Second of two parts; read part 1

Not every slave master in Moses Grandy’s life was cruel. Some actively worked with Grandy to help him buy his freedom.

There was “Richard Furley, who … gave me a pass to work for myself.”

The agreement between Furley and Grandy was simple.

“I obtained work by the piece where I could, and paid him out of my earnings what we had agreed on; I maintained myself on the rest, and saved what I could…He paid seventy, eighty, or ninety dollars a year for me, and I paid him twenty or thirty dollars a year more than that.”

Sometime around 1813 or 1814 Grandy noted “the English blockaded the Chesapeake, which made it necessary to send merchandize from Norfolk to Elizabeth city by the Grand Canal, so that it might get to sea by Pamlico Sound and Ocracock Inlet…”

A skilled waterman by this time, he “took some canal boats on shares; Mr. Grice … was the owner of them.”

Most likely that is Mr. Charles Grice, described in a National Register of Historic Places survey of Elizabeth City as “the leading merchant in Elizabeth City’s early years.”

Grandy’s arrangement with Grice gives an indication of how valuable and trusted Grandy was. “I gave him one-half of all I received for freight: out of the other half, I had to victual and man the boats, and all over that expense was my own profit,” he described as the business arrangement.

It was during this time, when visiting “my brother Benjamin returned from the West Indies,” that how cruel and capricious life was for an enslaved person becomes clear.

Grandy was in one room and in another room “heard the heavy blows of a hammer…went to see what was going on. I looked into the store, and saw my brother lying on his back on the floor, and Mr. Williams, who had bought him, driving staples over his wrists and ankles; an iron bar was afterwards put across his breast, which was also held down by staples.”

His brother had done nothing wrong, he was told, “but that his master had failed, and he was sold towards paying the debts.”

Grandy Tries to Buy His Freedom

Although increasingly independent, Moses Grandy was still owned by James Grandy and at the suggestion of Grice, Moses asked how much would it cost to buy his freedom.

After considerable negotiation, $600 was the agreed price.

“I then went heartily to work, and whenever I paid him (James) for my time, I paid him something also towards my freedom, for which he gave me receipts,” Grandy recalled.

When $600 was reached, Moses went to his master and “he tore up all the receipts: I told him he ought not to have done so; he replied it did not signify, for as soon as court-day came, he should give me my free papers.”

Read the first part: Enslaved in Camden County, Moses Grandy knew its cruelty

When the court date came, James “was playing at billiards, and would not go with me.”

Concerned his chance for freedom would be lost, Moses went to the Grices and asked for help. Mrs. Grice sent for James who “cursed her, and went out of the house.”

Mr. Grice then met with James and he agreed to go to court and sign the papers. Instead “he rode away, and kept away till court was over” and sold Moses for $600 to a Mr. Trewitt.

It was the first of three attempts by Grandy to buy his freedom.

Trewitt, agreed to the same arrangement Grandy had had with Grice and that $600 would buy his freedom.

After two and a half years, Grandy had paid the full $600. Trewitt on Christmas Eve asked him, though, to take a letter to a Mr. Mews on Newbegun Creek, a small tributary to the Pasquotank River, in Weeksville.

When he delivered the letter, Mews read it “and looking up at me said, ‘Well, you belong to me.’”

Trewitt had used Grandy as security on a loan and failed in his payments.

“‘Mews’ was almost assuredly William T. Muse, a Pasquotank land speculator who owned slaves and more than twenty thousand acres of swamp forest. Muse, who had not really wanted Grandy, sold him back to Sawyer,” Cecelski wrote.

Initially his time with Sawyer went well. His second wife was owned by Sawyer, and Grandy’s maritime skills afforded him a better life and more freedom than most other enslaved people.

“I got into a fair way of buying myself again; for I undertook the lightering of the shingles or boards out of the Dismal Swamp …” Grandy said.

But Sawyer had gone into business with “his two sons-in-law at Norfolk, who failed; in consequence of which, he sold eighteen coloured people, his share of the Swamp (lightering), and two plantations.”

Grandy was again in the fields, but this time may have been the worst.

“The overseer was a bad one, his name was Brooks,” Grandy said.

Working in the field, if a worker did not put in sufficient effort, “One black man is kept on purpose to whip the others in the field; if he does not flog with sufficient severity, he is flogged himself: he whips severely, to keep the whip from his own back.”

Grandy witnessed Brooks kill “a girl named Mary” and “also killed a boy about twelve years old. He had no punishment, or even trial, for either.”

After years working as a waterman, the hard labor of field work was wearing him down and Grandy told Sawyer that he had “not been used to it for a long time; that his overseer was the worst that had ever been on the plantation, and that I could not stand it.”

Grandy pointed to how little food the field hands were given, Sawyer agreed to provide more food. The slaves working in the field “much rejoiced that I got this additional allowance for them. But I was not satisfied; I wanted liberty.”

A payment of $230 had already been made to Sawyer, and Grandy again began negotiations for his freedom.

Sawyer agreed to sell Grandy for the $600 he paid for him plus the $230 already given him. Grandy, “hired an old horse and started for Norfolk.” At Deep Creek he went to the house of “Captain Edward Minner … in former days I had done much business for him.”

Minner agreed to pay the $600 for Grandy’s freedom with the understanding that he would be repaid. At first Sawyer refused to sell his property, but Minner “shewed him the paper he had given me, saying, ‘Mr. Sawyer, is not this your handwriting?’”

Unlike everyone else who had purchased him, Minner was adamant that he would not own another human being.

“Mind, gentlemen, I do not want him for a slave; I want to buy him for freedom. He will repay me the money, and I shall not charge him a cent of interest for it. I would not have a coloured person to drag me down to hell, for all the money in the world,” Moses recalled Minner telling Sawyer.

By 1828, Grandy had repaid Minner and he had his “free papers, so that my freedom was quite secure, my feelings were greatly excited. I felt to myself so light, that I almost thought I could fly, and in my sleep I was always dreaming of flying over woods and rivers.”

He moved north, first to Providence, Rhode Island, then to Boston, Massachusetts. He traveled the world as sailor, telling of trips to “St. John’s in Porto Rico…(and) several other voyages, and particularly two to the Mediterranean. The last was to the East Indies.”

He had now saved enough to purchase the freedom of his wife. “I sent it to Virginia…She came to me at Boston. I dared not go myself to fetch her, lest I should be again deprived of my liberty, as often happens to free coloured people,” Grandy said.

He was also able to buy his son’s freedom as well and learned that at least two of his six daughters had purchased their freedom.

Grandy, now a free man, found life in the northern states troubling.

“Although I was free as to the law, I was made to feel severely the difference between persons of different colours. No black man was admitted to the same seats in churches with the whites, nor to the inside of public conveyances, nor into street coaches or cabs …” he said, adding however, “the abolitionists boldly stood up for us, and through them things are much changed for the better.”

Grandy was particularly harsh in his criticism of the American Colonization Society, the organization that was founded to send Black and enslaved people back to Africa.

“As to the settlement of Liberia on the coast of Africa, the free coloured people of America do not willingly go to it. America is their home: if their forefathers lived in Africa, they themselves know nothing of that country,” he indicated.

Enoch Sawyer was a vice president of the Camden County American Colonization Society the Raleigh Register, and North-Carolina State Gazette recorded in 1825.

Although illiterate Grandy was a keen observer of events and the personalities of the people he met along his journey. There were slave owners, as he noted, that did treat their human property well, at least by the standards of many slave owners.

But overall “The proprietors, though they live in luxury, generally die in debt: their negroes are so hardly treated, that no profit is made by their labour. Many of them are great gamblers. At the death of a proprietor, it commonly happens that his coloured people are sold towards paying his debts. So it must and will be with the masters, while slavery continues: when freedom is established, I believe they will begin to prosper greatly.”

The concept of freedom and its importance to the individual is an idea Grandy returns to a number of times throughout “Late a Slave in America.”

“Slavery,” he observed, “will teach any man to be glad when he gets freedom.”

First of two parts

A highway sign installed last September in Camden County calls attention to Moses Grandy, born there an enslaved person, and the story of his life told in “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy; Late a Slave in the United States of America.”

The book was published in London, England, in 1843. When the book was printed, he was, Grandy guessed, 56 years old, although as he notes in his book, “Slaves seldom know exactly how old they are: neither they nor their masters set down the time of a birth; the slaves, because they are not allowed to write or read; and the masters, because they only care to know what slaves belong to them.”

The book was published the following year in the United States.

There are no kindly “Old Black Joes,” elderly enslaved people treasured for their wisdom by caring masters in Moses Grandy’s autobiography. Rather, early in the book, there is a description of his mother, “blind and very old … living in a little hut, in the woods, after the usual manner of old worn-out slaves.”

Grandy observed late in his narrative that, “As far as the owner is concerned, they live or die as it happens; it is just the same thing as turning out an old horse.”

The book is filled with Simon Legree-like characters, capricious in their cruelty, and chilling descriptions of the horrors of the American institution of slavery. Legree is a harsh slaveowner in Harriet Beacher Stowe’s fictional, antislavery novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

Yet the book is more than that. Grandy’s eye for detail and his memory are remarkable. What emerges from the pages is an exceptional and complex description of the institution of slavery.

It is Grandy’s penchant for remembering names that may provide the most damning indictment of slavery.

The title page of the book carries the warning, “It is not improbable that some of the proper names in the following pages are incorrectly spelled. M. G., owing to the laws of the slave states, being perfectly illiterate, his pronunciation is the only guide.” Yet, if some names are muddled in pronunciation and untraceable, there is still plenty to go on.

He describes his first master, Billy Grandy, as “a hard-drinking man” who “sold away many slaves.”

The Camden County 1790 census lists 18 slaves in the William Grandy household, but its apparent there had been more.

“I remember four sisters and four brothers; my mother had more children, but they were dead or sold away before I can remember. I was the youngest,” Moses Grandy recalled. 

His master died when he was probably 9 and the Grandy will bequeathed Moses to James Grandy, the son of William Grandy. James and Moses were the same age and there was a stipulation in the will that Moses would be hired out until “my master and myself were twenty-one years old.”

When he was old enough “to be taken away from my mother and put to field-work, I was hired out for the year, by auction, at the Court House, every January; this is the common practice with respect to slaves belonging to persons who are under age.”

The first person to buy his services, a Mr. Kemp, “used me pretty well; he gave me plenty to eat and sufficient clothing,” he then went to Jemmy Coates, “a severe man”

“Because I could not learn his way of hilling corn, he flogged me naked with a severe whip made of a very tough sapling…The point of it at last entered my belly and broke off; leaving an inch and a-half outside…On looking down I saw it sticking, out of my body: I pulled it out and the blood spouted after it. The wound festered, and discharged very much at the time, and hurt me for years after,” he said.

“I was next with Mr. Enoch Sawyer of Camden county,” Grandy recalled.

A prominent North Carolina politician immediately after the Revolution, Sawyer was deeply involved in developing the Great Dismal Swamp Canal. If the gravestone the Elizabeth City Economist found in November, 1897 is to be believed, Sawyer was a good man.

“Sacred to the memory of Enoch Sawyer, who was born on the 10th of March, 1758. and departed this life on the 16th of March, 1827, age 68 and six days. He was universally beloved and respected, and a faithful servant of the Lord Jesus. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his Saints,” the Economist reported.

If Sawyer was a good man to his neighbors and peers, to Grandy, “It was cruel living.”

“We had not near enough of either victuals or clothes … I have often ground the husks of Indian corn over again in a hand-mill, for the chance of getting something to eat out of it,” Grandy reported. “In severe frosts, I was compelled to go into the fields and woods to work, with my naked feet cracked and bleeding from extreme cold.”

If the living was cruel in working for Sawyer, Grandy learned a skill that gave him a degree of freedom very few enslaved people enjoyed.

“The young Moses Grandy tended the ferry across the Narrows on the Pasquotank River,” historian David Cecelski wrote in his 1994 article “Moses Grandy: A Slave Waterman’s Life,” written for the Institute for Southern Studies.

The Black watermen were, Cecelski wrote, “an elite fraternity … both irreplaceable to the plantation economy, and subversive of the racial bondage that fueled it.”

That skill served Grandy well, raising his importance as a commodity, and the value that was placed on his skill as a waterman underscores how complex the institution of American slavery was.

After three years working for Sawyer his services were acquired by “Mr. George Furley (probably George Ferebee, early postmaster of South Mills) … he employed me as a car-boy in the Dismal swamp; I had to drive lumber, &. I had plenty to eat and plenty of clothes. I was so overjoyed… that I then thought I would not have left the place to go to heaven.”

Although no longer working under Sawyer, the “cruel living” touched him once again.

“I married a slave belonging to Mr. Enoch Sawyer,” he said. After eight months of marriage, he was returning home on a Friday, when he “heard a noise behind me, on the road which ran by the side of the canal … When they came up to me, one of them cried out, ‘Moses, my dear!’… It was my wife. She cried out to me, ‘I am gone.’

His wife had been sold.

He was able to walk with her for a short distance “and bid her farewell. I have never seen or heard of her from that day to this. I loved her as I loved my life.”

Next in the series: To purchase his freedom

Friends of Hammocks Beach and Bear Island plan to honor Saturday the North Carolina Teacher’s Association, the only organization for African American educators in the state, and a fundamental part of Hammocks Beach State Park history.

Set for 3 p.m. in the teacher’s building at 1572 Hammock Beach Road, Swansboro, the nonprofit friends group is recognizing “those who paved the way to help shape our coastline through the preservation of Bear Island and shaped the minds of many, through education,” organizers said.

The $40 donation covers entry to the event and a meal. Register online.

The land that is now Hammocks Beach State Park was purchased by Dr. William Sharpe, a white neurosurgeon, in the 1940s for hunting and fishing. Sharpe hired John Hurst, a Black country club guide, to manage the site.

Sharpe intended to leave the land to the Hurst family, but Mrs. Gertrude Hurst, who was a school teacher, suggested the property be donated to theNorth Carolina Teachers Association, to provide recreational opportunities for Black residents in a segregated state, according to the state park.

In the early 1950s, the park became a gathering space for Black residents. In 1961, the state park was created, becoming the first coastal park in North Carolina specifically for Black visitors. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the park was integrated.

“FHBI proudly honors the North Carolina Teacher’s Association and hopes that you will join us as we share a meal and celebrate the memories that helped to create a space unlike any other,” the group said.

Presented in cooperation with the Pea Island Cookhouse Museum on Roanoke Island.

Of the many documents associated with the Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island, a letter signed by Richard Etheridge and eight others, and with 58 other names shown, each marked with an “X”, is particularly important.

The undated letter, received on Dec. 25, 1867, is noted by the academic and author, Patricia Click in her scholarly book about the colony, “A Time Full of Trial.”

There will be two opportunities to visit the Pea Island Cookhouse Museum Feb. 28, from 10 a.m. – noon, or 1 p.m. – 3 p.m.  During each, at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., the latest version of our short video, “A Checkered Past: The Story of Keeper Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers” will be shown. This 15-minute video, based on two events held during Black History Month in 2023, was recently revised to include additional information about our organization.  It features Pea Island Preservation Society Inc. board members, youth volunteers, and descendants of the Pea Island lifesavers who were interviewed.

For our organization, Black History Month is a reflective time, and especially to think about the Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island and the U.S Life-Saving Service (and later, the early U.S. Coast Guard station) at Pea Island.  Both are important to fully understand the history of the Outer Banks.

Keeper Richard Etheridge, who grew up enslaved on Roanoke Island, is perhaps most known for his leadership and the legacy associated with the Pea Island station.  Following his death in May 1900, the station remained staffed primarily with Black surfman crews until it was deactivated in March 1947 and officially decommissioned two years later.

Etheridge’s association with two letters about the Freedmen’s Colony are not as well known.  The first is a letter he co-authored in 1865 with a fellow solider, William Benson, protesting the mistreatment of those left behind at the Freedmen’s Colony.  A framed typed version of it hangs at the Cookhouse. 

The second letter, a photo of one page included here, shows Etheridge’s signature and eight others.  This page is one of two signature pages that accompanied the undated letter.  The full letter includes the names of fifty-eight men with an “X’’ mark, a practice used to indicate a person was illiterate.

Often when the Freedmen’s Colony story is told what many focus on are the several missionary teachers who arrived from the North and the sawmill provided to build 500 small homes, each with a small portion of land to raise crops.   Also frequently mentioned are the churches and schools freedmen also helped to build to have their own places to worship and be educated. 

This undated letter reminds us of another important, yet unfortunately often overlooked part of the story – that in the end thousands who came to the Roanoke Island colony and other Freedmen’s Bureau locations established during the Civil War were ordered to leave – sometimes forcefully, and sometimes cruelly and even brutally.  

On Feb. 28, during the morning and afternoon, the Cookhouse Museum will be open to visitors. This year Cathy Steever a researcher and friend to our organization will join us. Cathy has been uncovering the remarkable story of the Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island for several years. She is especially drawn to the colony’s everyday realities — work, schooling, housing, faith resilience and hard choices families faced during and after the war. Lately, she and I have been collaborating on research findings, especially the stories that best reflect the challenges and difficulties those who lived on the Freedmen’s Colony faced, and lesser known stories.

The complete undated letter will be read and interpreted on Feb. 28. The noted letter portrays what life was like for the freedmen and their objections to being forced to leave. 

Those who had hoped to see the “First Light of Freedom” as the memorial at the Fort Raleigh site reads, pleads for a short extension of time to stay and for leniency “having been thrown out without shelter” as the noted letter received on Christmas Day in 1867 reveals.

Given the small size of the Cookhouse, those interested in visiting are requested to RSVP indicating if the morning or the afternoon session is preferred.  Those who have a special connection or interest in this history are especially encouraged to come.  Those who plan to visit are also requested to RSVP us at: friends@peaislandpreservationsociety.com. Given the small size of the Cookhouse, RSVP’s are requested soon so we can plan accordingly.

‘Cookhouse Chats’

As director of outreach and education, I am also pleased to announce this special opening on Feb. 28 is also the start of PIPSI’s latest initiative, “Cookhouse Chats”.  These selected chats will focus on less known or newly discovered stories as well as potential future collaborations with interested parties.  

The next planned chat, one about research findings pertaining to “checkerboard crews,” or mixed-race crews, will be announced in the spring. 

Presently, by email request the Cookhouse is “open by appointment only” preferably for group visits and special events.

The State Archives of North Carolina is offering a virtual lunch-and-learn program, “Bound by Law: Limits to Emancipation during the Revolution,” examining the impact of early North Carolina laws on enslaved people and the fight for freedom, starting at noon Wednesday.

The State Archives, a division of the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, is hosting the program to spotlight “Bound by Law,” a project that explores legislation that restricted the emancipation of enslaved individuals in early North Carolina.

The program is being held in recognition of Black History Month in February and the America 250 NC commemoration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

During the program, former America 250 NC intern Olivia Cody, a student at Winston-Salem State University, will preview a new America 250 NC digital exhibit focused on these laws and their historical significance.

Archives staff Adrienne Berney and Alana Gomez are to present Revolutionary-era stories of Ned Griffin and John Jasper White to “illustrate how these restrictive laws shaped individual lives and underscored the broader struggle for freedom in North Carolina,” organizers said.

Advance registration, which is required, can be done using the online form.

For more information, contact Berney at adrienne.berney@dncr.nc.gov or 919-814-6863.

Note: The Feb. 7 event described below has been rescheduled for Feb. 21 because of weather-related issues.

Those who know me best often hear me say I wear two hats. One is to help raise awareness of the story of Keeper Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers. The other is to raise awareness of my father and his family who have deep ties to Roanoke Island and a remarkable record military service.

I am thrilled to speak of both on Feb. 7 and to help celebrate a momentous occasion, the fifth anniversary of The Water’s Edge museum.

The accompanying mini-exhibit will be the first outside exhibit there.

An invitation to speak at this event is something I would have never imagined when I first visited Oxford, Maryland, on March 29, 2025. The Water’s Edge had opened just a few years earlier and was new to me. I had never heard of or seen it before.

My niece, a frequent visitor to the Eastern Shore and an avid reader, happened to come across an article about the museum during a stay nearby. During a trip I made to Maryland last year, she urged me to visit the Oxford museum with her and her mother, my sister. Little did I know then what would lie ahead. I still feel the joy I experienced walking in The Water’s Edge for the first time.

I was immediately reminded of the Pea Island Cookhouse Museum on Roanoke Island. Many know me for my connection to this museum. I have helped manage, operate and raise awareness of this museum’s history for several years. Simply known as “the Cookhouse” this museum is a small structure built in the 1930s at the Pea Island station where surfmen cooked and ate their meals.

This historic station was the only U.S. Life-Saving Service (USLSS) station in the country with an African American commander and an all-Black crew. My great-great-uncle served under Keeper Etheridge, as did my great-grandfather. My great-uncle, father and other relatives also served at the Pea Island station. The station was staffed primarily with Black commanders and surfmen crews from January 1880, when Etheridge took command, until March 1947, when my father, Herbert M. Collins, the last surfman left in charge, closed its doors for the last time.

The USLSS station at Pea Island is most known for the Oct.11, 1896, rescue of an all-white contingent on board the shipwrecked E.S. Newman during a fierce hurricane and in the middle of the night. Etheridge and his crew were posthumously awarded the prestigious U.S. Coast Guard Gold Lifesaving Medal for this daring and heroic act in March 1996, some 100 years later.

Another captivating fact is that before becoming a surfman and commanding the Pea Island station, Etheridge grew up enslaved. He had also served with the 36th Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War, enlisting with other men on Roanoke Island to join the fight for freedom. By the time the war ended he had earned the rank of sergeant.

As a visual learner, when I first entered The Water’s Edge I was immediately moved. The colorful images on the walls, particularly the portraits and scenes of daily life in Oxford made me think of my father, grandparents, great-grandparents. The scenes reminded me of my father growing up on Roanoke Island during a time when church, community gatherings, and services were so important to the small community in which he lived.

I imagined him as a young child sitting in the church with his parents, grandparents, cousins, and friends. I imagined a community gathering with food, music, dancing and well wishes as he and his twin brother left Roanoke Island together at just 17 years old, and at their father’s urging, to join the Coast Guard. I imagined the smiles and the sorrow, particularly my grandmother’s likely tears as she watched them leave knowing there was little opportunity for them to succeed if they stayed.

When I returned to my home on Roanoke Island, I quickly sent The Water’s Edge more information, including a video. I also invited members of their staff to come to Roanoke Island to learn more. That resulted in staff members visiting the Cookhouse and staying at my home this past summer.

My talk will include showing the short video, “A Checkered Past: The Story of Keeper Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers.” There will also be other images including three, 4-foot-square oil paintings associated with my father’s career, part of my family’s collection, on display for the first time. The artwork is part of an ongoing family creative effort to preserve my father’s life story, and in a creative way, a project we began after his death in March 2010.

I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity on Feb. 7 to wear my “two hats,” one to tell the story of the historic Pea Island station and the other, the story of my father and his family. As a kid, my father and superhero grew up longing to wear a surfman’s uniform.

The picture on the event flyer was commissioned by the late portrait artist John de la Vega. It is based on a photograph of my father shortly after he first reported to Pea Island and as he told me, before his uniform arrived. Thankfully that uniform did arrive, which I am sure put a big smile on his face. He often recalled growing up as a kid longing to wear a Coast Guard uniform one day.

In March 1947, he left Pea Island proudly wearing that uniform. He would serve for 34 years, the longest of anyone in his family.

Jacksonville will kick off Black History Month with an afternoon of inspiration and celebration at the African American Read-In.

Now in it’s 22nd year, the read-in celebrates culture, creativity, and the power of reading together.

The program is scheduled for 2-4 p.m. on Feb. 1 at the Jack Amyette Recreation Center, 825 South Drive, where after-school students will share poems, literature and artistic works created by African American authors.

Entertainment and light refreshments will be served following the ceremony.

The legacy of the all-Black World War II Women’s Army Corps unit, the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, will be highlighted during a New Hanover County Black History Month recognition program.

Retired U.S. Army Col. Edna Cummings will be the keynote speaker for the program taking place at 6 p.m. Thursday in Cape Fear Community College’s Union Station auditorium, 502 N. Front St., Wilmington.

Cummings, a native of Fayetteville, has been an advocate for honoring the legacy of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, also known as the Six Triple Eight.

Co-producer of the “SixTripleEight” documentary about the unit, Cummings was instrumental in the passing of the Six Triple Eight Congressional Gold Medal Act in 2022, awarding the battalion the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Cummings is co-producer of the “SixTripleEight” documentary, and there is a feature film produced and directed by Tyler Perry available on Netflix about the unit as well.

Because seating is limited advanced registration is required.

Event sponsors are New Hanover County Commission on African American History, Heritage & Culture, the New Hanover County Office of Diversity & Equity, the New Hanover County Public Library, the Cape Fear Museum, and New Hanover County Veterans Services.

For more information, call 910-798-7430 or visit Diversity.NHCgov.com.

The Pea Island Preservation Society Inc., or PIPSI, is working to gather more stories to add to its collection preserving the history of the nation’s first all-Black manned U.S. Lifesaving Service station.

The public is invited to attend the society’s special Black History Month program, “PIPSI Past, Present and Future” at College of the Albemarle – Dare at 3 p.m. Feb. 22.

During the one-hour program, participants will be among the first to preview three videos highlighting PIPSI’s efforts to share the story of Keeper Richard Etheridge, the first Black individual to command a U.S. Lifesaving Service station, and his all-Black crew, the Pea Island Lifesavers.

After the videos, participants will be asked to discuss content and provide feedback.

Descendants of the Pea Island lifesavers and others with a special connection or interest to the station may participate in short, on-camera interviews following the program.

The preservation society is particularly interested in gleaning the stories of those who served at the station or interacted with the crew in some special way.

Etheridge was selected as the station’s keeper on Jan. 24, 1880.

Etheridge’s life, including his enslaved upbringing, his service during the Civil War with U.S. Colored Troops, and his command of the Pea Island station, have largely been the focus of stories shared about the lifesaving station.

But PIPSI’s goal is bright to light new stories and include them with existing ones about the station and what life was like during the entire era the station operated, which spanned nearly 70 years until it closed in 1947.

Anyone who wished to attend is encouraged to arrive early as seating is limited.

PIPSI Board members will be in attendance to share information and answer questions.

The Swansboro Historical Association is recognizing the town’s African American heritage with a special program on the past, present and future of Hammocks Beach State Park and the surrounding area.

The event is scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Swansboro Area Heritage Center Assembly Room, 502 Church St.

Attendees will have the opportunity to hear how the park became important to the Swansboro community and how it evolved into a center for recreation, education, preservation, and conservation.

Area historian and author Patricia Hughey, Onslow County Museum Director Lisa Whitman-Grice, past Hammocks Beach State Park Superintendent Claude Crews and park ranger Renee Evans have been invited to speak during the program.

Hammocks Beach State Park is made up of its mainland, where there’s a visitor center, and three barrier islands, including the 4-mile-long Bear Island.

New York neurosurgeon, Dr. William Sharp, purchased 4,600 acres including Bear Island in 1914 for a hunting and fishing preserve after visiting the area, according to a N.C. State Parks report. The land was deeded in 1950 to the North Carolina Teachers Association, a nonprofit group of Black educators. After an unsuccessful attempt to develop the land, it was donated to the state in 1961. The land was a state park for Black citizens until it was opened to all people in 1963. Hammocks Beach State Park opened for all citizens following the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The U.S. Department of the Interior Designated Bear Island a National Natural Landmark in 1980.

The traveling exhibit, “We Built This: Profiles of Black Architects and Builders in North Carolina” will be on display March 6 through May 28 at the Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City.

Presented by Preservation North Carolina, the exhibit that spans more than three centuries highlights the stories of those who constructed and designed many of North Carolina’s historic sites.

The exhibit includes more than two dozen personal profiles and historic context on key topics including slavery and Reconstruction, the founding of historically Black colleges and universities and Black churches, Jim Crow and segregation, and the rise of Black politicians and professionals.

Featured among the profiles are the first Black architect licensed in the state, Gaston Alonzo Edwards; Stewart Ellison, an enslaved carpenter hired out in Raleigh; and William B. Gould, an enslaved plasterer in Wilmington.

Edwards, 1875-1943, worked at Shaw University, where he planned and superintended construction of key buildings such as the 1910 Leonard Medical School Hospital, now Tyler Hall, using students to help in the construction.

Ellison, 1834-1899, helped build the North Carolina Hospital for the Insane, now Dorothea Dix Hospital. He became one of the state’s longest-serving Black legislators of the 19th century, representing Wake County in five legislative sessions. He was also the first Black citizen to serve on what is now the Raleigh City Council.

Gould, 1837-1923, made his mark on the elaborate plasterwork at the Bellamy Mansion. His initials, WBG, were found on the back of decorative plaster pieces during the 1993 restoration of the mansion.

The Museum of the Albemarle is at 501 S. Water St., Elizabeth City. Visit the website at www.museumofthealbemarle.com.

It may be hard to overstate the influence, creativity and genius of Max Roach.

The famous coastal North Carolina native’s instrument was the drums, but calling him a drummer is roughly akin to comparing the Atlantic Ocean to a pond.

The subject of a PBS documentary that premiered in October 2023, Max Roach was born in 1924 in Newland Township, about 12 or 13 miles north of Elizabeth City. It might be a stretch, though, to claim Roach as a product of North Carolina. His family moved to New York when he was just 4.

If he didn’t grow up in North Carolina, it does appear as though he maintained his connection to the area.

“He wasn’t raised here. He wasn’t educated here. But he has cousins that are still here, and my understanding is that he would come back every once in a while, and they’d have a big family party out in Newland,” said Douglas Jackson, professor of music at Elizabeth City State University.

Jackson was keynote speaker at the centennial celebration of Roach’s birthday Jan. 10 at the Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City. Jackson, who plays trumpet, was aware of Roach, but as he went deeper into researching him, his appreciation grew.

“I started listening to more of his recordings and what people were writing and saying about … the influence on how he maintained tempo, his cymbal technique, where he’s he’s feathering the cymbal, and it’s so fast and it’s always so consistent,” Jackson said. “People were referring to him as a lyrical drummer. He used all of the different pieces of the drum set to complement the musicians, but he never got in the way.”

Roach died in 2007 at his home in Manhattan, but during his lifetime, he received a number of accolades. These include a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1988, Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 1989 and the International Percussive Art Society’s Hall of Fame and the DownBeat Hall of Fame. In 2009 he was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame.

Roach was a musical prodigy. In an interview recorded in 1984 at Howard University, he described growing up in Brooklyn and his earliest musical experiences.

“When I was about 8 years old, I joined the marching band in Concord Baptist Church,” he said. “My first instrument in that band was a bugle. And I had a problem with that and later switched to the marching drum.”

Roach had an aunt who taught him to play piano and read music, but his love was always the drums, and by the time he graduated from high school in 1942, he was already in demand when a drummer was needed in New York City.

At age 17 he sat in with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, perhaps one of the most accomplished jazz orchestras of its day. Ellington’s regular drummer, Sonny Greer, was sick and a substitute was needed.

But, as he told NPR’s Terry Gross, host of “Fresh Air,” in a 1987 interview, Greer played by ear and by watching what was happening around him.

“I couldn’t play by ear at that time. I was about 17,” Roach said. “So Mr. Ellington, before the curtain came up, he looked at me and saw the fright of fear in my face and said keep one eye on me and one eye on the acts on the stage. And I made it through.”

That night, in spite of the fear, was also a defining moment for Roach.

“I made up my mind I wanted to be in this area of music because Duke had (it) all, the theater and the drama and the pageantry was just surrounding him when he presented a show. And that’s when I really decided that was what I wanted to do,” he told Gross.

The big-band era was coming to an end, however. There were a number of factors that led to that, but a World War II tax in particular may have been the death knell as Roach recounted in his Howard University interview.

“The Second World War, we had an extra 20% cabaret taxes,” he explained, pointing to already existing federal, state and city taxes. “On top of that (a club owner) had to pay a 20% government tax called entertainment tax. If he had a singer, if he had public dancing or dancing on a stage or a comedian, this really heralded the demise of big bands during that time.”

What did not face the cabaret tax, however, were small improvisational groups. It was a time when some of the finest jazz musicians in the world were gravitating to New York, and Roach was in the middle of it.

“Right after high school, of course, I went into New York and started working with people like Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet) and (saxophonists) Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins,” he recalled in his Howard University interview.

The improvisational sound of the small groups had challenges, Roach told Terry Gross.

“When you played in a small band, more was required of you because there were less people. It was like playing in a string quartet is vis-a-vis symphony orchestras,” he said. “You heard more drums, you heard more piano, you heard more this then that and the other to fill it out.”

He was 18 and 19 when he first began playing with Gillespie and Hawkins and sometimes Parker. From those sessions a new form of jazz music emerged that continues to influence how jazz is performed.

“What we hear in clubs today is a manifestation that came out of the whole bebop period, when small bands took the place of big bands and people came into these smaller clubs, sat down and listened to instrumentalists perform,” he said in his Howard university interview.

One of the most distinctive features of bebop is how the cymbal is used to keep time instead of the kick drum — it was a technique the Roach pioneered. In his first recordings in the late 1940s and 50s, there is almost no bass drum at all, but in an article written for the Percussive Arts Society, Roach is quoted from an interview published in the 1998 book “The Drummer’s Time” in which he clarified why the bass drum wasn’t heard.

“We played the bass drum, but the engineers would cover it up because it would cause distortion due to the technology at the time. There were never any mics near our feet; they would have one mic above the drum set, and that was all,” he said.

Over his career Roach went far beyond the sounds of bebop.

“The creative mind is always turning and Max had a creative mind and he kept it turning,” Jackson said, and that creative mind led to some intriguing and compelling use of percussion instruments. His 1980 album, “M’Boom,” features only percussion instruments — no stringed instruments, brass or woodwinds. The sound is complex, haunting and at times surprisingly melodic.

Music does not exist in a vacuum, Roach commented in a number of interviews, and he specifically saw jazz as an expression of the Black experience in America, and that experience is very much a part of the fabric of life in this country.

“When I look around and listen to most anybody… they have been touched by, and I mean profoundly touched, by what came out of the Black community culturally. That’s what America is,” he told his Howard University interviewer. “It reflects the whole democratic aspect, improvisation. Collective improvisation is democratic.”

He was also a powerful advocate for civil rights and African American equality. In 1960 he released “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite” featuring his wife Abby Lincoln as vocalist and Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax, with lyrics by Oscar Brown. In 2022 the album was selected into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.

Writing about the album for the Library of Congress, writer Christa Gammage noted the album was not widely praised when it debuted.

“The album received mixed reviews; some critics claimed the album displayed a ‘bitter mood’ and felt it was ‘new-frontier club stuff and most likely a little too far out in uncut timber for most tastes,’” Gammage wrote.

Asked by Gross in the NPR interview if the album was a result of the growing Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Roach drew attention to the music Black artists had already been performing.

“I go back to Bessie Smith with “Black Mountain Blues” and then to Duke Ellington with his “Black, Brown And Beige.” It’s always been there,” he said.

He went on to tell Gross that the inspiration for his activism was what the future would hold for his children.

“You’re always thinking about … their future as well,” he said. “If they’re going to come up and be responsible human beings, they have to have education and the things like everyone else has. And the society has to accommodate that.”

This report includes outdated racial terms that may bother some readers.

Salmon Creek is a slow-moving, scenic tributary of the Chowan River in Bertie County. At the mouth of the creek on the south bank there is a golf course. On the north side, the Salmon Creek State Natural Area and adjacent Bertie County land that the county is using to develop its Tall Glass of Water park create 1,400 acres of protected forest and wetlands.

The peaceful setting gives little evidence of its rich history, a history that includes Native American villages at the site and extends to the earliest days of European explorers.

It is here at the mouth of Salmon Creek that the nonprofit First Colony Foundation places the Lost Colony Site X that was discovered in 2012 hidden on a 1585 John White map.

As the stream meanders to the heart of Bertie County, it seems far removed from the time when it was once one of the most prolific shad and herring fisheries in the nation – a fishery that David Cecelski describes in his 2001 book, “The Waterman’s Song Slavery and Freedom in Maritime South,” as “… by far the most prominent commercial fishery in the South prior to the Civil War. It was also the only major commercial fishery in North America that relied exclusively on slave and free black labor.”

Using mostly seine nets, the amount of fish landed and processed here was sizable. In a 2002 report placing Bertie County plantation Elmwood on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), the study’s authors wrote, “The heyday of fishing in the Albemarle Sound and its tributaries was during the antebellum period … During the 1840s and 1850s it was not unusual for large soundside fisheries to experience a single seine haul containing in excess of 100,000 fish, all of which were cleaned and packed for shipping by the time the next seine haul was landed five or six hours later.”

Little had changed 45 or 50 years later, other than the use of steam winches to haul the net in, when The Semi-Weekly Fisherman & Farmer described the harvest in its October 21, 1887, edition.

“The large seines nets in the Albemarle Sound and Chowan River are from 2000 to 2400 yards long …They are laid out in the water and hauled in, about five times in every twenty-four hours, and sweep a square mile or more of water. It catches everything that it encircles. Steam is employed by most of them both in the laying of them out in the water, and on shore for hauling them in,” the newspaper reported.

The spawning run for the herring and shad was brief — perhaps 10 weeks — but the labor needs were extraordinary. In “A Cultural History of River Herring and Shad Fisheries in Eastern North Carolina,” a 1997 East Carolina University master’s thesis, Charles Heath describes the Fisherman’s Courts where workers were recruited.

“During the antebellum period, the Fisherman’s Court was established in several counties surrounding the Albemarle Sound. The court was held the third Monday in February and served as a clearing house for fisheries labor,” he wrote. “Fishery operators came to the court to hire slaves, as well as free whites and blacks. Potential laborers, free blacks and whites, were said to have come to the court from as far inland as fifty miles or more for the opportunity to work at the fisheries. In May, the court was held again and the fishery owners settled debts and paid the free laborers and the owners of the slaves for their work.”

It was brutal work. The hours, according to eyewitnesses, were around the clock.

Sally Moore Koestler has created a website, “Sally’s Family Place,” where she records “Tales of NC Roanoke-Chowan and elsewhere.” On her page recounting seine fishing, she has included a letter written to Lucy Daniels by her grandmother, Ella Harrell Evans. Koestler places the date of the letter around 1965 and in an email wrote that she believes it is possible to “… place the grandmother’s notes about 1900.”

The details in the letter paint an extraordinary picture of who the workers were and what the work was like.

“Years ago at Capehart’s fishery which was owned by Mr. William Capehart, he runned (sic) a public fishery and had forty-five or fifty negroes that helped him,” Evans writes.

She goes on to detail the working conditions, writing to her granddaughter, “The men would start to work about three o’clock in the morning and work in the rain, snow, ice and sleet and sometimes their clothes would be frozen. They wore oil suits, hats and long hip boots. The men would work until 12 o’clock every night and go back at three in the morning.”

Her recollection of the size of the catch confirms how large the haul was.

“The negroes would line up on each end of the seine and pull the seine in, it would take around five hours, depending on the amount of fish in the seine … They would have to stake it out because there would be so many fish in the seine, around two hundred fifty thousands. They would have to get it close end to dip part of the fish out so they could pull the seine in. Most days they could make four hauls a day with about about fifty or seventy five thousands,” Evans writes.

Other accounts note even larger harvests. The Elmwood National Register of Historic Places study authors describe what the fishing was like at its peak.

“Although the notably large hauls at Avoca (the south bank of Salmon Creek) comprised of approximately 300,000 river herring and 6,000 shad, such operations were recorded as having caught as many as 400,000- 500,000 river herring in a single haul of the seine. Observers noted that from 1878 to 1883 the total catch at one Chowan River fishery was over fifteen million river herring,” the study notes.

The Evans letter and other accounts written by eyewitnesses are richly detailed, but in his master’s candidacy prospectus, East Carolina University student Levi Holton notes all the eyewitness accounts of the Salmon Creek fishery are missing an important point of view.

“The initial gathering of primary source materials indicates that the record of experiences, points of view, and stories of African Americans have been written almost exclusively by white Americans. This is a limitation to the accurate interpretation of historical records concerning African Americans and what has been written may suffer from the constraints of bias and potential prejudice,” he writes.

Holton’s prospectus includes a reexamination of records, most of which have not been digitized. Additionally he is proposing deep mapping of Salmon Creek, a relatively new geographic information system-based archaeological tool that creates a 3-D historic overview of the research site.

River herring continued to be commercially harvested well into the 20th century, but today there are no nets strung across Salmon Creek catching the fish on their spawning run.

The massive harvests of the fish were likely a factor in the river stock’s decline, but it was not the only cause.

In a 2017 fishery management plan for river herring, North Carolina Marine Fisheries noted, “considerable habitat area has been lost through wetland drainage, stream channelization and conversion to other uses.” The plan continues that oxygen-consuming wastes are discharged into several streams, “causing nuisance algal blooms, fish kills, and fish diseases over the years.”

JARVISBURG — Lewis Wescott was a Black man who was born in North Carolina just before the Civil War and died just before World War II. Little has been known about his life except that he was a surfman, a Coast Guard captain and a hero who participated in one of the most daring ocean rescues in Outer Banks history.

But thanks to the serendipitous discovery of his gravesite by a retired Coast Guard commander, we now know that Wescott, a member of the famed all-Black crew at Pea Island Life-Saving Station, lived two weeks short of 83 years, and he is buried next to his wife in Jarvisburg, a community on the Currituck County mainland.

“I didn’t really need to do much research,” Gavin Wente, the property owner, recently told Coastal Review. “I spent almost 30 years in the Coast Guard, so I was familiar with the lifesaving service on the Outer Banks, specifically the story behind Pea Island … and I was familiar with some of the names like Etheridge and Wescott.”

Richard Etheridge, the first Black appointed keeper in the U.S. Life-Saving Service, led his six all-Black crewmen — including Wescott — into a seething, stormy sea at night during an October 1896 hurricane to rescue terrified passengers and crew on the wrecked schooner E.S. Newman. With just a rope tying two surfmen together, the crew took turns plunging 10 times into the water, eventually rescuing every single person.

With the end of Reconstruction the next year, followed by decades of Jim Crow, the amazing feat — and the heroism of the Pea Island crew — soon faded from history.

When Wente and his wife Renee moved in April 2022 to their new home on 31 acres along the Currituck Sound, they were aware of two fenced-in cemeteries on the land.  But it wasn’t until around Thanksgiving, when the overgrowth of poison ivy and Virginia creeper had died off, that the couple and their children and grandchildren were able to investigate.

“We’re out there starting to clean off some of the gravestones, and they started in the back corner where Wescott’s grave was,” Gavin Wente said. “And there must have been a foot of pine straw and overgrowth on top of that crypt.”

But before long, Wente recalled, his daughter announced that she had found a gravestone engraved with the words “Capt. L.S. Wescott.” After looking at the grave, he went online, checked the records, and was thrilled to confirm what he suspected.

“Yeah it was him,” Wente said. “So, we think that was one of the signs that this is where we were supposed to be.”

Not only did the couple find it significant that Wente knew who Wescott was, his grave was also the first one the family cleared.

“We don’t know why they went back to that righthand corner and started there,” said Renee Wente. “They said they just felt something under their feet and there it was.”

The Wentes said that the county shows no record of Wescott being buried on their property, and she is not aware of any record of his life in Currituck.

Wescott’s grave, a large crypt with engravings on top of it, is within the larger cemetery at the rear of the property, which appears to contain about 15 to 20 graves, Gavin Wente said. Near Wescott’s grave are two gravestones, one marked William Wescott and the other, Henry Wescott.

There are also small gravestones with initials, ending in “W.”

Another small cemetery with about 10 graves is at the front of the property.

After Wente, 61 and a former Coast Guard commander, discovered Wescott’s burial site, he contacted Coast Guard Atlantic area historian Bill Thiesen about finding the grave.

“I think it’s extremely significant,” Thiesen told Coastal Review. “I would have assumed that all of the final resting places for the Pea Island lifesavers would have been known, if not recognized. And then I learned that actually, Wescott’s was kind of lost and forgotten.”

In general, he said, Coast Guard personnel burial sites don’t get the attention that those in other military branches do, partly because it was not an official military organization until 1915, when it also absorbed the lifesaving service. Also, the lifesaving service had been regarded as more of a federal humanitarian service.

All other members of the Pea Island crew have some sort of marker or monument, except for William Irving, who may be interred in a family cemetery that has been forgotten, which was likely the case with Wescott.

Thiesen said that records prior to 1915 are slim, especially for Black individuals and other minorities. Even the “tremendous and remarkable achievement” of the Pea Island crew in the E.S. Newman rescue was not honored, or even noted by the Coast Guard for 100 years, when members were posthumously awarded the Gold Lifesaving metal in 1996.

Before the Civil War, some of the Black members of the U.S. Lifesaving Service were enslaved, but there were also free men who served, Thiesen said.

“The military agencies were officially desegregated by Truman in 1948, but the Coast Guard had already integrated African Americans into the service during World War II,” Thiesen said.

Even earlier, some Black men served under the same rating system as white men, including at Pea Island. “Not very frequently,” he added,” but far earlier than other military organizations.”

Starting in 1880, Richard Etheridge was the first African American to command a base of operations in the U.S., as keeper of the Pea Island Life-Saving Station on Hatteras Island. After Etheridge’s death, Wescott was appointed keeper in September 1900 and served until 1916.

Significantly, he was the officer in charge of Pea Island when the U.S. Life Saving Service merged with the Revenue Cutter Service to form the modern-day Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard also had Black officers in charge of cutters — Coast Guard vessels longer than 65 feet —  one in 1928, Thiesen said, and there was also an all-Black cutter crew in 1920.

“And then the Coast Guard really was the trailblazer for desegregation, starting in 1942, when some Coast Guard cutters were used as kind of experiments for desegregation to see how it worked out before they introduced it to the Navy.”

Thiesen said that the Coast Guard plans to acknowledge the Wescott burial site with photographs and writings, but otherwise it is limited from doing anything more formal, especially on private property.

“The Coast Guard doesn’t have the funding to recognize all of the Coasties that have been interred over the years,” he said.

But the Wentes’ plan to try to get assistance in clearing and cleaning the cemeteries, and continue to investigate Wescott’s history, as well as the other graves.

“When we look at it, I just can’t help but think to myself ‘My word! This graveyard has been here when our nation was in its infancy,’” Renee Wente said. “It’s just remarkable.”

Wente added that the family feels so honored to have the burial site on their property and wants to make sure that the Pea Island hero gets the recognition he deserves.

Although the nonprofit Pea Island Preservation Society has not been directly involved in anything to do with the Wescott burial site, the group is pleased about the increased attention on the Pea Island story.

“I think this discovery is a great reminder to do the research of this ‘uncovered history,’” said Joan Collins, the group’s director of outreach and education. “Because this history hasn’t been told.”

Gavin Wente still can’t get over that such a historically important Coast Guardsman has his resting place on his land.

“It’s sad that Capt. Wescott’s legacy was lost from years of neglect in this grave yard,” Gavin Wente wrote on a Facebook post. “It will be this old, retired Coast Guardsman’s privilege to ensure this is corrected and I will maintain this grave yard as long as I’m able.”

A full day of programming is set for Sunday at the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher in celebration of Black History Month.

The first of the aquarium’s Community Day Series, organizers said that the debut event welcomes visitors to explore the cuisine of the Gullah Geechee, find inspiration in the spoken word, and dive into a life-saving history.

The celebration will begin with a screening of the documentary “Rescue Men: The Story of the Pea Island Life Savers” at 9:45 a.m. and again at 3 p.m. The film looks at the story of former slave and Civil War veteran Richard Ethridge and his team of surfmen.

At 11 a.m. there will be a performance by University of North Carolina Wilmington Rhyme N’ Reason Spoken Word.

Then at 1 p.m., talk rice and Gullah Geechee cuisine with Chef Keith Rhodes of Catch Modern Seafood in Wilmington. The Gullah Geechee people are descendants of Africans who were enslaved on plantations in coastal areas of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

“At the Aquarium, celebrating the rich diversity that strengthens our communities underscores our commitment to an inclusive and accessible experience. From there, the Community Day Series evolved. It is exciting and enlightening for our team to highlight the rich histories that people of various heritages offer and the ways they have influenced our community,” said Shannon Armstrong, special events assistant at the Fort Fisher aquarium.

Scheduled events are included with standard admission. Advanced tickets are required, and visitors can plan their visit at N.C. Aquarium at Fort Fisher tickets. To become a member, visit NC Aquarium Society. 

A special showing of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” is scheduled for 6 p.m. Friday in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences at Whiteville.

Hosted by North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, doors open at 5:30 p.m. for the free showing and following discussion held in recognition of Black History Month.

The film is rated TV-MA and intended for mature audiences only. Free snacks and drinks will be provided.

This HBO-original film released in 2017 depicts the discovery by Henrietta’s daughter, played by Oprah Winfrey, that her mother’s cancer cells had been used without her permission for medical research and explores the broader implications of this breach of medical ethics.

In 1951, a young mother of five named Henrietta Lacks was treated for cancer at Johns Hopkins, one of the few hospitals at the time that would treat Black people. “Her cancer cells were discovered to be unique: where other cells would die, Lacks’ cells doubled daily and indefinitely. Although Lacks ultimately passed away later that year, these “HeLa” cells have been and continue to be used in experiments from determining the long-term effects of radiation to developing the COVID-19 vaccine,” according to information from the museum. “However, Lacks and her family didn’t know the cell cultures existed until more than 20 years after her death. And these cells were commercialized and have generated millions of dollars in profit over the past 70 years for the medical researchers who patented her tissue.”

After the film, there will be a discussion of medical ethics and racism led by Ms. Black North Carolina 2023, Tatyana Frink-Faulk. She is also a Chadbourn native and current medical student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, at 415 South Madison St., Whiteville, is a free science museum with interactive exhibits, outdoor learning and play areas, and collections featuring the nature of Southeastern North Carolina.

Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. The museum provides group tours and classes, public events and programs, and rental space. Contact the Museum at 910-788-5100 for more information.

The Elizabeth City State University Choir recently lifted their voices in song during a performance honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in the First Flight High School auditorium in Kill Devil Hills.

The trip to Kill Devil Hills Jan. 14 was not a long one, an hour at the most, but it was in keeping with the choir’s long tradition of traveling to perform for as many eager audiences as possible.

It is a tradition that dates to the choir’s founding in 1933 by Dr. Evelyn Adelaide Johnson. In her book, “History of Elizabeth City State University: A Story of Survival,” published in 1980, she wrote about the choir’s custom of traveling to perform.

“There are few churches in the area, black and white, in which the choir has not appeared … The choir has sung for local clubs, societies, fraternal organizations, banks, the navy, general assembly celebrations, and for other groups in other states,” she wrote.

More recently, Dr. Walter Swan, director of choral activities for ECSU, described an upcoming spring tour.

“We do take annual tours since we’re now back from COVID and we’re able to travel,” he said. “This year’s tour will take us as far south as South Carolina, potentially Georgia and will take us up to D.C.”

It may seem remarkable that through wars, the Great Depression and civil rights turmoil, a choir from a relatively small, historically Black university in a small city in northeastern North Carolina would be able to continue to tour and perform.

Perhaps more remarkably, though, in the 90 years since Dr. Johnson came to the school, there have only been three choral directors.

When Johnson arrived on campus in 1933, ECSU was still a State Normal School with a two-year course of instruction. It would not become Elizabeth City State Teachers College until 1939 when it was able to award its first baccalaureate degrees in elementary education.

“Many students who entered the school between 1934 and 1939 were almost poverty stricken,” Dr. Johnson wrote. “They entered sometimes with less than five dollars, brought their few belongings in a burlap bag or some other nondescript luggage.”

Teachers, she mentioned, were on half-salary.

“It took ten years to recover salaries in vogue during the 20s, before the depression,” she noted.

In her book, she lists the regular events that she scheduled for her choir, community Christmas carols at the homes of respected Black and white citizens, a choir scholarship fund and annual choir tours during the school year.

She retired in 1975, and Clarence Lewis, who sang in the choir for two years in the early 1970s, recalled clearly what it was like.

“It was an experience. And if you didn’t know how to read music, you couldn’t be in a choir,” he said.

At the time Lewis was fresh out of the military and spent two years at ECSU. Then, in his words, “I … made the decision that I wasn’t ready for college. I went back into the military,” where he spent 21 years, retiring as a master sergeant.

The two years he was at ECSU included giving performances across the country and internationally.

“We sang in quite a few places in the United States. Major cities like New York and Delaware and places like that. Okay, so we also toured overseas in Belgium,” he said.

ECSU is a tradition in many families and Lewis’ daughter Michelle sang in the choir when she went to college. Billy Hines was her choral director and like Dr. Lewis, he demanded his choir know their music.

“If you loved to sing, and you had some ability, professor Hines was willing to work with you. But you had to put in the same time that everybody else did,” she said.

Everyone was expected to know their part, she added.

“If someone was singing off-pitch in a section, if he couldn’t tell who it was right away, everybody had to stand up and sing the part a capella, one by one,” she said. “There was this one time where I didn’t know the part. It was me and I knew it was me … I kind of hoped I’d figure it out before he got down the line to me … it was my turn … and I couldn’t sing it.”

Not being able to sing the part seems to have left an indelible memory.

“I can still sing it to this day,” she said.

Attention to detail and knowing how to perform to the highest standards are things that ECSU graduate Tshombe Selby, who is now performing with the Metropolitan Opera of New York, remembered.

“I would not be where I am without Mr. Hines and the ECSU choir … Mr Hines’ attention to the music and acceptance of nothing less than your best are the teachings that are my foundation in classical music and my performance career. He was more than an instructor, he was Mr. Hines,” Selby wrote when asked about Hines.

Swan has been the choral director since Hines retired in 2009 after 34 years. He was already teaching vocal performance at ECSU when, as he describes it, “I was ushered in.”

Other traditions that were established in 1933 continue. The choir is made up of music lovers, but they do not have to be music majors.

“We do have good musicians, but because we’re not solely music majors, we are taking people who are music lovers who come from other choral programs from high school,” Swan said.

Like Johnson and Hines before him, he sees his role as more than an instructor of music, and is especially aware of the importance of ECSU as an historically Black college and university.

“I think (there is) pride that comes with HBCUs, especially being a product or coming through that rake of being a graduate of Alcorn State University. I understood the importance of this particular lay of the land from Mississippi. Also being educators and knowing that there is a greater purpose beyond self,” he said.

Yet if he is aware of the traditions that have been created over 90 years, he sees that as a path forward for the school and choir, and not something that will slow the path to the future.

“I don’t have large shoes to fill, I have to only walk in my own, create my own footprint,” he said. “You don’t ever leave something like you found it. Always try to leave it better. I think that’s what Evelyn did, and that was trying to create something better. What Billy did was to capitalize on Evelyn and (what I’m) doing is to capitalize on Billy.”

Tryon Palace is recognizing Black History Month with the one-woman play, “Colored Silk: A Mother’s Civil War Odyssey.”

The play is based on the life of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Hobbs Keckley, born 1818 and died 1907. She was born into slavery but, after buying her family’s freedom, worked her way to becoming the exclusive seamstress to Mary Todd Lincoln.

The play, which is being offered at no charge to the public, will begin at 7 p.m. Feb. 16 in the Cullman Performance Hall located within the North Carolina History Center in New Bern.

Playwright, historian and actress, Tami Tyree, who wrote the play, was inspired by Elizabeth Keckley’s memoir, “Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave, Four Years in the White House” published in 1868, according the palace.

Born a slave in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Keckley’s father was the owner of the plantation, Col. Burwell. She became a seamstress and after having a child of her own, Keckley bought their freedom through her skills and her ability to promote her business and network. She rose to fame as Mary Todd Lincoln’s exclusive dressmaker during her White House years and is now recognized as America’s first Black fashion designer and entrepreneur.

Tyree, inspired by Keckley’s memoir, “delves into both the ‘glamour and grit’ of her life. Colored not only with silks and satin, but also the scars of sexual trauma, complications of mulatto status, motherhood, and the battle for she and her son’s freedom, story is one of love, marriage, and the ultimate sacrifice; a son as a casualty in the Civil War,” according to the release.

Following the performance there is to be a presentation featuring readers of letters from the National Archives written to President Lincoln by Civil War mothers and soldiers in the United States Colored Troops.

For more information, call Sharon Bryant, Tryon Palace African American outreach coordinator at 252-639-3592, or email sharon.bryant@ncdcr.gov.

BURGAW — The Pender County Library is partnering with educator and filmmaker Claudia Stack to host a screening of the documentary “Lessons from the Rosenwald Schools.”

The screening, the result of a partnership between the library and Stack’s company, Stack Stories LLC, is set for 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 16, at the Main Library at 103 S. Cowan St. in Burgaw. All ages are encouraged to view the film and meet the film’s codirectors, Stack and Richard T. Newkirk.

“Lessons from the Rosenwald Schools” includes footage from hundreds of interviews with alumni and former teachers in which they speak of their experiences at historic African American schools.

The Rosenwald school building program was funded by Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., according to N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Rosenwald partnered with African American educator and activist Booker T. Washington, first working with Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and then forming an independent foundation to manage the school program. After meeting in 1912, the two men built thousands of schools for black students in 15 states, according to the National Park Service.

Architectural plans and matching grants were provided that helped build more than 5,300 schools from Maryland to Texas between the late 1910s and 1932. North Carolina had more than 800 projects, more than any other state, cultural resources continues.

Newkirk, an educator and alumnus of these historic schools, and Stack, who has been documenting African American education heritage since 2003, help viewers understand how these schools fostered a culture of excellence.

The film reveals practices that were common in Rosenwald schools and other historic African American schools, including many teaching strategies that are validated by current research, and recommends ways that we can move forward together.

Dare County Library Adult Speakers Series will feature in February a talk, “Roanoke’s Forgotten Colony: The Freedmen’s Colony of 1863-1867,” with Fort Raleigh National Historic Site Ranger Josh Nelson.

The program is to begin at 11 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 14, in Kill Devil Hills Library meeting room or by Zoom. Register online to attend in-person or virtually.

“Centuries after the lost colony, Roanoke Island became home to a new colony, a Freedmen’s Colony, which was established by the army to prepare the formerly enslaved people for life after the war,” information from the library states. “In February of 1862, the Battle of Roanoke Island left the Outer Banks under Union control, which made Roanoke Island a safe haven, a place of refuge for those who sought the protection of the Union Army. Although some freedom seekers continued their journey northward, many of the refugees remained on the island in the Freemen’s Colony that lasted until 1867.”

Nelson is park ranger for a group of interns, volunteers and employees working at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Roanoke Island. Before his post on the Outer Banks, he led the Youth Conservation Corps at Acadia National Park and held positions at Wind Cave National Park, Zion National Park, Crater Lake National Park, Manhattan Project National Historical Park diversified and Carlsbad Caverns. 

A link to the Zoom presentation will be sent via email within 24 hours of the event from updates@info.darecountync.gov. If you do not see the email in your inbox, check your spam folder. Programs are not recorded.

For assistance, contact the Kill Devil Hills Library, located at 400 Mustian St., or call 252-441-4331 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays.

Dr. Glen Bowman at Elizabeth City State University is to present information about academics and athletics at Elizabeth City’s P.W. Moore High School between 1934 and 1954 during the Feb. 15 History for Lunch at the Museum of the Albemarle.

The program, “Progress & Growth: P.W. Moore High School, 1934-1954,” begins at noon in the Gaither Auditorium at the Elizabeth City museum and is being offered in-person and through Zoom. Register in advance through the Museum’s Facebook page or website to receive a link to attend the lecture virtually.

Elizabeth City’s P.W. Moore High School was northeastern North Carolina’s most outstanding public secondary school for Black students during segregation, according to information from the museum.

The presentation will cover the middle period of the school’s history, starting from the mid-1930s and ending with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that would ultimately desegregate public education in North Carolina.

The virtual program is supported by Southern Bank of Elizabeth City.

The Museum of the Albemarle is at 501 S. Water St. in Elizabeth City. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday and closed Sundays and state holidays.

The museum serves Bertie, Camden, Chowan, Currituck, Dare, Gates, Hertford, Hyde, Northampton, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Tyrrell, and Washington counties and is the northeast regional history museum of the North Carolina Division of State History Museums within the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

The Museum of the Albemarle will host a History for Lunch program, “Families of the United States Colored Troops” at noon Wednesday, Feb. 1, in the Gaither Auditorium. 

The program is being offered in-person and through Zoom. Register in advance through the museum’s Facebook page or website to receive a link to attend the lecture virtually.

“Some of northeastern North Carolina’s free families of color frequently had several members who served in United States Civil War forces,” according to information from the museum. “In Hertford County’s Winton Triangle area, it is not unusual for today’s residents to have as many as 20 ancestral relatives who enlisted in the United States Colored Troops.”

Documentarian Marvin Tupper Jones will describe these families and their relatives’ role in keeping the U.S. whole, expanding freedoms in America, and creating new opportunities for all people of color whether free or enslaved.

Related: Marvin Jones’ Winton Triangle research a personal journey

The virtual program is supported by Southern Bank of Elizabeth City.

The Museum of the Albemarle is at 501 S. Water St. in Elizabeth City. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday and closed Sundays and state holidays.

The museum that serves Bertie, Camden, Chowan, Currituck, Dare, Gates, Hertford, Hyde, Northampton, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Tyrrell, and Washington counties is the northeast regional history museum of the North Carolina Division of State History Museums within the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Dressed as an enslaved woman from 19th century North Carolina, Leesa Jones, executive director of the Washington Waterfront Underground Railroad Museum, tells the story of the journey to freedom that thousands of enslaved people endured.

Housed in an old caboose at the corner of Main and Gladden streets, the museum is small but filled with information and artifacts from the time that enslaved people were a part of life in Washington. Although the artifacts and reprints of wanted posters for runaways are fascinating, Jones and her narration are what truly bring the story to life.

As she describes the journey, what emerges is an interweaving of moral outrage, courage and ingenuity.

It was the enslaved people and their need to be free and a network of abolitionists fierce in their defiance of slavery that created the Underground Railroad. Although many of the people who were a part of it were white, the effort crossed racial and cultural lines, a point Jones emphasizes.

“Not all abolitionists were white. They were Native American, they were Italian, they were immigrants, they were German. They were people from every walk of life,” she said.

Jones draws particular attention to William Still, one of the best known and most effective of the abolitionists. A Black businessman from Philadelphia, he was born across the Delaware River from Philadelphia in 1821 in Burlington, New Jersey, and in 1847 started working for the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Three years later, he became the chairman of the society’s Vigilance Committee, the arm of the society that actively brought enslaved people to freedom.

Still is particularly important because of his 1872 book “The Underground Railroad,” which is notable because the stories of the enslaved people are told almost entirely through their letters, correspondence and interviews.

The book includes the story of William Jordon (page 129) that Still recounts, describing why a person would choose to live for 10 months in the swamps and three months in a cave, “surrounded with bears, wild cats, rattle-snakes and the like.”

“Under Governor Badger (sic, probably Sen. Edmund Badger), of North Carolina, William had experienced Slavery in its most hateful form. True, he had only been twelve months under the yoke of this high functionary. But William’s experience in this short space of time, was of a nature very painful,” Still wrote.

In Still’s narrative, Jordon became the property of Badger when the white man married his third wife. Badger and his wife were not good masters to Jordon and Jordon’s wife.

“The governor and his wife were both equally severe towards them; would stint them shamefully in clothing and food, though they did not get flogged quite as often as some others,” he reported.

What finally drove Jordon to escape enslavement, though, was the separation from his wife.

“(H)is honor gave him distinctly to understand that the idea of his going two hundred miles to see his wife was all nonsense … ‘If I said so, I did not mean it,’ said his honor.”

In his book, Still includes letters describing the conditions many of the escaping enslaved people endured. A letter from prominent abolitionist Thomas Garrett about three men who arrived from the South and needed a place to stay is similar to a number of other letters.

“Respected friend, William Still,” Garrett wrote, “I write to inform thee, that Captain Fountain has arrived this evening from the South with three men, one of which is nearly naked, and very lousy (covered in lice). He has been in the swamps of Carolina for eighteen months past … I would send them on to-night, but will have to provide two of them with some clothes before they can be sent by rail road.”

The origin of the phrase “underground railroad” is unclear. Numerous sources place the first use of the term in 1831 when Kentucky slave Tice Davids swam the Ohio River to the free state of Ohio with his master hard on his tail. An Ohio abolitionist named Rush Sloane claimed that when Davids’ master returned home emptyhanded, he blamed the escape on an underground railroad.

By 1840, the term was in general use in describing the network of safe homes, conductors and others who actively helped enslaved people to freedom.

Located at the mouth of the Pamlico River, antebellum Washington was a bustling industrial port, second only to Wilmington as the busiest port in the state, and was ideally situated to aid in the escape from bondage that the underground railroad offered.

“By 1850 Washington was the largest shipbuilding port in North Carolina. And it rivaled only Wilmington in size,” Jones said.

Her observation is confirmed by an East Carolina University research paper, “The Castle Island Ships’ Graveyard: The History and Archaeology of Eleven Wrecked and Abandoned Watercraft,” written in 2006 by Bradley A. Rodgers and Nathan Richards.

“By 1849, John Myers and Sons were building steamships in the port. The company completed two steamships that year,” according to the authors. “The following year Washington ranked as the number one shipbuilding center in North Carolina. A census completed in 1850 documented 23 shipbuilders living in Beaufort County.”

Jones said the port of Washington was a center of international trade, and the state’s exports of agricultural products and naval stores shipped to destinations as diverse as the northeast coast of the United States and Canada, Europe and the Caribbean. Those ships with their worldwide ports of call were a pathway to freedom for the enslaved.

“Freedom seekers used this river,” she said, “to get their freedom literally anywhere that a ship could go.”

What she describes was a vast network of people and places that gave the enslaved people of the South a chance to be free before the Civil War.

“You could get your freedom not just north and Canada,” she said. “People don’t realize the Underground Railroad ran south.”

She points to Fort Mose (pronounced Mo-say), a small settlement of free people of color that existed just outside St. Augustine, Florida. The town, sanctioned by the governor of the province when it was under Spanish rule in 1738 was “the first legally sanctioned free Black town in the present-day United States,” according to the Florida History Museum.

Jones describes a remarkably sophisticated network that included coded phrases and words that were commonly used but, only for the trained ear, delivered a message of hope.

“Let’s say (you’re) standing here and having a conversation with me. And let’s say (someone) says to me, ‘Tomorrow at the depot, we’re going to have breakfast. We’re going to have ham and eggs,’” she said.

To the untrained ear that sounds like an invitation to breakfast, but for the conductors and passenger of the underground railroad, the meaning was quite different.

Depot, she explained, would be almost any meeting place that had been agreed upon earlier.

“It could be a graveyard, could be a place by the river, could be a place in the woods, could be a cave. Anywhere that we had already agreed to meet. Breakfast indicates a specific kind of meeting. Ham one adult. Eggs more than two children,” she said.

Yet that only hints at the complexity of the journey to freedom for enslaved people.

A number of the ship’s pilots and captains who called Washington their homeport were enslaved. There was little motivation for them to escape their bondage — their skills were highly prized, and they were often quite well off and many had families that they could not return to if they left. Yet if the Black pilots and captains did not wish escape themselves, Jones said she believes they would often help others.

“They could tell you everything,” she said. And if they did not themselves seek freedom, they would often turn a blind eye to stowaways who were fleeing. Still’s book is filled with stories of Underground Railroad passengers, secreted in ships as they traveled north to Philadelphia or other free ports.

For Jones, who grew up in Washington, the stories she heard as a child are part of her own journey of discovery. Her grandmother would tell tales of her ancestors coming to America “in the snow,” and she would wonder because there is seldom snow in Washington.

And then she realized, “The Snow was the name of the slave ship coming from West Africa.”

She spent her summers as a child in Philadelphia, and remembers hearing the adults say, “Somebody went to Timbuktu. All I knew about Timbuktu (was that) it was in Africa.”

But what she subsequently learned was that Timbuctoo was an early African American settlement in New Jersey. According to the New Jersey State Library, the community dates from 1826. It is in Mount Holly about 3 miles southwest of Burlington.

For Jones, the process of uncovering the stories of the Underground Railroad has been a journey of discovery that keeps revealing more tales to tell of the people who believed so strongly in the freedom for others. And as those stories are revealed, different ways to understand what happened will continue to unfold.

“History is really like a diamond,” she said. “The more you turn it, the more you’re going to see.”

Editor’s note: Coastal Review is sharing this work by historian David Cecelski in recognition of Black History Month.

Whenever I pass the old clam house between Smyrna and Williston, I glance east across Jarrett Bay to Davis Ridge. You will go that way if you drive Highway 70 across the broad salt marshes of Carteret County, to catch the Cedar Island ferry to the Outer Banks.

Most passersby admire the beautiful vistas across Core Sound and look for the wild ponies grazing in the Cape Lookout National Seashore and the Cedar Island National Wildlife Refuge. Some travelers wander through the old seaside villages, such as Harkers Island, that are renowned for their boatbuilding, fishing and seafaring heritage.

Few coastal visitors know that the secluded hammock of Davis Ridge was once home to an extraordinary community founded by liberated slaves.

Nobody has lived at “the Ridge” since 1933, yet the legend of those African American fishermen, whalers and boatbuilders still echoes among the elderly people in the maritime communities between North River and Cedar Island that locals call Down East.

This essay appeared in my book “The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina” (University of North Carolina Press, 2001). It was originally a lecture at a conference on race, power and ethnicity in maritime America that was held at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut. Earlier versions of the essay appeared in Coastwatch magazine and Sea History.

At the North Carolina Maritime Museum

I had heard of Davis Ridge when I was growing up 25 miles to the west. When I became a historian, I searched for the history of those Black Down Easterners with much ardor and little success.

For a long time, I assumed all record of them had been lost. I found no trace of Davis Ridge in history books. Exploring the Ridge by boat and on foot, I uncovered only an old cemetery in a live oak grove surrounded by salt marsh and, only a few yards away, Core Sound and Jarrett Bay.

All the documents that I examined in research libraries, archives and museums yielded only tantalizing clues to the community’s past. The best sources I could find were a few, mostly secondhand recollections from elderly people who had grown up in fishing villages not far from Davis Ridge.

At last, after I had given up I stumbled upon a tape-recorded interview with Nannie Davis Ward in a storage pantry at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort.

Most success in historical research comes from persistence and hard work. Finding Ward’s interview was an undeserved act of grace.

Folklorists Michael and Debbie Luster had interviewed Ward in 1988 only a few years before her death. At that time, Ward was apparently the last living soul to have grown up at Davis Ridge.

A retired seamstress and cook, she was born at the Ridge in 1911. Ward was blind by the time the Lusters interviewed her, but she had a strong memory and a firm voice. Listening to her eloquent words, I found a vivid portrait of her childhood home taking shape in my mind. Her story fills an important part of the history of the African American maritime people who inhabited the coastal villages and fishing camps of North Carolina before the Civil War.

It is a story of only one community, Davis Ridge, but it speaks to the broader experience of the Black watermen and women who came out of slavery and continued to work on the water.

Black maritime traditions before the Civil War

When Nannie Davis Ward was a child, Davis Ridge was an all-Black community on a wooded knoll, or small island, on the eastern shore of Jarrett Bay, not far from Core Sound and Cape Lookout. A great salt marsh separated the Ridge from the mainland to the north, which was known as Davis Shore. Davis Island was just to the south. A hurricane cut a channel between Davis Ridge and Davis Island in 1899, but in her grandparents’ day it had been possible to walk from one to the other.

The founders of Davis Ridge had been among many slave watermen and women at Core Sound before the Civil War. Ward’s family was in many ways typical of the African American families along the Lower Banks. They were skilled maritime laborers with a seafaring heritage. They had 18^th century family roots in the West Indies and had Black, white and Native American ancestry. They moved seasonally from fishery to fishery, working on inshore waters, rarely the open sea.

They also had a history of slave resistance. Nannie Davis Ward’s mother, who identified herself as Native American, had grown up in Bogue Banks, a 26-mile-long barrier island west of Beaufort, and her mother’s grandfather had evidently been a slave aboard a French sailing vessel. According to Ward, that great-grandfather had escaped from his French master while in port at New Bern and had been raised free in the family of a white waterman at Harkers Island, 10 miles west of Davis Ridge.

It was Sutton Davis, Ward’s paternal grandfather, who first settled Davis Ridge. As a slave, Sutton Davis had belonged to a small planter and shipbuilder named Nathan Davis at Davis Island. Sutton Davis had been a master boatbuilder and carpenter. According to his granddaughter, he had learned the boatbuilding trade at a Wilmington shipyard owned by a member of the white Davis family and then moved back to Davis Island.

Family lore on one side of the white Davis family holds that Nathan was Sutton’s father. Nannie Davis Ward did not address that question in her interview, except to note that Sutton and his children were very light skinned.

A voyage to freedom

When Union troops captured Beaufort and New Bern in 1862, Sutton Davis led the Davis Island slaves to freedom. They rowed a small boat across Jarrett Bay to the fishing village of Smyrna, from where they fled to Union-occupied territory on the outskirts of New Bern.

After the war, some of those former enslaved people founded the North River community, a few miles outside of Beaufort, but Sutton Davis bought 4 acres at Davis Ridge in 1865. Nathan Davis sold him the property for the sort of low price usually reserved for family. Sutton Davis and his children eventually acquired 220 more acres at Davis Ridge.

The number of Black Down Easterners declined sharply after the Civil War, but Davis Ridge remained a stronghold of the African American maritime culture that had thrived along Core Sound. Nearly all of Nannie Davis Ward’s relatives worked on the water. Her grandfather Sutton, of course, was a fisherman and boatbuilder. Her mother’s father, a free Black man named Samuel Windsor, became a legendary fisherman and whaler at Shackleford Banks, the 9-mile-long barrier island just east of Beaufort. Sam Windsor’s Lump is still marked on nautical charts of Shackleford.

Her father, Elijah, owned a fish house. Her great-uncle Palmer was a seafarer and sharpie captain. Her great-uncle Adrian was a captain of the fishing boat Belford. Another great-uncle, Proctor, was a waterman who lived at Quinine Point, the northwest corner of Davis Ridge.

Many other kinsmen became stalwarts in the Beaufort menhaden fleet, which rose in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to become the state’s most important saltwater fishery. During its heyday, Black watermen dominated the menhaden fishery, which had Black leadership earlier than any other local industry. Out of Nannie Davis Ward’s family came the menhaden industry’s first African American captains.

Saltwater farmers

Sutton Davis and his 13 children operated one of the first successful menhaden factories in North Carolina, long before the industry’s boom in Beaufort. Sutton built two fishing schooners, the Mary E. Reeves and the Shamrock. His sons worked the boats while his daughters dried and pressed the menhaden — known locally as “shad” or “pogie” — to sell as fertilizer and oil.

“Men should have been doing it,” Ward explained, “but he didn’t have them there, so the girls had to fill in for them.”

In fact, Ward pointed out, at Davis Ridge, “The girls did a lot of farm working, factory work too.”

The Black families at Davis Ridge were what local historian Norman Gillikin in Smyrna calls “saltwater farmers”: the old-time Down Easterners who lived by both fishing and farming. They hawked oysters across Jarrett Bay and raised hogs, sheep and cattle. They grew corn for the animals and sweet “roasting ears” for themselves. At night they spun homegrown cotton into cloth.

Their gardens were full of collard greens and, as Ward recalled vividly, “sweet potatoes as big as your head.” They worked hard and prospered.

Sometimes Sutton Davis augmented his children’s labor by hiring fishing hands from Craven Corner, an African American community 30 miles west. Craven Corner had been settled in the 18^th century by free Blacks that had migrated south out of Virginia. According to local oral tradition, many had intermarried with the descendants of the Native American survivors of the Tuscarora War of 1711-13. Over the generations, African Americans at Craven Corner had earned a strong reputation for a fierce independence and for being excellent watermen and artisans.

One does not have to stretch one’s imagination to see them fitting into the fishing life at Davis Ridge.

Davis Ridge was a proud, independent community. When Nannie Ward was growing up there in the 1910s and 1920s, seven families — all kin to Sutton Davis — still lived at the Ridge. They sailed across Jarrett Bay to a Smyrna gristmill to grind their corn and to a Williston grocery to barter fish for coffee and sugar, but mainly relied on their own land and labor.

They conducted business with their white neighbors at Davis Shore or across Jarrett Bay by barter and by trading chores. “You didn’t know what it was to pay bills,” Ward reminisced.

Island women

While the Davis Ridge men worked away at Core Banks mullet camps or chased menhaden into Virginia waters, the island women cared for farms and homes. They gathered tansy, sassafras and other wild herbs for medicines and seasoning. Thy collected yaupon leaves in February, chopped them into small pieces and dried them to make tea.

In May, they sheared the sheep. Nannie Ward’s grandmother spun and wove the wool. They produced, Ward explained, “everything they used.”

Davis Ridge was a remote hammock, but Ward could not remember a day of loneliness or boredom. She told how two Beaufort menhaden fishermen, William Henry Fulcher and John Henry, used to visit and play music on her front porch.

“We enjoyed ourselves on the island,” Ward said. “There wasn’t a whole lot of things to do, but we enjoyed people. We visited each other.”

The camaraderie of Black and white neighbors around Davis Ridge was still striking to Nannie Ward a century later. For most Blacks in coastal North Carolina, the 1910s and 1920s were years of hardship and fear. White citizens enforced racial segregation at gunpoint. Blacks who tried to climb “above their place” invited harsh reprisals. The Ku Klux Klan marched by the hundreds in coastal communities as nearby as Morehead City, and word went out in several fishing communities — including Knotts Island, Stumpy Point and Atlantic — that a Black man might not live long if he lingered after dark.

Davis Ridge was somehow different. Black and white families often worked, socialized and worshiped together. “The people from Williston would come over to our island,” Ward said of school recitals and plays, “and we’d go over to their place.”

Sutton Davis’s home, in particular, was a popular meeting place. Hymn singers of both races visited his home at Davis Ridge to enjoy good company and the finest pipe organ around Jarrett Bay.

Ward even recalled a white midwife staying with Black families at Davis Ridge when a child was about to be born, a simple act of kindness and duty that turned racial conventions of the day upside down. This may seem a trivial thing, but it was quite the opposite.

A coastal midwife had to move into an expectant mother’s home well before her due date or risk not being in attendance at the birth because of the time required to travel to and from the islands. The midwife stayed for the child’s birth and then tended to mother and child — and sometimes the cooking and housework — until the mother was recovered fully. Taking care of those duties, a midwife could easily spend two or three weeks living in the mother’s household.

In the American South during the era of Jim Crow, it was not unusual at all for a Black midwife to serve a white family in that capacity. The arrangement was entirely consistent with a traditional role of Black women serving as maids and nannies in white homes.

But to reverse the arrangement was unheard of. The white South simply did not allow one of its own to serve a Black woman. Even more fundamental to the complex racial landscape of the day, a white woman could never stay the night under a Black man’s roof, that being a breech of the sexual code that was at the heart of Jim Crow.

The daily conduct of Blacks and whites at Davis Ridge would have caused riots, lynchings or banishment in most southern places, including coastal towns 20 miles away.

Similarly, in the 1950s and 1960s, many white ministers across the American South lost their jobs for inviting Black choirs to sing at a church revival. Yet the Davis Ridge choir sang at revivals at the Missionary Baptist church at Davis Shore two generations before the civil rights movement.

An old legend even tells how, in 1871, Black and white worshipers rushed from a prayer meeting and together made a daring rescue of the crew and cargo of a ship, the Pontiac, shipwrecked at Cape Lookout.

Mullet camps

The work culture of mullet fishing on the barrier islands near Davis Ridge both reflected and reinforced this blurring of conventional racial lines. Every autumn all or most of the Davis Ridge men joined interracial mulleting gangs of four to 30 men tending seines, gill nets and dragnets along the beaches between Ocracoke Island and Bogue Banks.

During the 1870s and 1880s, that stretch of coastline supported the largest mullet fishery in the U.S. More than 30 vessels carried the salted fish out of Beaufort and Morehead City, and the Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad transported such large quantities that for generations local people referred to it as the “Old Mullet Road.”

Out on those remote islands, Black and white mullet fishermen lived, dined and worked together all autumn, temporarily sharing a life beyond the pale of the stricter racial barriers ashore. They worked side by side, handling sails and hauling nets, and every man’s gain depended on his crew’s collective sailing and fishing skills.

For most, a lot was riding on the mullet season. Local fisherman were a hand-to-mouth lot, and mulleting was one of the few fisheries that promised barter for flour, cornmeal and other staples necessary to fill a winter pantry, to say nothing of putting aside a little for Christmas or a bolt of calico that might save their wives a fortnight of late night weaving.

Every fisherman hoped for the strongest crew possible, and nobody worked the mullet nets or knew how to survive the vicious storms on the barrier islands better than the men from Davis Ridge. On those secluded shores, away from the prying eyes of the magistrates of Jim Crow, a man’s race might start to seem a little less important.

Work customs reflected this camaraderie and interdependence. Mullet fishermen traditionally worked on a “share system,” granting equal parts of their catch’s profits to every hand, no matter his race. Owners of boats and nets earned extra shares. Often they also voted by shares to settle work-related decisions. These were the sort of working conditions that might attract even the independent-minded souls of Davis Ridge to work alongside their white counterparts.

This fraternity of Black and white fishermen on the islands off Davis Ridge comes across clearly in a stunning engraving of a mulleting gang at Shackleford Banks. The original photograph on which the engraving as based was taken in about 1880 by R. Edward Earll, a fishery biologist who visited the local mulleting beaches as part of the U.S. Fish Commission’s monumental survey of all of the nation’s fisheries.

Look closely at the engraving and what stands out immediately are the equal numbers of Black and white fishermen, their intermingled pose, their close quarters, their obvious familiarity — one might even say chumminess — and the unclear lines of authority. All were entirely foreign to the standard racial attitudes of the American South in that day.

I find it one of the most extraordinary images ever made of life in the Jim Crow era. One never sees anything close to that intimacy and equality in the portraits of Black and white workers in cotton mills, lumber caps, coal mines or agricultural fields, much less in the trades or professions.

The notion of Blacks and whites sharing a fish camp whose design was inspired by a West African architectural tradition (see my book “The Waterman’s Song,” pages 78 and 248-49) stretches the imagination even farther.

A mullet fisherman from Davis Ridge may, in fact, have built the camp in this engraving. Sallie Salter, a white woman who lived near the Ridge from 1805 to 1903, recalled for her grandson that Proctor Davis “lived in a rush camp” at Davis Ridge and later moved closer to her family at Salter Creek “and built another rush camp, and lived in it for a long time.”

After dark

One must be careful not to exaggerate the racial harmony around Davis Ridge. Not a crossroads in the American South escaped the reality of racial oppression. Certainly Davis Ridge did not. After the statewide white supremacy campaigns of 1898 and 1900, local whites fostered an atmosphere of racial intimidation that increasingly drove African Americans out of Down East, as well as discouraged any new Black settlement in the villages east of North River.

For years, a hand-scrawled sign at the town limits of Atlantic, 15 nautical miles from Davis Ridge, read: “No Niggers after Dark.”

Even when I was a young boy, no Blacks lived anywhere Down East, and I often heard the admonition that African Americans could work in the Down East clam houses or oyster shucking sheds during the day but could never spend the night safely.

Once, on a club field trip to one of my teachers’ homes at Harkers Island, the teacher — a native of Down East — had the one African American girl in the club lay on the floor of her car as soon as she drove over the North River Bridge. My teacher did not have to explain why.

Seen in this light, Davis Ridge was an island in more than one sense: As the rest of Down East grew whiter and whiter after the Civil War, this remote knoll was increasingly seen as a last redoubt of African American independence and self-sufficiency. White fishermen could look across Jarrett Bay and refer to the Mary E. Reeves or the Shamrock as “the nigger boats,” as I have heard Down East old timers call them, but Sutton Davis’s clan still had two of the only menhaden boats Down East and the skills to make good money with them.

So many good things

That was the heart of the matter. Sutton Davis and his descendants could not remove themselves from the white supremacy pervasive in the American South but they had at least two advantages that most Black southerners could only dream of: land and a fair chance to make a living.

And, unlike the rest of the Jim Crow South, the broad waters of Core Sound could not so easily be segregated into separate and unequal sections. Self-reliant, in peonage to no one, the African Americans at Davis Ridge joined their white neighbors as rough equals in a common struggle to make a living from the sea.

Ward left Davis Ridge in 1925. She first went to Beaufort to attend high school, and then she moved to South Carolina and New York. While she was gone, the great 1933 hurricane laid waste to the island’s homes and fields. The Ridge was deserted when she returned in 1951. No African Americans resided anywhere Down East by that time.

“I still loved the island,” Ward told the Lusters only a few years before she died in Beaufort. “When you grow up there from a child, you learn all the things in the island, you learn how to survive. You learn everything.”

I heard a low, wistful sigh and a deep yearning in her voice. “We were surrounded by so many good things that I don’t get anymore, that I never did get again.” I knew that she was not speaking merely of roast mullet and fresh figs.

She was silent a moment. Then, with a laugh, she exclaimed, “I’d like to be there right now.”

Coastal Review is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

NAVASSA – There have been times when Al Beatty has been afraid to look at Reaves Chapel as he’s driven by.

Jesica Blake felt a swift wave of nausea when she watched the chapel, built in the mid-1800s, visibly shake as its steeple was lifted off the roof a couple of years ago.

More than one conversation between the two have started with the question, “Is it still standing?”

Remarkably, Reaves Chapel, one of the oldest African American buildings in southeastern North Carolina is, indeed, still standing after falling into dilapidation since a congregation last met within its walls more than 15 years ago.

Since then, the small chapel built by people formerly enslaved at Cedar Hill Plantation has weathered tropical storms and hurricanes. Termites have feasted on its wooden bones.

The weight of the steeple, which holds a small, but impressively heavy bell, began to cause the chapel to tilt to one side.

The race against time to restore the chapel before it toppled to the ground weighed heavy on Beatty, president of the Cedar Hill/West Bank Heritage Foundation, and Blake, North Carolina Coastal Land Trust associate director.

“It would have never survived another tropical storm,” Beatty said, surveying the chapel’s new flooring on a recent, cold February morning.

It was the first time he walked inside the chapel, its floor too rotted to safely hold a person, in more than a year.

“This is fantastic,” Beatty said, a smile beaming across his face. “It’s past great. It’s fantastic.”

Roughly half of the $1 million it will cost to restore the building, landscape the chapel’s grounds, build a separate building for restrooms and a parking lot, has been collected through fundraising efforts headed by the land trust, foundation and Historic Wilmington Foundation.

The Coastal Land Trust purchased the little more than half an acre on which the chapel now sits just off Cedar Hill Road in Navassa, the Brunswick County town nestled at the confluence of the Cape Fear and Brunswick rivers.

Ed Reaves, a former Cedar Hill Plantation slave, donated the land in 1911, which was around the time the chapel was relocated by its congregation, the members of which used logs and a team of oxen, to move it inland from the bluffs of the Cape Fear River.

The church eventually became affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal denomination and remained an AME church until its doors closed permanently in the mid-2000s.

As a child, Beatty attended the church with his family. He recalls the Easter Sunday programs when he and the other children, dressed in their Sunday best, had to recite short speeches intertwined with scripture, from the pulpit.

“Everybody had a speech,” Beatty said. “Everyone.”

Beatty helped form the Cedar Hill/West Bank Foundation in 2011 in an effort to save the chapel. The foundation officially gained nonprofit status two years later.

Early attempts to buy the chapel were unsuccessful. The land trust, which had been working with Navassa as the town began going through a process with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to remediate the former Kerr-McGee Superfund Site, eventually stepped in and offered to help pick up the cause to save the chapel, purchasing the land with a grant from the Orton Foundation.

“It’s a piece of American history that we are honored to help protect,” Blake said.

The church is being restored to how it was in 1911, when a cubby-like addition was built at the front of the church to hold a choir.

Today, the chapel’s white paint is grayed and chipped. Evidence of water damage marks parts of the ceiling and walls.

Portions of exposed, wooden frame of the building are peppered with holes gnawed by termites. “Real, old-fashioned nails,” as Beatty refers to them, still hold the frame together.

But the bones are good, a testament to the craftsmen who built the chapel more than a century ago.

Beatty said he’s yet to bring first-time visitors to the chapel who were not immediately drawn to its allure.

“The church becomes a part of them,” he said.

Balding Brothers, a Wilmington-based company that specializes in historic building restoration, is overseeing the project.

Since restoration work began late last year, the church’s foundation has been stabilized by some of the original concrete blocks that have held up the church for years. New, brick pilings have been added along the foundation’s sides.

Three stain glass windows, including a triangular-shaped window over the double-door entrance, have been removed and sent off for cleaning and restoration at a hefty price tag of $50,000.

A shipping container next to the chapel, which is enclosed temporarily by a tall, chain link fence, is used as storage for items taken out of the chapel, such as pews and the steeple bell.

Out of site of the chapel grounds, back in the woods that lead to the Cape Fear River bluffs, is the chapel cemetery.

About 10 or so headstones are in that area. More than 70 depressions in the ground signal more graves.

“We are in the process of restoring that and getting a catalog,” of those graves, Beatty said.

The organizations are working with the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office to have the chapel and its cemetery designated a state historic site, one that would eventually be tied in with nationally-recognized places of historic significance related to the Gullah Geechee.

Gullah Geechee are descendants of West Africans taken from their country and enslaved on rice, indigo and Sea Island cotton plantations of the lower Atlantic coast.

Reaves Chapel would be the northern anchor of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, which encompasses 12,000 square miles of coastal area that runs up the southern Atlantic Coast from St. John’s County, Florida, to Onslow County.

Efforts are underway to connect the corridor with the East Coast Greenway in Brunswick County. The greenway is a 3,000-mile walking and biking route that runs through 15 states from Maine to Florida.

The Gullah Geechee Greenway/Blueway Heritage Trail project will be designed to intertwine outdoor activities, including walking, bicycling and paddling, with the history and culture of the Gullah Geechee.

There is also a proposal in the works to build in Navassa a cultural heritage center, a place that will further educate visitors about the history and culture of the Gullah Geechee.

Blake said the goal is to get the state to take ownership of the chapel. Ultimately, Beatty said, the plan is to get the site on the National Park Service’s National Register Historic of Historic Places.

Blake said, though lofty, she hopes the chapel restoration will be complete by year’s end.

Dr. Erroll L. Royal, from New Bern, is set to give a virtual presentation on his most recent book, “Traces of Places and Faces of African Americans from the New Bern Community,” as part of Tryon Palace’s African American Lecture Series.

The program will begin at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 17. Though offered virtually, reservations are required to participate. Email Historic Interpreter Krystal Eldred at krystal.eldred@ncdcr.gov or call 252-639-3512.

Royal will highlight past and present African Americans from the New Bern area who have made or continue to make significant contributions to the city, the surrounding areas and nationwide.

“His stories serve to remember the legacies of these African Americans as their lives will have lasting impact on the lives of many for generations to come,” organizers said.

Royal, a New Bern Senior High School graduate who, in addition to his doctorate, earned master’s in several areas of study, is a retired educator with more than 40 years as a school administrator.

He is author of other books including “Pembroke: The Road Less Traveled,” “No Pain, No Rain, No Gain: Understanding the Meaning of Suffering” and “Twenty Steps to Effective Prayer.”

Royal is working on a sequel to “Traces of Places and Faces of African Americans from the New Bern Community” to remember other prominent individuals not mentioned in the first book.

A new Civil War Trails marker telling the story of Union Town, a refugee camp established in 1862 by African Americans who fled enslavement to Union-occupied Beaufort, is to be unveiled at 3 p.m. Wednesday at 608 Mulberry St.

This is the second Civil War Trails marker in the Carteret County town. The first can be found on the grounds of the Beaufort Historic Site.

The dedication is to begin with the Presentation of Colors by The U.S. Colored Troops 35th regiment reenactment group. Special guest speakers will include the Civil War Trails Board Chair and Visit NC’s Partner Relations Manager André Nabors as well as Pastor William Ellison of Queen Street Missionary Church and the Rev. Tambria Lee of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, both of Beaufort, and choirs from the two churches.

The Beaufort Historical Association and the Crystal Coast Tourism Authority, the latter of which has worked with Civil War Trails Inc. in the past, are hosting the event. Civil War Trails is a nonprofit organization that works with municipal, county and state offices of tourism and transportation, and historic and genealogical societies to find sites with a strong story and safe parking.

Beaufort was not only home to many Union soldiers during the Civil War, but was instrumental for Union forces because of its seaport and proximity to Fort Macon, according to the historic site. After the Civil War ended in 1865, Beaufort became home to the state’s second-largest population of freedmen and women, who created a community within Union Town. About 2,000 residents lived there.

A solider of the 144th New York Regiment described it, “A large camp had been established … and laid out in streets. They proved themselves quite expert in building their temporary homes, riving out material for their construction from the pine and other growths of timber in the surroundings.”

The new Civil War Trails marker has been installed at the industrial arts building of the former Queen Street High School, the only remaining structure of the African American high school, which opened in 1926 to educate descendants of Union Town’s original residents. The building will soon become the Queen Street Heritage Foundation.

For more information about the ceremony, call 252-728-5225 or about Civil War Trails Inc., visit www.civilwartrails.org.

A Black History Month program is set for this month on the legacy of the Rev. Richard Keaton and the Black Missionary Movement in the Middle Cape Fear Region.

Pender County Library is hosting the program, “Unsung Heroes: The Life and Legacy of Reverend Richard Keaton,” at its main library in Burgaw at 5 p.m. Friday, Feb. 18.

Area historian Earnestine Keaton will present the program offered both in-person at the Burgaw library and online via Zoom. Registration is required for both.

During the hourlong program, Keaton is to explore the economic and cultural development of several rural majority Black faith-based communities in Columbus and Pender counties.

Keaton began researching her family history in 1998. Through her research, she discovered the rich and interesting history of the Cape Fear Region. Her primary focus is the cultural traditions and economic development of the communities that grew out of the area’s plantations, particularly the Lloyd Plantation.

Register online at bit.ly/pclunsungheroes, or go to the library’s website, www.penderpubliclibrary.org, and follow the links under “Events” or contact the library to reserve a spot at 910-259-1234. Seating is limited for in-person attendance. If attending online there is no need to have a Zoom account; just click the link provided in the confirmation email and follow the prompts to download Zoom. The talk can be viewed on a smartphone, tablet, or computer.

The Museum of the Albemarle is hosting a traveling exhibit highlighting the work and lives of three African American female mathematicians who were critical to NASA.

The exhibit, “When the Computer Wore a Skirt: NASA’s Human Computers,” will open Feb. 14 at the museum Elizabeth City. Admission is free to the museum open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

On loan from the Hampton History Museum, the exhibit, which closes March 12, explores the history and personalities brought to light in the film and novel “Hidden Figures,” Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson and Hampton native-Mary Jackson.

Five women in 1935 formed a computer pool at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, to process data from wind tunnel and flight tests. By 1942, the human computers had become essential to operations. A memo that April stated: “The engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they could,” according to NASA.

Langley began recruiting African American women in the 1940s as human computers, but due to segregation laws these “West Area Computers” were kept separate from their white counterparts.

This changed in the 1950s as NACA, later NASA, integrated and the “human computers” extended into the broader scientific community at NASA. By the 1960s they numbered in the hundreds.

Created by the Hampton History Museum staff, the exhibit is designed to travel to other museums, libraries, schools and other organizations.

For details on “Human Computers,” or other Hampton History Museum traveling exhibits, visit www.hamptonhistorymuseum.org/travelingexhibits or contact curator Allen Hoilman at 757-727-6875 or allen.hoilman@hampton.gov.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review is sharing this work by historian David Cecelski in recognition of Black History Month.

When I was at Oberlin College last summer, I stopped by the library so that I could look at the letters that the Rev. Elam J. Comings and his daughter Sarah wrote when they were in Beaufort during the Civil War.

I was interested in Elam and Sarah Comings’ letters because they were written in 1863-64, when they were teachers at the Whipple School, an American Missionary Association, or AMA, school in Beaufort. Most of their students were African Americans who were slave laborers until Union forces captured the town and liberated them in 1862.

When Elam and Sarah arrived in Beaufort, the vast majority of North Carolina remained in Confederate hands. Slavery was of course still the law of the land in that section of the state.

Things were different in Beaufort, New Bern and a few other coastal towns, however. Held by the Union Army, they made up a narrow sliver of the North Carolina coast where African Americans could come out of the shadow of slavery.

By the fall of 1863, Beaufort was busting at the seams. The little seaside town was overflowing with escaped and liberated slaves. Confederate deserters were everywhere. Throngs of Union sailors and soldiers (including many who were Black) and sick and wounded soldiers (a Union Army hospital was there) crowded the town’s old oyster shell and sand streets. Smugglers, shysters and war profiteers, of every loyalty, abounded.

Originally from Vermont, Rev. Comings had graduated from Oberlin College in 1838 and had been ordained there in 1841. He was at Oberlin at an extraordinary moment in the college’s history. In 1835, Oberlin admitted its first Black students, becoming one of the first colleges in the U.S. to do so.

To put that in perspective, I might note that was 116 years before the University of North Carolina admitted its first Black students.

Two years later, in 1837, Oberlin admitted women students for the first time, becoming the first coeducational college in the U.S. At the same time, the town of Oberlin was becoming a hotbed of anti-slavery activism.

To what degree Oberlin shaped Rev. Comings’ views on slavery, I do not know. But after finishing at the college’s seminary, his first pastorate was in Frederickstown, Ohio, where proponents of slavery attempted to blow up and burn his church because of his and his congregation’s anti-slavery views.

The Rev. Comings’ abolitionist beliefs also led him to Beaufort. In his and Sarah’s letters, we get a glimpse of wartime Beaufort and of a local history of Afro-Christianity that had defied slavery long before the Civil War.

We also get a fascinating look at the two missionaries, Elam and Sarah, their commitment to African American freedom and education, and also the limits of their commitment to racial equality.

These are some of the notes that I made as I read Elam and Sarah Comings’ letters at Oberlin College.

* * *

Rev. Comings to his wife Fanny, Nov. 6, 1863

He has left their home in East Berkshire, Vermont. On route to North Carolina, he learns where the American Missionary Association has assigned him. “I am to teach in Beaufort.”

Rev. Comings to Fanny, Nov 12, 1863

He and their daughter Sarah are in New Bern, 35 miles up the railroad line from Beaufort. They will take the train to Morehead City, then a ferry to Beaufort in the next day or two.

Rev. Comings to “my dear wife,” Nov. 16, 1863

He describes his first visit to one of Beaufort’s African American schools. The school is held in a local church, probably Purvis Chapel.

“As I entered the Ch(urch), I saw 150 (illegible) of all ages each with some book primer … And a few with scripture … books all eagerly trying to spell out the words. A few …could read the testament.” He notes: “The teachers were all blacks but a short time out of slavery.”

He also makes this observation with respect to the African American women that he meets in Beaufort:

“The women look as tho they have suffered (under slavery) by far more than the men. They look abject … and dejected … The great day will reveal many a story of shame and sorrow through which they have past. (sic). ”

Rev. Comings to Fanny and Eliza (their other daughter), Nov. 24, 1863

He describes a pastoral visit to a dying man in Beaufort. “He was a poor slave, and leaves two little children and a wife.”

He also reports that his students will largely be African Americans who had recently escaped from slavery, but he expects some white children, too. He mentions that some white adults have already showed up at the school’s night classes.

“Some 7 or 8 North Carolina white soldiers came to our evening schools to learn enough to write their names. They are deserted from the Rebels. They come in here on an average of about 10 per day(,) take the oath and join the Union army.”

Rev. Comings to “my dear wife” and Eliza, Nov. 23, 1863

He begins to realize how little he knows about the African American faith and spirituality during slavery. The Whipple School now has 235 students, but he is surprised how well the former slaves already know Scripture.

“It is a puzzle to me to see how they have got hold of the Bible so much, when never allowed to learn to read till they were free.”

Sarah Comings to “ma and sis,” Nov. 26, 1863

“The colored people are very kind to us and make us presents of apples, fish and other little gifts.” She reports that she picked flowers at Fort Macon and collected seashells at Cape Lookout.

Rev. Comings to Fanny and Eliza, Nov. 28, 1863

He is not accustomed to the coastal landscape. Everything is new to him: “Back of our house is a pretty grove of what they call ‘Live Oaks.’”

Rev. Comings to Eliza, Nov. 29, 1863

He presides at a funeral for the African American man he visited on Nov. 24. The funeral is held at a local home. The service begins with the kind of solemnity with which he is accustomed, but he is surprised when the mourners begin “singing, shouting, stamping and clapping.” He writes, apparently somewhat taken aback, “It was a joyful time to them.”

He recalled, “As I came down from the pulpit one great stout man got hold of my hand and squeezed it till it ached … and fairly lifted me up saying ‘Oh Brother I am happy, my soul is full!”

Rev. Comings to Eliza, Dec. 11, 1863

He describes where the AMA missionaries stay in Beaufort. “We live in an academy or boarding school building. In the basement story is a kitchen where we take our meals; the next floor above is a large school room now occupied by a school of the ‘poor white trash’ as they are here called, taught just now by a Mrs. Etheridge from Pa. In the next story are sleeping rooms … We have at present in our family 8 teachers including myself … The teachers work very hard in school and have little strength for anything else. I have an evening school 5 nights in the week for young men.”

Rev. Comings to “my dear fellow pilgrims,” Jan. 18, 1864

He has visited Newport, a village 10 miles west of Beaufort: “it has 6 stores … There is one hotel or boarding house containing two sleeping rooms, besides those occupied by the family. One blacksmith shop, one schoolhouse and there will soon be another when I get mine done for the blacks. There is also one stable large enough to contain two mules … On Broadway there are a good many houses, I guess nearly a dozen. And one of them is two stories high.”

Rev. Comings to Eliza, Jan. 24, 1864

He tells Fanny and Eliza that the former slaves in Beaufort are struggling to find housing. As they pour into town, they are bedding down in attics, hallways, porches and sheds.

He also reports a growing number of the sick. “For the last 3 weeks or so, our teachers have been strangely ill. This has made me anxious.” Sarah has also been ill.

Rev. Comings to Fanny and Eliza, Jan. 30, 1864

The Rev. Horace James, the Union army’s Superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, is visiting Beaufort. His wife is with him. According to the Rev. Comings, he and Horace James “regret that Mrs. James considers it `an impropriety’ to eat in a negro’s house.”

Mrs. James was far from unusual. Despite their anti-slavery beliefs, the northerners in wartime Beaufort — soldiers, civilians and missionaries — typically shared a sense of white superiority and Black inferiority.

Racial prejudice abounded. In his letters, Rev. Comings, for instance, occasionally referred to African Americans as “darkies.” Likewise, Sarah was genuinely committed to her Black students, but she also compared them to monkeys. Both referred to Black men and women in childlike terms.

Rev. Comings to Fanny, Feb. 8, 1864

He reports that Rebel troops attacked the Union outpost in Newport. He and Sarah fear the fate of a regiment from their home state, the 9^th Vermont Infantry, that was stationed there.

The Vermonters retreated to Beaufort. “Some 25 sons of Vermont there fell killed and wounded on the first day … Seven wounded men are brought to our hospital here. I attended the funeral of one of them yesterday …There are more than 200, mostly women and children, thrown upon us … I have been obliged to take Sarah’s school room for them to occupy till the storm is past …”

Rev. Comings to Fanny, Feb. 29, 1864

Rumors of 40,000 rebel troops massing near New Bern have reached Beaufort. The town is in a panic. If New Bern falls, Beaufort would likely be next. (New Bern does not fall).

Rev. Comings to Fanny, Mar. 15, 1864

He seems beleaguered and worn out. He thinks he is “called” to return shortly to Vermont. “You think a great deal today no doubt of the deep waters through which we have past (sic),” he tells his wife.

He gives few details about the wellsprings of his discouragement, but he does mention one loss. “We are all today in deep mourning. One of our beloved teachers died yesterday at 4 bells. She was sick one week. We thought her in no danger till just before her death … Mrs. Carrie McGetchen of Maine.”

Death would soon become a daily occurrence. The great yellow fever epidemic of 1864 is just around the corner.

Rev. Comings to “dear ones at home,” Mar. 19, 1864

Since the recent Confederate attacks, he is spending a great deal of time visiting wounded and sick soldiers at Hammond Hospital, the Union army’s hospital in Beaufort. The hospital occupies a building that was formerly the Atlantic Hotel, a seaside resort.  “Since the last excitement …  my duties have been altogether too much for me to endure a great while … ” He says that he is hoping to leave Beaufort in April. Sarah wants to stay until June or July.

Rev. Comings to his Sunday school students, April 3, 1864

In gratitude for a donation to his work, he writes the children in his old Sunday school class in East Berkshire, Vermont. In that letter, he tells them how one group of African Americans recently escaped from the Confederacy and reached Beaufort.

“About 10 days ago, some 300 or more of our soldiers went about 40 miles from this in a gunboat, taking with them two small flat-boats, with the design of letting free a large number of slaves, who are kept in bondage.

“A terrible storm came on very soon, and the whole party came very near being lost in the sea. One colored man, who went to manage a flat-boat, was lost. Noble fellow! He would not abandon his boat not even to save his own life, as long as there was the least hope that he might land and give his brethren a chance to escape from slavery. Thus he gave of his life.

“Some of this party succeeded in landing and brought away all the slaves there were on two plantations. In all there 41 men women and children.”

He then informs the children that he used their donation to purchase clothes and other provisions for those people.

Sarah Comings to (illegible), April 10, 1864

She praises the Rev. James Walker Hood for his sermon at a quarterly meeting of a local church — Purvis Chapel presumably.

Rev. Comings to Fanny, April 19, 1864

He is headed back to Vermont, but he is still in Beaufort and waiting for a ship north. He is still referring to African Americans as “darkies.”

 * * *

“SHE MUST AND WOULD LEARN TO READ”

Along with the letters of Elam and Sarah Comings, Oberlin also had a clipping from an anti-slavery newspaper that mentioned the Rev. Comings and an African American woman in Beaufort.

That newspaper, The Morning Star, was published by Free Will Baptists in Dover, New Hampshire. The clipping does not include a date, but the newspaper’s editor, William Burr, visited Beaufort in March 1864.

I am not sure, but Burr apparently traveled with another anti-slavery activist, Ebenezer Knowlton, who was also involved with The Morning Star.

While in Beaufort, they met with Rev. Comings and toured the local African American schools. In the pages of The Morning Star, Knowlton later recounted a story that an African American woman in Beaufort told him about her struggle to learn to read and write while she was still an enslaved laborer.

Her story is very brief, but I think it has a special poignancy. The struggle of enslaved African Americans to get access to books, and most particularly the Bible, and the efforts of slaveholders to keep them from doing so, is one of the central themes in the history of American slavery.

Here is the excerpt from The Morning Star:

“Bro. Comings has just introduced me to a young woman, who he says is one of the most truthful, intelligent and really devoted, he has met among the freed slaves. She told me a few years ago she felt that she must and would learn to read – that she got visitors to read the labels on their trunks to her — then got a primer, which she used to hide under her bonnet in her bandbox. 

“Her master in some way mistrusted that she had learned to read, and one day called her in great haste and said, `Go to the library and bring me the first volume of Hannah Moore.’

(Hannah Moore was an English poet, playwright and religious writer. She lived from 1745 to 1833).

“Being thrown off her guard by his unusual and excited manner, and fearing to disobey his order, she went and brought him the book. 

“`There,’ said he, `Malinda, I thought you had learned to read, now I know you have.’ Then said Malinda to me, ‘he stripped me and whipped me almost to death!’ 

“`O Mr. Knowlton,’ said she, `can I ever be thankful enough … , that my children can now learn to read the Bible without being whipped to death for it?’”

Coastal Review is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe.