freedman

He is to give me one half of everything except peas.

Just eight months after Emancipation, freedman Riley Robbins entered into a sharecropping contract with white farmer David W. Weaver to tend a small (“one-horse”) farm north of Wilson.

Articles of agreement between D.W. Weaver and Riley Robins

I D.W. Weaver do promise to let the aforesaid Riley Robins have for the balance of this year enough of my land lying on the W&W R R five miles from Wilson to attend a one horse crop. With the understanding that he is to give me one half of the corn one half of the fodder one half of the cotton or whatever else may be raised except Peas. I also agree to furnish him with a house garden and potato patch

Witness W.L. Pearce    D.W. Weaver   This the 24th day of January 1866

I Riley Robins do promise to cultivate and attend the aforesaid crop to the best advantage and likewise to keep everything in good repair such as keeping the fence and ditches cleaned out &c

Witness W.L. Pearce  Riley (X) Robbins

Approved Geo. O. Glavis [illegible]

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The arrangement seems to have gone bad — note the “contract broke” scrawled at the top of the cover page — but I have found no further records.

U.S. Freedmen’s Bureau Records, 1865-1878 [database on-line], http://www.ancestry.com.

Grand marshal Suggs leads a thousand marchers.

This letter to the editor of the New Berne Daily Times highlights a Republican celebration in Wilson in September 1872. Reconstruction was in full swing with all its promise of interracial cooperation, and Grand Marshal Washington Suggs led a parade through the streets of downtown.

New Berne Daily Times, 20 September 1872.

The estate of Sampson Hinnant.

Sampson Hinnant was near 60 when sold to his last enslaver in 1861. A year after freedom, he and Mary Boykin formalized their marriage. They apparently did not have children, and Hinnant died in 1878, leaving a small estate. His was one of a relative handful of estates of formerly enslaved people that entered probate in Wilson County in the decades after freedom.

Hinnant’s estate file contains only the record of the widow’s allotment paid to Mary Hinnant for one year’s support. In addition to the harvested crops on hand — potatoes, peas, wheat, “greens” — she received all their furniture, working tools, fodder, four head of cattle, five hogs, and eight barrels (of what?).

The census taker apparently missed the Hinnant household when making his rounds in 1870. Their cohabitation registration and this estate file are the only known documentation of their lives in freedom.

Estate File of Sampson Hinnant, Wilson County; North Carolina Wills and Probate Records, 1665-1998, http://www.ancestry.com.

The notorious John Shallington.

John Shallington was hanged on 12 April 1878 in Greene County, North Carolina, for the murder of his step-daughter Serena (or Lorena) Thompson. According to news accounts, Shallington and Thompson had been in a relationship (consensual?) for two to three years, and he had shot her in a fit of jealousy. Shallington fled and was on the lam for several weeks, pursued by both black and white vigilantes before being arrested in Wilson County.

An “esteemed correspondent,” apparently enthralled with Shallington’s person and exploits, provided breathy details — his ownership during his enslavement in Wilson County; his reputation for violence, craftiness, and superhuman strength; his physical description; his impassiveness at trial. As later reported, Shallington was hanged in front of a crowd of 2000 people in Snow Hill after asking from the gallows to be baptized.

Goldsboro Messenger, 11 April 1878.

Holman reminisces.

Wilson Daily Times, 28 August 1937.

Among other things George H. Holman recalled about his early days in Wilson was disinterring Confederates from the old white Wilson cemetery for reburial in Maplewood.

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In the 1870 census of Bushy Fork township, Person County, N.C., George Holeman, 22, is a farm laborer in the household of white farmer Thomas H. Briggs, 56.

On 6 September 1892, George Holman, 24, son of West and Nancy Jane Holman, of Person County, N.C., married Bell Noell, 18, daughter of Chas. and Chis. Noell, of Person County, in Roxboro, North Carolina.

In the 19o0 census of Wilson, Wilson County: day laborer George Holdman, 46; wife Isibeller, 27, cooking; and sons Nathanial, 5, and Arther, 1.

In the 1910 census of Wilson, Wilson County: George Holden [sic], 57; wife Isabella, 35; and children Arthur, 11, and Thelma, 8.

In the 1920 census of Wilson, Wilson County: widow [sic] Belle Holeman, 40, private cook; son John, 21, oil mill laborer; and daughter-in-law Thelma, 2o,

In the 1928 Hill’s Wilson, N.C., city directory: Holmon Geo (c; Hattie) lab Watson Whse  h 601 Wiggins

In the 1928 Hill’s Wilson, N.C., city directory: Holmon Geo lab h 601 Wiggins

George Holman died 9 January 1940 at the State Hospital in Goldsboro, Wayne County, N.C. Per his death certificate, he was born in 1856; was a widower; lived in Wilson County; and had worked as a laborer. He was buried at the State Hospital.