Month: December 2022

A request for gasoline for a street lamp.

November 6, 1902

A regular meeting of the Board of Commissioners of the Town of Wilson was held in the Mayor’s office, November 6, 1902.

…

S.H. Vick came before the Board asking that the Town furnish the gasoline for the operation of a Street Lamp on the east end of Green Street. The Lamp to be furnished and cared for by the citizens in that section of Town.

On motion, consideration of the application was deferred until

On motion, the Superintendent of Electric Lights was directed to investigate the cost of putting an Arc Light in the neighborhood of S.H. Vick and others.

…

Minutes of City Council, Wilson, North Carolina, transcribed in bound volumes shelved at Wilson County Public Library, Wilson.

The estate of Benjamin Amason Jr.

It’s not a common surname in Wilson County anymore, but in the early 1800s a prosperous extended family of Amasons lived in the Stantonsburg area (in what was then Edgecombe County, North Carolina). They owned extensive real property and considerable slaves, and often left estates that spent years in probate as family members bickered, and heirs and administrators died.

This post is second in a series featuring documents from Amason (Amerson) family estate files.

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Benjamin Amason Jr. married a woman named Mary Ann in 1815. Amason was a widower with a young daughter, Nancy Matilda Amason. The marriage quickly failed, and Amason left Edgecombe [later, Wilson] County for Fairfield County, South Carolina. There, he fathered a son, Washington Amason, out of wedlock.

Amason died in South Carolina about 1823. A few years prior, he transferred to his children his interest in several enslaved people belonging to the estate of his father Benjamin Amason Sr. Mary Amason sued, claiming that the deed of gift had been made to defraud her of her dower right.

A set of referees agreed. Their 7 March 1829 decision named the enslaved people at issue as Cherry, Henry, Tamar, Pheby, Spencer, Jinny, and Polly, and ordered that they be sold.

The account of sale notes that Polly was Cherry’s daughter. They were sold out of the family to Ephraim Daniel, while Roderick Amason bought Henry and Tamar. Asa Amason bought Phebe; Josiah R. Horn bought Spencer; and Jinny went to Jonathan Ellis. In total, the sale raised $1325.00 for the estate.

When Roderick Amason died just months later, Henry and Tamar went on the block again. Two days before Christmas, they were “taken and resold by Josiah R. Horne” in what appear to be various trades in forgiveness of notes owed to Roderick Amason’s estate. Reddick Barnes came away with Henry; Tamar went to Blake Little.

Estate Files of Benjamin Amason Jr., North Carolina Wills and Estates, 1665-1998 [database on-line], http://www.ancestry.com.

Typical tenant farm house.

This early twentieth-century photo shows a typical tenant farm house with one or two rooms and a shed-roofed extension. Most African-American farmers in Wilson County were tenant farmers or sharecroppers and would have lived in a house similar to this one.

Photo courtesy of Stantonsburg Historical Society’s A History of Stantonsburg Circa 1780 to 1980 (1981).

Reid writes of “splendid progress” made on hospital and home for tuberculosis patients.

J.D. Reid, principal of the Colored Graded School, was also secretary/treasurer of Wilson Hospital and Tubercular Home (later known as Mercy Hospital) and its chief fundraiser. The institution was meant to encompass two sites — an intown hospital and a “tubercular home” on a farm just outside of Wilson. More about the latter in a future post.

Wilson Daily Times, 9 December 1913.

The greatest event of its kind among Afro-Americans.

Wilson Daily Times, 23 November 1913.

[The land was surely purchased from Dr. Frank S. Hargrave, not W.S., and I intend to figure out exactly where it was.]

[Update, 20 February 2023: actually, per deed, Samuel H. Vick sold the hospital the acreage for $5000 in November 1913. He had purchased it several years earlier.]

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African-Americans baptized at and dismissed from Lower Black Creek P.B. Church, part 5.

Lower Black Creek Primitive Baptist Church, founded in 1783, was the second church organized in what is now Wilson County. (It closed its doors in 2010.) The church’s nineteenth and early twentieth-century records includes names of enslaved and freed African-American members, who worshipped with the congregation as second-class Christians even after Emancipation.

This page continues the previous “Reception to Babtism” with entries from 1824 to 1831, as well as names of several members “dismissed by letter.” (Members leaving voluntarily requested letters of good Christian character from their home church to another church.) The page includes references to seven enslaved African-Americans. (Don’t let “servant” fool you.) As Primitive Baptists did not practice infant baptism, the seven were, if not adults, then nearly so, and thus were all born in the 1700s or very early 1800s. Some may have lived to see Emancipation, but even if they remained in Wilson County, I have no way to identify them further.

Baptisms:

  • Dick, a servant
  • Raiford, a servant
  • Lewis, a servant
  • Will, a servant of Johnathan Dickerson
  • Jane, a servant of A. Farmer

Dismissals by letter:

  • Kedar, a servant
  • Harry, a servant

Copy of documents courtesy of J. Robert Boykin III. Originals now housed at North Carolina State Archives.