Alice’s Ordinary People

Next month the Wilson County Public Library is showing an exceptional film on an “ordinary” person and their struggle for human rights during the Civil Rights Movement. Here is more from the website:

Alice’s life story reads like a history of the movement. Early on she fought the “Willis Wagons.” The second class structures were built to relieve overcrowding in those Chicago schools which served the African American community. Their very existence perpetuated segregation.

In 1966, Dr. King came to Chicago. Alice and her husband James Tregay, marched with him, often at great personal risk. It was at this time that Dr. King joined the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and the Reverend James Bevel to form Operation Breadbasket. Breadbasket fought racism on many fronts, but its main task was jobs for African Americans, particularly from those businesses drawing profits from the African American community.

Under the leadership of Reverend Jackson, the months that Alice and her “ordinary people” spent picketing led to real change. But it was through her Political Education class, that Alice had her most significant impact. Over a four year period, thousands were trained to work in independent political campaigns. This new force was integral to the re-election of Ralph Metcalf to Congress (this time as an independent democrat), to the election of Harold Washington, mayor, and to making Barack Obama, our first African American President.

Alice’s contribution is unique in American history, and an hour program can only tell so much. It is my hope that one day a book will also be written on this important subject.

– Craig Dudnick

Three New Historical Markers in Wilson County

Mercy Hospital. Photo taken by Lisa Henderson.

Ava Gardner’s home in Rock Ridge. Gov. Jim Hunt is pictured 2nd from left.

The first amateur golf championship was held in Wilson in 1961.

Mercy Hospital: Medical Care for African Americans in East Wilson

Medical care in eastern North Carolina was conspicuously absent for African Americans until Dr. Frank S. Hargrave, a black physician,  conveyed property on 504 East Greene Street, where he had been treating black patients since 1905,  to Samuel H. Vick and J.D. Reid for the creation of the Wilson Hospital and Tubercular Home. Money troubles dogged the new hospital for next 17 years, but it still provided care for a growing African American population streaming into Wilson to work in the tobacco, cotton and mercantile industry. In 1929 the hospital was forced to close due to lack of funds. This did not last long however, and in 1930 it was newly incorporated as Mercy Hospital.

Until 1938 the hospital was supported through private donations from local tobacconists, the city of Wilson, and the Duke endowment. In 1938 the trustees sold the hospital to the city of Wilson to obtain a federal grant for $16,000, which allowed the hospital to expand from 25 to 40 beds. Mercy was then sold back to the trustees to obtain a $19,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. This increased its size to fifty beds and enabled the hiring of eight full-time employees.  With the end of segregation and the building of the new Wilson Memorial Hospital, Mercy Hospital closed its doors permanently in 1964 (1).

Dr. Frank S. Hargrave in the center with nurse Henrietta Colvert on the far left and Dr. William A. Mitchener in the 1910’s.

Many black physicians and nurses went through the doors of the historic medical facility, including the Dr. J. F. Cowan and his wife Annie Mae Cowan who came to work there in 1927.  Dr. J. F. Cowan was a graduate of Howard University and was brought to Wilson by hospital trustee, J.D. Reid. It was at the hospital that Dr. Cowan met his future wife, Annie Mae Cowan, who was the first African American woman in Wilson to take the state nursing exam

“Old man Reid, the banker, supervised the hospital,” recalled Annie Mae. “And his wife kept the books.”

When Dr. Cowan arrived, he was n’t very encouraged by the sight of the facilities after being used to the modern medical facilities at Howard Medical School. But they enjoyed their time at the hospital, which was then still called the Wilson Hospital and Tubercular Home.

Annie Mae recalled them having good relations with visiting physicians from Moore-Herring Hospital, which was the white hospital in Wilson, but where African American patients went for surgical procedures. She also remembered a screened in porch installed for tuberculosis patients, but she only remembered one patient suffering from that infectious, bacterial lung disease (2).

The Mercy Hospital Historical Marker will be dedicated at 3:00 PM on Tuesday, May 4.

References

1.Lewis, Necole. “Mercy Hospital: Emergence of the First Black Hospital in Eastern North Carolina.” Unpublished thesis, North Carolina Central University, 1998, pp. 1–47.

2.Railey, Mimi. “Mercy Hospital: Health Care in East Wilson.” Wilson Daily Times, 16 July 1983, p. 1C.

Stagecoach Mary: the Black Cowgirl

America’s Old West was undoubtedly a Wild West before an ex-slave named Mary Fields arrived in 1885 at a small railroad town in present-day Montana. Yet she certainly made things more interesting. One schoolgirl wrote an essay saying: “she drinks whiskey, and she swears, and she is a republican, which makes her a low, foul creature.”

Source: Stagecoach Mary: the Black Cowgirl

African American Program Tonight

London’s Primitive Baptist Church in Ruins

Last week, a patron showed me some photographs that she took of a crumbling London’s Primitive Baptist Church on London Church Road.  The Church, built in about 1895, was moved to this site from Herring Avenue in 1992 to preserve the structure. All has not gone as planned and after a tree fell through the church sometime after 2013, it has been left as a ruin.  The patron that brought me the photos had been trying to get Preservation Wilson to renovate the structure, but they said that it was the landowner’s responsibility.  The church was deeded to the owners of American Museum of Music but after one of them died, the other was unable to take care of the important historic building.  For more on the church, see this post in Black Wide-Awake.

London’s Primitive Baptist Church in better days.

Say Their Names: Reclaiming Wilson’s Slave Past

Join us next month 2/7/2017 @ 7 pm in the WCPL assembly room for Lisa Henderson’s presentation: Say Their Names: Reclaiming Wilson’s Slave Past. If it is anything like her past presentations, it will be stellar.

New Marker for African Americans who fought at the Battle of King’s Mountain

Last weekend, I went camping at King’s Mountain National Park with my son and lots of cousins.  It was a beautiful two days and we hiked on the gorgeous trail around the Revolutionary War battlefield.  While hiking, I noticed a new marker, placed there just a few days before, memorializing three African Americans who fought at the battle: Esaias Bowman, John Broddy and Andrew Ferguson.  When I got home I looked into these three soldiers and found some interesting information, but I found the most interesting one was Andrew Ferguson (1765-1855).

There are two applications that I examined on Fold3, one for a pension and one for bounty land.From his pension/ bounty applications Ferguson  acknowledges that he is colored and born of a free father and free mother.  Andrew states that he and his father, Andrew Perley, were from Dinwiddie County, Virginia and were captured by the British who whipped them with a “cat o’ nine tails”.  They both escaped and joined Nathanael Greene’s regiment, who were in the county at the time. Father and son participated in a good portion of the battles of the southern theater.  Andrew Ferguson relates that he was wounded at Camden in the leg but was able to fight at Ninety-Six, Kings Mountain, Pacolet River, Musgrove’s Mill, Eutaw Springs, Cowpens and  Guilford Courthouse.  It was at Guilford Courthouse where he was seriously wounded in the head and Doctor John Sidney placed a silver plate in the fracture.  Andrew was discharged shortly after Cornwallis’ defeat at Yorktown.

The bounty letter also mentions that he was in the Battle of Brandywine in Pennsylvania and in the pension application there is a reference to the notorious Tory, Bill Cunningham, also known as bloody Bill Cunningham (for  the massacres of patriot militia he perpetrated in South Carolina).  He shot and killed an American near Andrew, then escaped.

Andrew Ferguson was given a small pension and would move to Monroe County, Indiana sometime after 1820. Both he and his wife were very poor and the first pension letter was in 1838 when he was 73.  The bounty letter was in 1851.  Then he wrote another one in 1855 when he was supposedly 90 years old!  He finally received his bounty for 160 acres in 1856, but by then he and his wife had already died without heirs.

Andrew Ferguson’s pension letter in 1838.

Andrew Ferguson’s first bounty letter in 1851

Andrew received 20 dollars a year.

Unfortunately his land bounty of 160 acres came too late.

The Baker Family, 1914

I came across this image in a crumbling newspaper of James Baker and his family on their farm on Old Stantonsburg Road in 1914. Five children and one dog.

Using Deeds to Discover Your Enslaved Ancestors Part 2: Henderson Bagley

Recently a man and his son visited from Wake County looking for information on their enslaved and later freed ancestor, Henderson Bagley.  I was not there when they visited unfortunately, but I have kept in touch  with them over the phone and through email trying to decipher the enigmatic past of Henderson Bagley.

The marriage of Henderson Bagley and Hana Williams. Taken from Family Search.

On 22 August 1866 Henderson Bagley and Hana Williams registered their cohabitation in Wilson.  According to the 1870 census, Henderson Bagley  was listed as  living in Chesterfield, Nash County  with his five children and no wife.  In 1880, Henderson and four of his children were living in  Old Fields Township in Wilson County.

The Bagley family in the 1870 Census. Taken from Ancestry.com

I thought that the name Henderson was so unique that if I found it in a record as an enslaved person’s name, it would be a good chance that it would be Henderson Bagley.  But the name was more ubiquitous than I realized.  The name Henderson  appears several times in Nash County, NC, Division of Estate Slaves  1829-1861, abstracted by Timothy W. Rackley, as the name of a slave owned by the Boddie family.

 

 

In Johnston County deed books I found eight different entries of a slave (or several) named Henderson.  According to the 1870 census, Henderson was born in about 1830, therefore the most promising deed listed here  is from 14 March 1837, where they list a seven year old boy named Henderson.

In a Wilson County will I found a record that lists an enslaved person named Henderson.  The will is from 1862 and I would have hoped that it  listed Hana or one of their older children from the census, but no such luck.

This image is from “Abstracts of Wills, Wilson County, NC 1855-1899” by Robert Boykin

Although I found not a few entries that listed a man named Henderson in deeds, wills and estate records, it is difficult to determine if any of them are the Henderson Bagley that I was searching for.  Not often is the research as cut and dry as it was with Mariah and Bryant Pender from my earlier post.  But the fact that I found an enslaved man (or men) named in the records 14 times is a great indicator of how useful deeds, wills and estate records can be used to good effect.

Lisa Henderson (no relation) has also posted some info about Henderson Bagley on her blog.