilson Daily Times, 23 May 1924.
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Lane Street Project: Ben Mincey’s cleanup work revisited.
Another gift from the Joneses: the aluminum offset printing plates for the 18 February 1989 edition of the Wilson Daily Times, which featured Ben Mincey‘s work to honor his parents at Odd Fellows Cemetery.
On closer look, I see that the photo below was taken in Vick Cemetery. Though the City later was struck by amnesia, the sign clearly states that the property was overseen (if not actually cared for) by “The City of Wilson Cemetery Commission.”
This photo was taken in Odd Fellows, but a very different-looking Odd Fellows than today. The two tall grave markers at center left are those of Della Hines Barnes and Dave Barnes. You’ll notice that, while today they stand in the open, they were then surrounded by trees. A car is visible inside the tree line, likely parked on one of the paths that were used to dump trash in the cemetery.
Below, Ben Mincey stands closer to what is now the Vick Cemetery parking lot (the Barnes markers behind him.) In the foreground, a large flanged metal pipe. In the back, Henry Tart‘s tilting monument.
Carolina Telephone & Telegraph comes to Elm City.
In September 1915, Carolina Telephone & Telegraph Company obtained utility easements from property owners in Toisnot township, including G.A. Gaston and J.R. Rosser.
Deed Book 106, page 41, Wilson County Register of Deeds Office.
Deed Book 106, page 42, Wilson County Register of Deeds Office.
Recommended reading, no. 25: Chowan Beach, Remembering an African American Resort.
Founded in 1926 on the eastern bank of the Chowan River, about 100 miles northeast of Wilson, Chowan Beach was a thriving African-American resort for decades, drawing family vacationers and legendary chitlin circuit musicians for decades. In this slim book packed with photographs, Frank Stephenson brings to life a favored vacation spot for generations of Wilsonians.
Wilson Daily Times, 26 July 1940.