Slavery

The sale of Huldah, Hilliard, Alex, Fortune, Clarkie, Amos, Hardy, Rose, and Peg.

We have seen the will of Moses Farmer Sr., executed in 1844, and documents from his estate file, which was opened after his death in 1848. These records include references by name to 35 enslaved people.

Perhaps sensing failing health, Farmer was making moves to divest himself of property even before he made out his will. On 2 February 1843, Farmer gave his son Larry D. Farmer 320 acres on Buck Branch and Toisnot Swamp, as well as nine enslaved people — Huldah, Hilliard, Alex, Fortune, Clarkie, Amos, Hardy, Rose, and Peg. The deed of sale does not list their ages or relationships.

Deed Book 23, page 268, Edgecombe County Register of Deeds Office, Tarboro, North Carolina.

Pine Tree.

This marker on N.C. Highway 42 has long mystified me.

PINE TREE. Original center of Gardners township. Established by John Gardner. December 22, 1848.

Hugh B. Johnston Jr. described Pine Tree as the “community around John Gardner’s store about 20 years before and after the Civil War. On the Tarboro Highway about 6 1/2 miles E. of Wilson and 1 1/2 miles W. of Wilbanks.” 

The records of Gardner’s 1857 estate, which was beset with claims and bad accounts receivable, do not note any enslaved property, but in the 1840 census of Edgecombe County, North Carolina, Gardner claimed one male aged 10-24, a female aged 10-24, and a female under age ten. In the 1850 slave schedule of Edgecombe County, John A. Gardner claimed ten enslaved people: women aged 50, 40, and 39; men aged 41, 23, 18, and 18; a boy aged 4; and girls aged 2 and 12. 

Beyond these men and women, Gardner and Pine Tree would have been well known to enslaved people throughout what is now northeastern Wilson County. 

Photo by Lisa Y. Henderson, September 2024.

Founding fathers.

North Carolina Standard (Raleigh, N.C.), 2 May 1855.

Wilson County’s earliest appointed officials included some of the largest slaveholders in the county:

Elias Barnes’ 1856 estate included 55 enslaved people.

  • Washington Barnes

In the 1860 slave schedule of Saratoga township, Wilson County, Washington Barnes claimed five enslaved people.

  • Macon Moye

In the 1850 slave schedule of North Side of the Neuse, Wayne County, Macon Moye is listed with eight enslaved people. Though he does not appear in the 1860 slave schedule, in the 1860 population schedule of Saratoga township, Wilson County, Moye claimed personal property valued at $95,000. This estate would have been comprised overwhelmingly of enslaved people — and many dozens of them. Moye was a younger brother of county founder, sheriff, and slave trader Wyatt Moye.

In his father Etheldred Sauls’ 1859, Lawrence J. Sauls was bequeathed two enslaved people, Patrick and Jane, as well as control of four other enslaved people on behalf his sister Elizabeth E. Sauls Becton. Lawrence Sauls is listed in the 1860 slave schedule of Davis district, Wayne County, with two enslaved teenagers.

In the 1860 slave schedule of Wilson township, Wilson County, Joshua Barnes (brother of Elias Barnes above) claimed 66 enslaved people.

  • Dr. Alexander G. Brooks

In the 1860 slave schedule of Black Creek township, Wilson County, Dr. A.G. Brooks reported 29 enslaved people.

  • Robert Bynum

The 1850 federal slave schedule of Edgecombe County lists Robert Bynum with 19 enslaved people. In 1858, Robert Bynum inherited three enslaved people from his father Turner Bynum. By 1860, as reported in the Wilson County slave schedule, he claimed 46 enslaved people.

  • J.D. Rountree

In the 1860 slave schedule of Town of Wilson, Wilson County, J.D. Rountree is listed with 12 enslaved people.

  • George Howard Jr.

In the 1850 slave schedule of Edgecombe County, George Howard is listed with 11 enslaved people. In the 1860 slave schedule of Town of Wilson, Wilson County, Howard claimed eight enslaved people.

He may be around Stantonsburg.

The North-Carolina Standard (Raleigh, N.C.), 22 November 1848.

Rufus W. Edmondson, who lived in what was then far southeastern Edgecombe County, near Stantonsburg, sold a man named Cager to William T. Hopkins, who appears to have lived in Wake County, North Carolina. In October 1848, Cager stole away — perhaps to return “home.”

$50 reward for Levi, last seen in Black Creek.

The North-Carolina Standard (Raleigh, N.C.), 16 October 1850.

The resourceful Levi stole two sets of free papers when he left James G. Edwards’ plantation in Greene County, North Carolina. Luke Hall and Ned Hall were members of an extended free family of color living just over the county line in northeast Wayne County. Levi’s first mistake was trying to board a train too close to home. One set of his papers was seized, but he apparently was able to avoid being taken into custody. His second mistake was to ask directions to Raleigh. Hoping he made it to freedom nonetheless.

The last will and testament of Martha Simms.

Born in 1772, Martha Dickinson Simms was the daughter of Shadrach and Keziah Simms Dickinson. At her death in about 1848, Simms lived in an area of Wayne County in or very close to present-day Wilson County. In May 1845, she executed a will that included these provisions:

  • to daughter Elizabeth Whitley, two negro men Cader and Will
  • to daughter Zillah Simms, negro woman Delanah and her children Simon, Charles, Dick and Sara
  • to grandson Willey Simms, Harry, Lucy, Hannah

——

Will of Martha Simms, Wayne County, North Carolina Wills and Probate Records, 1665-1998, http://www.ancestry.com.

Nathan Best of the Confederate Veterans Home.

An abstract of “‘Every Comfort, Freedom, and Liberty‘: A Case Study of Mississippi’s Confederate Home,” Susannah J. Ural, Journal of the Civil War Era, volume 9, number 1 (March 2019), tells us:

“This case study of Mississippi’s Confederate veteran home, popularly known as Beauvoir, challenges historians to see these southern facilities as more than relics of the Lost Cause. This state-run home had a diverse resident population that included women as early as 1904 and that also included three African-American residents. It provided well-trained physicians in the Beauvoir hospital, and a powerful and popular woman superintendent ran the home as early as 1926. This article analyzes the lives of the veterans, wives, and widows of Mississippi’s Confederate home as well as the state’s policies for them, revealing a facility connected to the Civil War, but grounded in New South efficiency, regulation, and reform.”

One of Beauvoir’s three African-Americans, all former Confederate body servants, was Nathan Best, born enslaved in Greene County, North Carolina, in 1845. Henry Best, then his son Robert, held Nathan Best in slavery and sent him to war to serve Robert’s younger brother Rufus Best. Nathan Best and his family moved to Wilson County before 1880, then migrated south to Georgia’s turpentine belt, then further south to Ocean Springs, Mississippi. In the early 1930s, as he neared 90, Nathan Best applied for admission to Beauvoir.

Nathan Best, at right, with Frank Childress, another former body servant, at Beauvoir. Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College Dixie Press Collection.

Nathan Best was interviewed by a Works Progress Administration fieldworker during his time at Beauvoir. His “slave narrative” does not explicitly mention his time in Wilson County, but does offer a wrenching account of his experience on the Best plantations near Snow Hill — an experience that would have been familiar twenty miles up the road.

1880 census of Black Creek township, Wilson County.

In the 1900 census of Worth County, Georgia, Nathan Best headed a household that included wife Hester and three grandchildren. The elder two were born in North Carolina in 1886 and 1888, and the youngest in Georgia in 1891. The Bests, then, migrated from North Carolina around 1890, when hundreds left the state’s depleted turpentine industry for Georgia’s piney woods. Presumably, Best’s children and grandchildren born in the decade between 1880 and 1890 were born in Wilson County.

Nathan Best was eventually released from the Confederate Home and died at his daughter Lina B. Jones’ home in Biloxi. (Was Angelina Best Jones born in Wilson County? Per her headstone in Biloxi City Cemetery, she was born 25 November 1882.)

Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.), 18 January 1940.

[Side note: Elnathan Tartt was Beauvoir’s superintendent most of the years between 1916 and 1945, which encompasses the time Best was there. Tartt’s unusual first name signals his descent from slaveholding Tartts who lived in the area between modern-day Wilson and Saratoga in eastern Wilson County.]

Bravo, Iredell County Public Library!

Kudos to the Statesville, N.C., chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. for recognizing (and partnering with) Shellie Taylor, Joel Reese, and Iredell County Public Library for their exemplary work with Statesville’s Green Street Cemetery project. Further congrats to the library on its invitation to speak at the North Carolina Humanities Luncheon about library projects funded by N.C. Humanities, including the ground-penetrating radar at Green Street Cemetery! (There’s an idea!)

No. 2723. George A. Gaston.

We met the “Twin Gastons” — barbers John A. and George A. Gaston — here.

George and Matilda Gaston and their twin sons arrived in Wilson County in the 1870s. The family had also lived in Kinston, North Carolina, and in New Bern, North Carolina, where George Gaston opened an account with the Freedmen’s Bank on 9 March 1872.

The senior Gaston reported that he was born and reared in New Bern; lived “back of the foundery”; had just turned 55 years old; was dark-skinned; worked for William Jones as a blacksmith and plasterer; was married to Matilda Gaston; and had sons George and John. His parents, John George Gaston and Comfort Pruzell, were dead, and he had one sister, Lucinda, who was married to Major Austin. (The Austins appear in the 1870 census of New Bern.) Gaston signed his card with an X.

Freedman’s Bank Records, 1865-1871 [database on-line], http://www.ancestry.com.