You know, we carried on. That applies to Southern history, to slave history. login . Actually, Uncle Isaac sent her off because he didnt want her around after he married.. Bettie was sold to a man named Reed, and I was sold and carried to New Orleans and from there to Texas. I have sold out all my negroes to one man for eight thousand dollars! he told his wife. Looking for any information about the ancestors and descendents of John Armfield.I am descended through his daughter, Nancy Ann Armfield. No, thats not true, says Erin Greenwald, a curator at the Historic New Orleans Collection. Can you put it aside? After the women came the big wagonssix or seven in all. In Staunton, the Visitor Center. I sold your fancy girl Alice for $800, Franklin wrote to Rice Ballard, a partner then in Richmond. 1695 ENG d. 1792 NC 10/07/99 Re: John Armfield b. Part of the reason theyre successful is they work well together: Each understands the others strengths, they trust and respect each other., We cannot be forgetting: Twilight marchers in Alexandria evoke the pain of enslaved thousands. To get rid of their attitudes.. They created a modern machinery to support the business of human trafficking.. No. A hundred yards from Forks of the Road, there is a low brick bridge across a narrow creek. Advertising Notice They were discovered, and it caused a panic. Jack Keys children at Fairvue included Lucien Key, whose children included a woman named Ruby Key Hall. Historians know about the Slave Trail. I wrote the text for four of the markers, he says, sitting on a bench and looking over the grass. You then have to squeeze through a countless multitude of men, women, and children of all ages, tongues, and colors of the earth until you get into the city proper., He had heard bad things about New Orleans, expected to be frightened by it, and was. Both institutions broke attendance records. Franklin divided his retirement between a large mansion he built in Tennessee and several Louisiana plantations he acquired over the course of his career. The man in the South who has done the most to call attention to the Slave Trail was born in Natchez in 1940. In 1832, at age 43, supremely rich from 20 years as a long-distance trader, Franklin built a big house on 2,000 acres outside Gallatin. Most slave traders at that time were considered common and uncouth, with no social graces. A typical display placed an 8-year-old girl on the left end of a line, and then ten people like stair steps up to the right end, ending with a 30-year-old woman, who might be the first girls mother. This year, she curated an exhibition at the Historic New Orleans Collection, Purchased Lives: New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade, 1808-1865.. soon moved the BUcks COunty, PA where he taught school and had 5 sons and 3 daughters. What to do or where to go I know notI am surrounded by difficulty, he brooded. She points to a document from the steamerHibernia, which arrived from Louisville in 1831. Buyers looked at the people, took them inside, made them undress, studied their teeth, told them to dance, asked them about their work, and, most important, looked at their backs. No answer, despite several cars in the drive. There were others. Born in 1797 to lapsed Quakers who farmed several hundred acres in North Carolina and owned a small number of enslaved people, Armfield spent his early adulthood pursuing a variety of unsuccessful ventures, including a small mercantile shop which he was forced to abandon after his affair. So it is likely they were force-marched from Albemarle County, Virginia, to Louisville, and then boarded a steamer downriver to here. She waves a hand toward the Mississippi levee two blocks away. And you see a lot of records in which there are an unusual number of 10-year-olds alone. Recently, Laise tells me, she stumbled on evidence that in the 1820s a large number of people went up for sale at Belle Grove. The tan clapboard housefolding chairs and a hammock in the front yard, cinder blocks and planks for front stepsoverflows inside with books, LPs, folk art, old newspapers, knickknacks, clothes in piles and unidentifiable hoards of objects. We werent there. Are we accountable? At the time, John Armfield was lacking in purpose: Shiftless and footloose, he had recently been chased away from a county in North Carolina for fathering a child out of wedlock, Rothman said. They record the names, heights, ages, sex and coloration as determined by the person looking at them. It is 8 p.m., and the sun is failing. 1730 including research + descendants + more in the free family tree community. The three sisters had been taken from their parents, as had Pleasant, Mitchell and Samson. Golden Plains (Plantation : Mississippi) Her name was Hermina. Why does no one know their names? With that signal from Natchez, Armfield began vacuuming up people from the Virginia countryside. I want to resurrect the history of the enslavement trade, and for 20 years, that is where Ive focused.. While enslaved people waited in Franklin and Armfields holding pen in Alexandria, the two men most likely adopted classic techniques employed by slave traders to enhance enslaved peoples salability, McInnis said. His four children all died before they grew up. It would have been the easiest thing to do. The site is empty but for the five markers, paid for by the City of Natchez. My direct ancestor is Isaacs brother James. It is an abbreviation, to accommodate people.. Destructive 'Super Pigs' From Canada Threaten the Northern U.S. To my recollection my fathers name was Joseph, and my mothers Milly, my brothers Anthony, and my sisters Maria.My name was Annie Ferrill, but my owners changed my name. I have not seen him for ten years. This is the only child I have and I desire to find him much. The women wore calico dresses and white aprons and a pink ribbon at the neck with hair carefully braided. His path to the slave trade was less clear-cut than Franklins. Randolph once wrote a friend to complain that the road was thronged with droves of these wretches & the human carcass-butchers, who drive them on the hoof to market. Comparing Virginia to a stop on the West African slave trade, Randolph sighed, One might almost fancy oneself on the road to Calabar.. It was not an easy matter to place an ad. And Ill tell you what nobody ever talks about. Around the 20th of that month the caravan began to assemble in front of the companys offices in Alexandria, at 1315 Duke Street. 1695 ENG d. 1792 NC Julie Avedikian 2/13/00 Re: John Armfield b. Surnames; Search People; Sometimes, as in Balls case, the chain ran through an iron neck collar. We have been stopped for two days by the breaking up of turnpikes and bridges. I am president of the Sumner County Hysterical Society, he cracks, the only place you get respect for knowing a lot of dead people.. It worked like this: Relying on a network of headhunters spread across Virginia, Maryland and the District, Armfield would round up enslaved people, holding them in an open-air pen behind the house in Alexandria or sometimes in its crowded, filthy basement until hed amassed a sufficient number: usually between 100 and 200. The old railroad station, a wooden building with deep eaves, is a used-record store. He suspects the abuse, which had no financial purpose, stemmed from a desire for raw power: They did it because they could, and they felt like it.. Maurie McInnis, a historian and vice provost at the University of Virginia, who curated the Richmond exhibit, stood in front of a slave dealers red flag that she tracked down in Charleston, South Carolina, where it had lain unseen in a box for more than 50 years. His trip on the Slave Trail, like most others, would end in Natchez and New Orleans. He did it, but it is what it is. John's three married daughters had remained in Pennsylvania. When I grew up, we were servanted. Reading lights look like converted oil lamps. In NC by 1760 - aound then came to NC with son William (oldest ), and 20 other men exploring. I dont spare anything. His book was not much readit had a due-date notice from 50 years agobut in it Andrews described the scene as Armfield directed the loading for an enormous journey. Address me at Morales, Jackson Co., Texas.Mary Haynes.. The public recognition for Forks of the Road is for the ancestors who cannot speak for themselves.. Hannah Cole was one of them, maybe the first. A few bring up their own ethnic lore. Its been six years since Rothman began his research, crisscrossing the country to scour old documents such as property transactions in Louisiana, court cases in Mississippi, ship manifests in Alexandria. That would be more than $440 million today.. It was bigger than the wagon-train migration to the West, beloved of American lore. Then she came to me and said, Aint you my child? Glenn recalled. He was born in 1789 to a wealthy planter family in Tennessee that owned a significant number of enslaved people, according to Rothman. The drama of a million individuals going so far from their homes changed the country. Take the ashes and get off my land., The intent was to keep that history buried, McQuinn says today. It is a refrain among Southern whites who remain emotionally attached to the plantation daysthat one in 1,000 slaveholders who were black vindicates in some fashion 999 who were not. The floor is a marble mosaic. Behind the men were the women and girls, another hundred. Descendants of a slave trading family come to Sewanee to search for their history and find it tangled up with the University's own painful truth about its founding. In fact, it is more your story than it is mine.. Historic Structures Report The Historic Structures Report (HSR) for 1315 Duke Street, the Freedom House Museum, was formally presented by SmithGroup on October 28, 2021. I dont feel anything per se, she says, benignly. Here it is. Watching the things burn. And I think something like that has happened over and again, symbolically.. About August 25, they reached Winchester and turned south, entering the Shenandoah Valley. Boxley is 75. Florence Hall Blair, born and raised in Nashville, is 73, a retired nurse. Katrina was cataclysmic, and it changed the way people thought about our collective history, Greenwald says. The three sisters, Sarah Ann, Louisa and Lucy, also wanted to be sold together, which was not likely to happen, and they knew it. This is the oldest settled portion of the state and bears the appearance of great comfort, refinement and elegance, Waller wrote. The companys agents sent people down to Franklin & Armfields slavepens (another word that has disappeared) in Alexandria, just nine miles south of the U.S. Capitol: seamstresses, nurses, valets, field hands, hostlers, carpenters, cooks, houseboys, coachmen, laundresses, boatmen. The whole amount of sales for the twentythe entire group that had come with him from Virginiais $12,675. (About $400,000 now.) While their business strategy was not especially innovative, it was conducted on a scale bigger and better than anyone else, Rothman said. For almost everyone, the break was permanent, the grief everlasting. John's three married daughters had rem ained in Pennsylvania. His brothers never got back into the slave trade, but Isaac really decides this is going to be his game: Hes good at it, he likes it, he can make money at it, he sticks with it, Rothman said. Multiply that by 200. Franklin went to the theater with other rich whites and threw dinner parties, earning a reputation as a gregarious host with the best liquors, Rothman said. They developed cruel stratagems to boost their bottom line: For example, they designated less space per person [on their ships] than the trans-Atlantic slave trade vessels did, Schermerhorn said. He regularly acts as a mediator with respect to family provision claims. The cut is about 12 feet wide, with shallow ditches on each side. Robert Glenn was sold at age 8 from his mother and father in North Carolina and spent the rest of his childhood in Kentucky. Also, an elderly black woman named Charity, whom he and Sarah had kept at home, knowing that no one would offer money for her. The coffle headed west out of Alexandria. These were stores and taverns with places to sleep in the back. During the last ten years, a number of themEdward Baptist, Steven Deyle, Robert Gudmestad, Walter Johnson, Joshua Rothman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Michael Tadman and othershave been writing the million-person-migration back into view. This movement lasted longer and grabbed up more people than any other migration in North America before 1900. I feel a certain detachment from it, I suppose. But I recognize the melody, and let the song pass. He whiled away his final years managing his estates and spending time with his three children and wife, Adelicia Hayes, whom records indicate he adored. Thereand this is conjecture, based on what happened to other gangshalf of the big gang might have been sold. I do not believe that black people were responsible for their own enslavement, or that African-Americans should be grateful for slavery because they are better off than West Africans, or that a black man was author of the slave system. This story is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine. We studied hundreds of shipping manifests and compiled data on 70,000 individuals. The house bursts with 19th-century chairs, rugs, settees, tables and pictures. I made a vow that I was going to North Carolina and see my mother if she was still living. John Armfield Barrister and Mediator John specialises in estate litigation. Cookie Settings, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia, Illustrated map by Laszlo Kubinyi. Daniel is pleasant, happy to talk about his hardscrabble days. In 1827, it was 1,359. This letter from 1834 held riches, and I will bring them out by land was, for me, the invaluable line: It referred to a forced march overland from the fields of Virginia to the slave auctions in Natchez and New Orleans. We cannot be responsible, should not feel like were responsible. Not long ago I was reading some old letters at the library of the University of North Carolina, doing a little unearthing of my own. We would like to see it, if possible. The man at the door, who I have to assume was from the slaveholding side, said, Sure, well give it to you., The man went into his house and came back out with some papers in his hands. I think Franklin was a cruel individual, but he was human. He was an amateur slave trader, not a pro like Armfield, and his journey, though from another year, is even better documented. They placed ads in local newspapers seeking enslaved people almost every single day they remained in business. Take the Bible. Never heard of it. The current names of the streets that form the ForksLiberty Road and DEvereaux Drivediffer from the old ones. Samuel Garland said something about negro trading that makes me infer the Church is displeased with me. All these people came from Virginia, she says. 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