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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Reflections on Research: Race and the Virginia Blue Ridge
Audrey Horning
Accepted: 29 January 2020
#The Author(s) 2021
Abstract In the 1930s, Shenandoah National Park was
established in the Virginia Blue Ridge through the dis-
placement of nearly 500 white families. In recent de-
cades, my scholarship and that of others focused upon
the manner in which hackneyed stereotypes about back-
ward mountaineers were mobilized to garner public
support for the condemnation of family farms and, in
some cases, the institutionalization, sterilization, and
incarceration of some of the most impoverished. But,
in focusing solely upon the 20th century and the impacts
on the white displaced, this research has perpetrated
structural violence by obscuring the role of race and
racism in the wider Blue Ridge. Archaeological and
documentary evidence from the 1990s National Park
Service–funded “Survey of Rural Mountain Settlement”
is reexamined and reconsidered to begin the process of
redressingthe silencing of African American histories in
the Blue Ridge and surrounding valley and piedmont
regions.
Resumen En la década de los 1930, el Parque Nacional
Shenandoah se estableció en la cordillera Azul de Vir-
ginia, mediante el desplazamiento de casi 500 familias
blancas. En las últimas décadas, mi investigación y la de
otros se centraron en la forma en que se movilizaron los
estereotipos trillados sobre los montañistas atrasados para
obtener apoyo público para la condena de las granjas
familiares y, en algunos casos, la institucionalización,
esterilización y encarcelamiento de algunos de los
habitantes más empobrecidos. Pero, al centrarse
únicamente en el siglo XX y los impactos en los
desplazados blancos, esta investigación ha perpetrado la
violencia estructural al oscurecer el papel de la raza y el
racismo en la cordillera Azul más amplia. La evidencia
arqueológica y documental de la “Encuesta de
asentamientos rurales de montaña”financiada por el
Servicio de Parques Nacionales de la década de 1990 es
reexaminada y reconsiderada para comenzar el proceso
de corregir el silenciamiento de las historias
afroamericanas en la cordillera Azul y las regiones
circundantes de valles y piedemonte.
Résumé Dans les années 1930, le parc national de Shen-
andoah a été établi dans le Blue Ridge de Virginie
entraînant le déplacement d'environ 500 familles blanches.
Au cours des récentes décennies, ma recherche et celle
d'autres chercheurs s'est intéressée à la manière dont les
stéréotypes galvaudés relatifs aux habitants attardés des
montagnes ont été mobilisés pour recueillir le soutien du
public à l'appui d'une condamnation des fermes familiales
et, dans certains cas, du placement en institution, de la
stérilisation et de l'incarcération de certains parmi les plus
pauvres. Mais cette recherche axée uniquement sur le
20ème siècle et les conséquences pour les populations
blanches déplacées, a perpétré une violence structurelle
en dissimulant le rôle de la race et du racisme dans la
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s41636-021-00295-3
A. Horning (*)
Department of Anthropology, William and Mary, Williamsburg,
VA 23186, U.S.A.
e-mail: ajhorn@wm.edu
A. Horning
Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast University Road, Belfast BT7
1NN, UK
région plus vaste du Blue Ridge. Les preuves
archéologiques et documentaires issues de l’« Étude du
peuplement des montagnes rurales » financée dans les
années 1990 par le Service des Parcs nationaux, sont
réexaminées et reconsidérées pour initier le processus
correctif de la mise sous silence des histoires africaines-
américaines du Blue Ridge et des régions environnantes
de la vallée et du piedmont.
Keywords racism .Shenandoah National Park .
displacement .Blue Ridge
Introduction
Honesty and self-reflection must be at the core of ethical
archaeological practice. This is uncontroversial as a
principle, but rather more challenging in practice, par-
ticularly when we archaeologists take the time to look
back at our own work as well as position ourselves in the
lived present. In the discussion that follows, I revisit a
project that I conducted in the Virginia Blue Ridge in the
1990s and reconsider the ethical implications of my own
research. An honest self-critique highlights unintended
failures in my approach and illuminates my own culpa-
bility in amplifying one narrative over another. As
scholars of the past, we always choose what narratives
we wish to emphasize, very often motivated by social-
justice issues. That is precisely what I thought I was
doing at the time. Instead, I implicated myself in the
perpetuation of structural violence. Ongoing self-
reflection has allowed me to reorient my perspective
and initiate a revised program of research to addresses
past erasures toward producing a much more holistic,
critical, and inclusive narrative.
The project was a multiyear examination of historical
settlement and 20th-century displacement in the Virgin-
ia Blue Ridge, focusing upon three historical communi-
ties, each of which had been displaced through the
creation of Shenandoah National Park in the 1930s.
Shenandoah National Park encompasses an approxi-
mately 280 sq. mi. portion of the Blue Ridge Mountains
in northwestern Virginia. Long celebrated for its natural
wonders, including complex geology, native flora, and
thriving wildlife, the lands incorporated within the na-
tional park had also been home to human populations
for at least 10,000 years. By the time of park establish-
ment (the park was officially dedicated in 1936 follow-
ing a decade of planning), approximately 500 European
American families had been displaced. They left behind
evidence of their homes, farms, businesses, schools,
churches, and cemeteries, often superimposed on a
dense record of Native American activity. While many
of the abandoned buildings were dismantled, others
were merely left to decay. Although there was a move-
ment at the time of park creation to retain and interpret a
small selection of historical buildings in the park, the
effort faltered and was forgotten. Fields and roads soon
became overgrown, first with underbrush and eventual-
ly with mixed hardwoods. In the parlance of the Nation-
al Park Service management, Shenandoah was rendered
“natural”and administered as such (Horning 1998;
Krumenaker 1998).
Management priorities changed, and, in the 1990s, as
part of a broader national effort to assess the presence and
condition of archaeological resources across federal
lands, funding was made available for cultural resource
work in Shenandoah. I was privileged to take the lead on
two projects funded by the National Park Service through
a cooperative agreement with the Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation. One was an “Overview and Assessment”of
all known archaeological resources in the park (Horning
2007), and the other was the multiyear “Survey of Rural
Mountain Settlement”(Horning 1998,1999,2000a,
2000b,2001,2002,2004). It is this latter project that I
want to revisit and reconsider. The new light that I wish to
cast on this project and the historical archaeology of the
park more broadly is one that illuminates the realities of
racism in the broader park region and the impact of
structural violence in shaping the histories of settlement,
of displacement, and of scholarship on the Blue Ridge as
it has come to be defined by a narrow focus on the
Shenandoah National Park case. I argue that an insidious,
if unintended, outcome of park creation has been the
erasure of the African American history of the region.
This is a process long in the making. Two entries for the
year 1925 in a popular history of Madison County serve
as a stark reminder of the concomitant rise of anti-black
sentiment with the movement for the park: “The first
meeting concerning the creation of a national park in
the Blue Ridge was held. ... Ku Klux Klan held a meet-
ing”(Davis 1977:303). Subsequent considerations of
park-area history have focused on the experiences of
European Americans, because the whiteness of the early
20th-century displaced inhabitants of the park area has
been taken to mean that the entirety of the history of the
Blue Ridge is, de facto, a white history. This presumption
is at odds with both broader regional experiences and the
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specifics of the 18th- and 19th-century archaeological
and historical evidence from the park itself. In short, this
article begins the process of addressing the African
American history of the Shenandoah National Park re-
gion by confronting its historical silencing. But, before
addressing this critique, a bit of background is required.
Background
The focus of the “Survey of Rural Mountain Settlement”
was on Nicholson, Corbin, and Weakley hollows, which
lie in the park’s central district within Madison and
Rappahannock counties (Fig. 1). These three hollows
had been the subject of a 1933 pseudo-scholarly study,
Hollow Folk, by the University of Chicago psychologist
and eugenicist Mandel Sherman writing with a
Washington-based reporter, Thomas Henry. The book
purported to analyze the cultural backwardness of the
inhabitants and drew upon decades of tropes about
isolated, degenerate hillbillies to galvanize public opin-
ion in favor of removal of the residents. Sensationalized
descriptions emphasized lack of education, poverty, and
what were presented as genetically based character
flaws (Sherman and Key 1929,1932; Sherman and
Henry 1933). Ultimately, over 4,000 individual land
tracts were purchased or condemned by the Common-
wealth of Virginia and presented to the federal govern-
ment for the park (Engle and Janney 1997). In the
1990s, when I began the research, local memories about
displacement were very strong (and they remain so to
this day), even as the physical traces of habitation lay
obscured in the hardwood forests. But what remained
visible on the ground clearly challenged the conclusions
of Hollow Folk and the rhetoric of park boosters. Sur-
face artifacts, in particular, spoke to engagement with
regional and national commercial networks in the form
of abundant tin cans, pharmaceutical and cosmetic bot-
tles, ready-made clothing and shoe fragments, and even
automobile parts. Far from living in a “medieval age”
(Sizer 1932:n.p.), as described at the time, mountain
residents engaged with the popular culture of the
1930s, evidenced most graphically by the archaeologi-
cal recovery of fragments 78 rpm records and abundant
toys, including a Buck Rogers–style ray gun and a
porcelaneous Steamboat Willie (aka early “Mickey
Mouse”)figurine(Horning2019).
In addition to mobilizing the archaeologicalrecord to
challenge the “Dogpatch”version of history peddled by
Sherman and Henry, I was interested in piecing together
the full historical settlement of the three hollows. Along-
side the extensive field survey of 61 historical sites,
surface collecting and subsurface testing on a sample
of those sites, and ethnographic research with the
displaced and their descendants, I researched the full
property histories of each land tract within the ca. 2,500
ac. study area. Reconstructing property histories over
several hundred years by thumbing through deed books
in three different county courthouses was as exciting to
me as discovering a collapsed stone chimney on the
same piece of land I was tracing in the records. The
searches went hand in hand, one informing the other,
and were often disrupted in unexpected ways through
conversations and interviews with former occupants,
providing rich insights on the lived experience of life
in the hollows. Sometimes the documentary archives
remained frustratingly silent. Other times the records
yielded remarkable surprises, as was the case with a
chance discovery of a small, loose piece of paper stuck
in an unrelated set of chancery papers in the Madison
County courthouse that provided rare (if incomplete)
insight into family and community dynamics in the early
19th-century hollows. The story associated with that
scrap of paper serves as a prelude to and pivot point
for the reconsideration of race, racism, and inequality in
the Shenandoah National Park region that follows.
A Family Tale
According to the scrap of paper, dated 18 July 1818,
Weakley Hollow resident William Hurt entered an
agreement with William Taylor and Thomas Chapman,
“overseers of the poor,”to bindJames Corbin (aged 18),
Cornelius Corbin (aged 16), Eveona Corbin (aged 14),
Jefferson Corbin (aged 12), Ebbalina Corbin (aged 10),
Andrew Corbin (aged 9), Edwin Corbin (aged 7), Israel
Corbin (aged 6), William Corbin (aged 4), and Mary
Corbin (aged 1) “to be an apprentices with him the said
William Hurt”until the boys reached the age of 20 and
the girls 18 (Madison County Chancery Records 1818).
The boys were to be trained as farmers, while the girls
were to learn spinning and weaving. Furthermore, Hurt
agreed to “teach or cause to be taught to the said Chil-
dren reading writing and common arithmetic including
the rule of three and will moreover pay to the said
children the sum of twelve dollars each at the expiration
of the aforesaid term.”William Hurt was in a strong
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position to fulfill his promises, not only being the son of
a landowner, but from a slaveholding family. The sig-
nificance of Hurt’s familiarity with the institution of
slavery provides my departure point for discussion in
the second half of this article. I deliberately prioritize the
tale of the Hurt family in this first section to shape my
later consideration of archival erasure and a reframing of
understandings of hollows life.
I pondered long and hard over the question of why
William Hurt would take in 10 children. Only two
Corbin households were listed as residing in Madison
County in 1810: Hannah Corbin, heading up a house-
hold of five females (one >45, one >25, one 16–25, one
10–15, and one <10 years of age), and John Corbin
heading up a household of two: himself and amale aged
16–25. A further 18 Corbin households were enumerat-
ed for adjacent Culpeper County (U.S. Bureau of the
Census 1810). Unfortunately, the only names recorded
on the federal census of that year are those of the head of
household. By 1820, there were 4 Corbin households in
Madison County, but with no easily discernible direct
relationship to the 10 children. Three of the 1820 Mad-
ison County Corbin households were composed of
young families, while the fourth consisted of Thomas
Corbin (aged >45) and a female >45, presumably his
wife (no name was recorded) (U.S. Bureau of the
Census 1820). Perhaps the children were those of
Thomas Corbin and his wife, if they were unable to look
after them, or the children may have been the offspring
of Reuben Corbin of Culpeper County. His listing in the
1810 census (eight years before the indentures) matches
with the ages of the Corbin children named in the
indentures; namely (in 1810), three boys and two girls
under age 10. But, as a Culpeper County resident, why
would his children become the responsibility of the
Madison County overseers of the poor?
I found a partial answer in the marriage records,
which revealed that a little over a month after the ap-
prenticeships were agreed––on 8 September 1818––
William married one Fannie Corbin, thenceforward re-
ferred to as “Frances.”The names of her parents were
not recorded. Were the 10 children hers? or perhaps
Fig. 1 Hollows study area,
Shenandoah National Park,
Virginia (Horning 2002:132).
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siblings? Did she hold out on agreeing to marriage until
the children were given legal status and support? Cer-
tainly a family relationship is implied, and ultimately the
10 children became more than mere apprentices to Wil-
liam Hurt. Long after the expiration of agreed terms of
their apprenticeships, each was left a substantial bequest
in his will (written in 1834, proved in 1843), where they
were specifically referred to as his children (Madison
County Will Book 1834). For example, the will speci-
fied: “I give my wife Frances and son Israel the house
tract, as it is my wish that they should farm together.”
Israel (now with the surname of Hurt) appears to have
been a favorite, as he was also named as executor of
Hurt’s estate. James and Jefferson were each granted
100 ac. and their houses on those lands, Andrew was left
$100, while Cornelius and Edwin each received $50.
Ebbalina (now Ramsbottom) received the remaining
part of Hurt’s“lower tract,”while Eveony (now Brad-
ley) and Mary received $100 each (Madison County
Will Book 1834).
Israel Hurt followed his father’s wishes, remaining
on the land tract first acquired by the Hurt family in the
late 18th century. Hurt owned 171 ac. in Weakley
Hollow, land first patented in 1750 by the first European
American settler in the hollow, Archibald Dick. At the
time of park creation, a six-room, log-and-frame home
described as dating back to the time of the Dick patent
still stood on the land, occupied by the erudite postmas-
ter William Brown, who was immortalized reading a
book in his study in a photograph by the Farm Security
Administration photographer Arthur Rothstein (1935)
(Fig. 2)—the antithesis of a backward mountain man.
But I digress. In addition to materials directly related to
Postmaster Brown’s residency, subsurface testing on the
Brown-Hurt-Dick property stretched back to the initial
Hurt occupation, given the presence of stem fragments
from imported white ball-clay tobacco pipes and sherds
of creamware and pearlware.
In 1850, this 18th-century dwelling was home to
Israel Hurt and his new family. In that year he married
25-year-old Sarah (Susan) Jones, who brought a 7-year-
old boy, Montella Jones (his relationship to Susan is
unclear in the records), into the Hurt family home (Vogt
and Kethley 2011:43). In 1853, a daughternamed Susan
Frances was born to Israel and Susan. But when Susan
Frances was just five years old her father Israel died
intestate, having been predeceased by his wife (Madison
County Will Book 1858; U.S. Bureau of the Census
1860b). Circumstantial evidence, including naming
practices, suggests that Susan may have died in child-
birth. In any event, young Susan Frances went to live
with her aunt Eveony (Corbin Hurt) Bradley and uncle
William Bradley. Montella Jones was sent away. The
1860 census lists him in the Genkins household of
Clarksburg, Virginia, presumably as an apprentice or a
laborer (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1860a).
An inventory of Israel Hurt’s goods indicates that the
ancestral Hurt home was filled with an array of furniture
(beds, tables, chairs, trunks, a desk, and a bookcase),
linens, books (including two atlases), two sets of dishes,
a clock, a churn, looms, and casks of wine, brandy, and
vinegar; while the barns and outbuildings housed horses
and tack, livestock, a carriage and a farm wagon, an
apple mill, a still, a pistol and a rifle, woodworking
tools, a pocketknife, a wheat fan, plows, corn, cabbages,
and other crops (Madison County Will Book 1858). The
sale of Israel Hurt’s property was attended by neighbors
from the surrounding hollows, their purchases speaking
eloquently of the circulation of objects through localized
kin and community networks (Horning 2004:84–85).
Unfortunately, the sale was insufficient to clear Hurt’s
debts, precipitating a family squabble over rights to his
land and money to be provided to care for the orphaned
Susan Frances. This dispute is outlined in excruciating
detail in a 210-page-thick chancery file (Madison
County Chancery Orders 1887). The child was “entirely
dependent upon an aunt”(Eveony Hurt Bradley), de-
scribed as “greatly inconvenienced”by “the support of
her niece”(Madison County Chancery Orders 1887:4).
Meanwhile, the Hurt farm was left “unimproved,”and
the house fell into a dilapidated state (Madison County
Chancery Orders 1887:4). Ultimately, the Israel Hurt
property was sold off to settle the suit.
Reflection
I found piecing together stories, such as that of the
Corbin-Hurt family, and what those stories said about
family and community relations, as well as the role of
litigation in 19th-century rural life, absolutely fascinat-
ing. I could imagine myself to be a proper historian. But
I really got involved in the research because of the
archaeology and how it contradicted lazy stereotypes
about poor mountain whites. I was incensed at the
treatment of the displaced and furious that narratives
about the people of the Blue Ridge overlooked the
obvious evidence lying on the ground. I wrote and
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talked a lot about how the material culture belied ste-
reotypes, e.g., Horning (2001). I was humbled by my
conversations with the displaced and their families, and
worked hard to restore to them some dignity through
bringing to light the archival and archaeological evi-
dence. But, in so doing, I also added to what seems to
be an industry of examining the Blue Ridge experience
from the lens of displacement; see, e.g., Gregg (2010),
Perdue and Martin-Perdue (1979–1980), and Powell
(2007,2009,2013). The stories of the historical Blue
Ridge are now always about its end, not its beginning,
negotiations, and nuances. When William Hurt adopted
the Corbin children, he did so not knowing that some of
the other Corbin descendants would be forcibly re-
moved from their families, hauled off to the Virginia
State Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded in
Lynchburg, and forcibly sterilized (Lombardo 2008;
Powell 2013). This is a grim legacy of the park-
creation movement, when poor whites became the target
of eugenicists. But this future is not one that could have
been anticipated in the early 19th century, particularly
not by William Hurt, conditioned by the racial hierar-
chies of Virginia slave society. What I missed at the
time, as I pondered the construction(s) of whiteness and
explored the othering of Southern mountain whites, is
how this particular narrative of displacement and of the
Blue Ridge doubly dispossessed the many African
Americans who were also part of the story of the hol-
lows, particularly in the earliest years of historical
settlement.
Racism and Research
The African American history of the Shenandoah National
Park vicinity has been willfully forgotten in dominant
regional narratives, much as it has been overlooked or
deemphasized elsewhere in the southern Appalachians;
see Barnes (2011), Dunaway (1995), Silber (2001), and
Inscoe (1994,2001). Because all of the directly displaced
park families were identified as white, the existence of
African American landowners in the park region has elic-
ited little comment. Park records indicate that an 812 ac.
parcel of park land in Augusta County (not then inhabited)
was owned by the heirs of the estate of John West, who was
identified as African American (State Commission on
Fig. 2 Interior of Postmaster Brown's home at Old Rag, Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, 1935 (Rothstein 1935).
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Conservation and Development Land Records 1869–
1995;Lambert1989:178). Others, including members of
the Barber, Blair, Blakey, Jones, and Simmons families
owned lands within the original planned extent of the park
before its size was reduced from an original 321,000 ac. to
the final 176,429 ac. (Engle 1998b:10n7; Powell
2007:174n22). These African American families may have
been the minority at the time of park establishment, but it is
crucial to note that the early 20th-century population of the
park area itself was less diverse than it had been during the
century and a half beforehand, and less diverse than was all
of the surrounding region in the early 20th century––a
region in which park people were fully enmeshed. To
generalize in the present about the Blue Ridge experience
relying only on evidence from within the 1930s park
boundaries is to artificially separate and obscure the reali-
ties of the past, a past in which white Blue Ridge commu-
nities were dependent upon (and at times full participants
within) the slave-based economy as well as wholly impli-
cated in the racist realities of postbellum Jim Crow Virgin-
ia. Those realities would play out in very visible ways in the
early years of the park itself, when recreational facilities
were segregated in deference to Virginia’sracistlaws,but
in violation of National Park Service policy (Lambert
1989:266; Engle 1998a:35).
Trying to recapture the long-overlooked African
American history of the Blue Ridge is part of a larger
regional dynamic whereby the presence of slavery has
been intentionally deemphasized and downplayed. Ann
Denkler (2001) examined nearby Luray, Page County,
and in ethnographic interviews with local white citizens
was repeatedly told that there was little to no history of
enslavement or of historical black communities: “[O]ver
and over, my White informants and written sources
indicated that African Americans were not here in great
numbers,”running counter to the continuing existence
of a geographically segregated African American pop-
ulation within the town. Denkler highlights a notation
for “Darktown”on an 1885 town map corresponding to
an area on the western side of 21st-century Luray that
remains primarily African American (Denkler 2001:61).
The work of Shenandoah Valley historian John Way-
land, writing in 1957, set the tone for this avoidance of
any discussion about slavery or the contributions of
African Americans to valley life:
In speaking of the various race elements, we must
not overlook the Negroes. They have never been
numerous in the Shenandoah Valley. ... The
Germans, as a rule, were opposed to
slavery—very few of them had slaves. The
Quakers, too, opposed it. The majority of slaves
in the Valley were held by the English from east of
the ridge and by the Scotch-Irish, but even among
them slaves were by no means numerous. ... From
the days of the first settlement the majority of the
families lived on rather small farms and did their
own work. (Wayland 1989:83)
Wayland clearly wished to promote what has become
the prevailing trope of the ShenandoahValley—that of a
prototypical American landscape, replete with farmers
engaged in small-scale agricultural production,
entwined in a close-knit economic and social relation-
ship with their neighbors and kin, and sharing in a rich
ethnic heritage. This view, which, in promoting white
self-sufficiency, aims to absolve valley inhabitants of
any responsibility for slavery and racism, is not support-
ed by the evidence.
In the 1760s, 10% of the Shenandoah Valley farm-
ing families owned enslaved workers, with a higher
concentration of slave owning in the lower (northern)
valley adjacent to the area that would become Shen-
andoah National Park. By 1783, 38% of households in
Frederick County, just north of the park, included
enslaved people, compared to 22% in the upper valley
in 1782 (Mitchell 1972:484). The Shenandoah Valley
was also home to a small but notable community of
free people of color. Rockbridge County in 1790 in-
cluded 41 individuals categorized as such, alongside
682 enslaved people (Eslinger 2000:195). Significant
numbers of enslaved and free Africans and African
Americans resided in the valley market town of Win-
chester. In 1800, fully 16% of the town’spopulation
consisted of enslaved people, with “a smaller, but
significant, number of free Blacks”(Hofstra
2004:318); see also Ebert (1986). Both groups partic-
ipated within the commercial economy, as evidenced
through extant account books: “In the picture that
emerges in these accounts, free and enslaved African
Americans worked for goods, credit, or cash in the
localeconomyandtradedontheirownaccountin
town shops”(Hofstra 2004:319). Participation in the
local market, however, was no compensation for free-
dom for the enslaved. In the dominant hiring-out sys-
tem, individuals were often paid cash incentives that
allowed for the exercise of some individual agency.
However, it should not be forgotten that those
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incentives were specifically designed to reinforce
rather than lessen discipline and control (Starobin
1968).
The institution of slavery, as it manifested in the
greater Shenandoah National Park region, differed from
the traditional tidewater model of large workforces con-
fined to sizable plantations. The hiring-out system may
have allowed for greater mobility and the maintenance
of communication networks, but the practice of slave-
holders owning, on average, between one and five
enslaved individuals challenged the maintenance of
family relationships and imposed a degree of intimacy
between black and white that likely intensified inherent
injustices more often than it did ameliorate them. Those
who were only hired out for short periods were also
subject to abuse, as evidenced in early 20th-century oral
histories of formerly enslaved people. Henry Buttler
(1941:180), who had been enslaved in Fauquier County
to the northeast of Madison County, recalled one inci-
dent when he and others had been hired out to erect a
fence line: “It was sundown when we laid the last rail
but the overseer put us to rolling logs without any supper
and it was elevenwhen we completed the task. Old Pete,
the ox driver, became so tired he fell asleep without
unyoking the oxen. For that, he received 100 lashes.”
Furthermore, the hiring-out system routinely, if only
temporarily, separated individuals of the same house-
hold, as the prevailing pattern was one in which an
owner would hire out on an individual basis; in other
words, three enslaved people in the same household
could be sent to three different farms or industries
(Zaborney 1997:94).
Employing that model, the major roads that traverse
the park area were built by both free and hired-out
enslaved labor, materially indexing their presence on
the landscape. For example, in the 1780s, the Thornton
Gap Road (now U.S. Route 211), which connected
piedmont to valley, was improved by enslaved laborers
who graded the road and surfaced it with stone under the
direction of either Andrew Barbee (Lambert 1989)or
William Russell Barbee (Steere 1935). Other enslaved
workers were hired out to perform industrial labor,
particularly in ironworks on the western slopes of the
park and into the Shenandoah Valley. In the 1780s, the
Pennsylvania German Dirck Pennybacker established
an iron furnace, Redwell, on the banks of Hawksbill
Creek in the valley. His workforce included enslaved
African American laborers, who not only operated the
furnace, but also labored in the mountain forests to
produce the massive amounts of charcoal required to
fuel the foundry (Lewis 1979; Lambert 1989:75–76).
Extant account books for the Redwell furnace detail the
names of some of the enslaved men who were com-
pelled to labor at Redwell: “Reuben Negroe,”“Black
Joseph,”“Moses Negroe Little”(Lewis 1979:27). Inside
the boundaries of Shenandoah National Park in Rock-
ingham County lie the substantial remains of the Mount
Vernon Furnace complex, established in 1830 and also
dependent upon unfree labor (Horning 2007:92–93;
Ellis 2011). Similarly, the exploitation of copper de-
posits on the Blue Ridge directly above Nicholson and
Corbin hollows was dependent upon hired-out slave
labor. Bethany Veney (1889:33), born into slavery in
Luray, penned a narrative of her life in which she
recounts being sent up to Stony Man Mountain (the
future location of the Skyland resort that was at the
center of the park-creation movement):
The spur of the Blue Ridge, against which my
little house leaned, was called “Stony Man”;and
it was supposed to be full of copper. Some time
ago, some Northern adventurers had set up an
engine, in order to mine the copper and test its
quality. But, for reasons which I had never under-
stood, the project was abandoned and the men
went home. They had built a small shanty on the
ground, and I had lived with them to do their
work. It had been a dreary experience to me, and
I was thankful when it was over.
On the eastern side of the Blue Ridge, the situation
was not dissimilar from the valley, in that enslaved
people were predominantly held in small units and hired
out for numerous different types of employment. In
general, the numbers of enslaved persons were higher
than the figures for the Shenandoah Valley, reflecting
the greater influence of westward movement from the
tidewater vs. the north-to-south pattern more common
for the valley. In Madison County in 1800, of an overall
population of 8,332, 3,436 were enslaved, while, in
1860, the U.S. federal census indicates 4,397 enslaved
persons out of a population of 8,854. While small-scale
slaveholding was the norm, there were still some sizable
plantations. One that was close to the vicinity of Nich-
olson, Corbin, and Weakley hollows was that of Thom-
as Shirley, who owned, at one time, over 48,000 ac.,
including lands in the hollows. His slave-based planta-
tion operation was augmented by industrial concerns,
Hist Arch
including mills and distilleries (Lambert 1989:71). Not
coincidentally, Shirley’s name appears on numerous
documents related to hollow residents, including prop-
erty deeds, wills, and chancery cases. But, as in the
valley, 20th-century local historians downplayed slav-
ery and, crucially, the continuing presence of African
American communities. While Claude Lindsay Yowell,
an early 20th-century Madison County historian, dedi-
cated a short chapter in his 1926 A History of Madison
County, Virginia to the “Colored People of Madison,”
his perspective on the realities of enslavement was
targeted toward a white readership and could hardly be
termed critical: “[I]t seems evident that the majority of
slave owners in Madison were not cruel,”and “[T]here
was a great dealof friendship between master and slave”
(Yowell 1926:166–167). Twentieth-century narratives
collected from individuals formerly enslaved in nearby
Rappahannock and Fauquier counties suggest a rather
different reality. For example, Pine Bluff, Arkansas,
resident Sonya Singfield (1941:166) noted that she had
been “born in Washington, Virginia, right at the foot of
the Blue Ridge Mountains,”and recalled that her “moth-
er was sold when I was a babe in her arms. She was sold
three times.”Painful insight into the experience of being
a human commodity was conveyed by another Virginia-
born Pine Bluff resident, 93-year-old Virginia Sims: “I
was sold, put up on a stump just like you sell hogs to the
highest speculator”(Sims 1941:163). Such a sight
would have been familiar to William Hurt and his fam-
ily, with their links to slavery and their lives as farmers
in a slave-based agricultural economy.
Claude Yowell painted postbellum race relations in
Madison County in terms as equally impossible as his
view of master–slave relations: “[T]here is a warm
personal friendship between the races”(Yowell
1926:171). Such uncritical sentiments were reiterated
in a 1976 revision of Yowell’sstudy:“Few slaves
deserted their masters during the CivilWar. After eman-
cipation, former masters tried to help slaves get
established”(Davis 1977:15). In a rather uncritical un-
derstatement of the realities of postbellum life, author
Margaret Davis blithely noted that “[a]fter receiving
freedom, the former slaves sought homes, but unsettled
conditions and lack of capital made this a somewhat
difficult task”(Davis 1977:150). Reading between the
lines of these official histories, it is possible to get a
sense of the strategies employed by newly freed people
to take control of their lives. Yowell, after celebrating
the fact that freed people “have given up politics,”
devotes much of his chapter on Madison’s African
American community to the establishment of 15 Baptist
churches in the postbellum period, itself an eloquent
statement to African American community building in
the face of political suppression. The first of those
churches was organized in 1868, the same year that a
school was established for freed people. While 11 of
those postbellum churches are still active, the African
American population of Madison County has since de-
clined from nearly 50% of the population in 1860 to an
estimated 9.3% of the county population (United States
Census Bureau 2018), reflecting the impact of 20th-
century population movement. The whiteness of Madi-
son County today is too readily back projected to further
deny past complexities and the experiences of the once-
considerable black population; see Brandon (2013)fora
parallel case study from the Ozarks.
Revision
I now offer a revised consideration of life in Nicholson,
Weakley, and Corbin hollows. While the hollows may
have been white spaces in the early 20th century, such
was not the case in earlier centuries, including when
William and Fannie/Frances Hurt adopted the Corbin
children. As hinted at above, William Hurt was raised in
a family that relied upon enslaved labor. The 1807 will
of his uncle, James Hurt, listed seven enslaved people as
his property: a woman named Judith and her daughter
Tilda; Dafney and her son Moses; an adult man named
Thomas; a boy called Thomas; and a girl named Eliza-
beth (Madison County Will Book 1807:177). William
Hurt thus grew up around the institution of slavery in the
form of these individuals whom he encountered on a
regular and probably daily basis. Hurt’s will tells little
about their lives, only revealing that Tilda, Dafney,
Moses, the two Thomases, and Elizabeth accounted
for the bulk of James Hurt’s wealth: $444.00 of the total
value of $512.00, leaving just $68.00 worth of house-
hold and agricultural goods. Such an investment relative
to the value of the remainder of Hurt’s estate suggests
that he must have relied upon a financial return from
hiring out their labor. Ultimately, James Hurt’sheirs
benefited from the sale of the lives of the enslaved, even
as the Hurts (including William) subsequently eschewed
slaveholding. Wills and inventories like those of James
Hurt chronicle control over people’s lives in violently
dispassionate language. The silences in the record are
Hist Arch
loud. Tracing the fate of Tilda, Dafney, Moses, the two
Thomases, and Elizabeth, whose lives werereduced to a
set of numbers and casually enumerated between entries
for “one smooth gun”and a “copper skillet,”is extreme-
ly challenging. Where did they go after they were sold to
as-yet-undiscovered buyer(s)? The documentary record
that I once found so exciting and helpful in tracing the
Hurts, Corbins, Nicholsons, and other white families
betrayed its true character as an instrument of racial
oppression.
Turning back to the year 1818, the same year that the
Hurts took in the 10 Corbin children, inequality as well
as diversity in the hollows is further illuminated. A few
months before William and Fannie/Frances Corbin mar-
ried, a prominent neighbor, James Ward, died. At the
time, Ward owned and occupied a property consisting of
80 ac. in the lower end of Nicholson Hollow, a few
miles from the Hurt farm. In Ward’s 1818 will, the
property was left to his wife Nancy and daughter
Margery or Margaret Berry. Ward received “part of
the tract I now live on, including the dwelling house,”
while Berry received “the lower part of my land Begin-
ning five poles below the field and thence extending to
the end of the tract adjoining toWilliam Weakley’s line”
(Madison County Will Book 1818:444). Ward’stotal
movable property was assessed at $2,210.79, and an
inventory indicates that 81% of that figure was bound
up in the lives of five enslaved people: “Lucy her two
children Cealy and Lewis”and two boys, “Jack and
Frank.”These individuals were valued at $1,800, and
their lives split between new owners: Ward’s widow and
his married daughter. Their work provided the funds
needed for Ward to fill his home with various chests,
bedsteads, and chairs, and provided him the leisure time
to read his “parcel of books.”Ward’s time clock pre-
sumably ordered not only his hours, but those of his
involuntary workforce. Cattle and hogs were raised on
the land, cotton and flax processed, liquor distilled, and
a smithy operated, giving a sense of the labor performed
by Lucy, the children, hired slaves, and apprentices.
Ward’s inventory tells us nothing, however, about the
ways in which Lucy and the children navigated the
realities of their own disenfranchisement (Madison
County Will Book 1818:444).
In 1997, I conducted limited test excavations in the
location of Ward’s former dwelling house, hencefor-
ward referred to by its internal site designation of
80DG. I was initially attracted to 80DG because it was
associated with the first residency of the Nicholson
family in their eponymous hollow. In 1799, John and
Anne Nicholson purchased 170 ac. in the hollow from
the original patentee, Mark Finks (Madison County
Deed Book 1799). Like many archaeologists, I fell prey
to the need to find the “oldest”and to archaeologically
trace the family for whom I had developed an affinity
through immersion in their daily lives in the hollow
from the 18th until the early 20th centuries. At the time
of park establishment, the site associated with Ward and
the early Nicholsons (80DG) was owned by Victoria
and William “Buddy”Nicholson. There they occupied a
20 ac. farm sold to the Virginia Commission on Con-
servation and Development (the state body responsible
for surveying and acquiring park lands for donation to
the federal government) that was part of a 40 ac. parcel
deeded by John and Anne Nicholson to their son
Shadrach in 1805 (Madison County Deed Book 1805).
Although both Buddy and Victoria Nicholson were
direct descendants of the initial Nicholson settlers, their
residency was not the result of an unbroken family
occupation of the farm. In fact, within a year of acquir-
ing the 40 ac. parcel, Shadrach Nicholson sold the land
to William Berry, who sold the property to James Ward
in 1815 (Madison County Deed Book 1815). The slave-
holding Ward, who also owned the Nethers Mill that
still stands just outside Nicholson Hollow, apparently
moved into the hollow at this time.
As recorded in the 1990s, 80DG contains traces of
two log dwellings, two stone-lined cellars, a barn, a
stone-lined well, and a cemetery, albeit all in a ram-
shackle condition (Fig. 3). Park-era photographs clearly
detailed the presence of two log dwellings: a sizable six-
room log-and-frame house with double chimneys and a
stone foundation and a small single-room log dwelling.
Excavations in 1997 recovered late 18th-century mate-
rials (creamware and a snuff-bottle fragment) from the
smaller structure. These finds gave some weight to my
hypothesis that the small log structure at 80DG had been
built and inhabited when John and Anne Nicholson
acquired the land and when their son Shadrach was in
residence. I further surmised that the more commodious
log, stone, frame farmhouse was first constructed during
the Ward ownership, given Ward’s relative wealth. The
smaller dwelling, then, makes a plausible candidate for
housing Lucy, Cealy, Lewis, Jack, and Frank (Fig. 3).
So, what is most important about that small log
structure? that it housed the first Nicholsons, long me-
morialized and commemorated by scholars (Perdue and
Martin-Perdue 1979–1980; Horning 2004) or that it
Hist Arch
housed an enslaved woman, her two children, and two
young boys (about whom the documentary record tells
us next to nothing)? I know my answer now and take
responsibility for my answer then. At the time, I certain-
ly did recognize the importance of the association with
Lucy, her children, and the two boys, and I made a point
of raising it even when I knew the members of the park-
descendant community were generally uncomfortable
with discussing that aspect of their history. But I worried
about positionality and rights, acutely conscious that,
not being of the African diaspora, it was not ethically
appropriate for me to be the one to speak for the lives of
Lucy and her children. It was more straightforward to
address a story of white poverty and marginalization; a
story that I could “own”on a more personal level. Given
the realities of white privilege, structural inequality, and
the need to decolonize archaeological practice, I contin-
ue to be very uneasy about my voice being employed to
tell a story of African America, particularly one that is
out of step with more recent trends that shift emphasis
from the period of enslavement to examining the myriad
ways in which African American individuals shaped
their lives and structured diverse communities in the
context of post-emancipation discrimination (Singleton
2010;Barnes2011;Mahoney2013). But, at the same
time, I have encountered and uncovered shreds of the
lives of Lucy, Cealy, Lewis, Jack, and Frank, and so I
also have a responsibility to share that information. My
own subject position provides another dimension to this
process. I cannot and should not speak for those who
endured enslavement, but I can speak of them in the
present to audiences who may otherwise be unaware or
even resistant to the reality of an African American
imprint on Blue Ridge history. In this manner I follow
both the lead of Carol McDavid (2002,2011)inengag-
ing with white audiences and the advice of Whitney
Battle-Baptiste in working toward “aproactiveap-
proach to the study of captive African people”(Battle-
Baptiste 2011:22).
Such conversations must include consideration of the
manner in which race-based structural inequalities per-
meate aspects of everyone’s lives. While the documen-
tary record indicates that the Nicholson clan themselves
were never slaveholders, they (along with their white
neighbors) benefited from the system by the clear ad-
vantage of being white and free, as well as having access
to hired enslaved laborers. At the same time, members
of the Nicholson family, as non-slaveholders, would
have also understood their position within the white
hierarchy. The unequal relationship between the Wards
and the Nicholsons is evident in an 1810 indenture,
whereby William Nicholson (son of John and Anne
Nicholson) delivered his son William to Ward, who, in
exchange for five years of the young William’slabor,
was to “bestow him with a liberal education such as
befitting a poor man’sson”(Madison County Will Book
1810). Far from the kind of egalitarian, self-sufficient
mountain lifestyle imagined by many, especially the
descendants of the displaced denied their own opportu-
nity to live on the mountain, community life across the
Fig. 3 Architectural remains at
Site 80DG, the former James
Ward farmstead. (Photo by
author, 1996.)
Hist Arch
hollows was characterized by hierarchy, inequality, and
constant negotiations both within and across kin groups
(Horning 2000a:221–222). Family and community
membership could be conditional, as illustrated by
Montella Jones’s apparent ejection from the wider Hurt
network following the deaths of Israel and Susan Hurt.
At the same time, hollow dwellers were bound to one
another via proximity as well as interdependency. But
those interdependencies, as illustrated by the William
Nicholson indenture, could be uneven and unequal.
William presumably worked alongside the enslaved
woman Lucy in the service of Ward’shousehold,further
cementing his lower status. However, while William
may have been a poor man’s son, he was promised the
education and the freedom denied to Lucy, her children
Cealy and Lewis, and to the two boys Jack and Frank.
It is important also to note that, as a slaveholder in
Nicholson Hollow, James Ward was not anomalous.
One of the signatories to William Nicholson’sindenture
was Benjamin Lillard the Younger, scion of a slave-
holding family. In 1787, Lillard acquired 487 ac. along
the Hughes River in Nicholson Hollow (Northern Neck
Land Grants 1787). In 1821, the personal estate of
Benjamin Lillard the Younger was appraised at a value
of $2,449.34 (Madison County Will 1821). Listed im-
mediately after the livestock and before a variety of
farming implements are three enslaved individuals: Si-
mon, Betty, and Sharlot—man, woman, and girl––pos-
sibly representing a nuclear family. Simon and Betty
had long been held by the Lillard family, as two persons
of the same name were left to Heziah Lillard in her
husband James’s 1804 will, with the proviso that own-
ership of the couple revert to Benjamin Lillard following
his mother’s death. The monetary value of these
enslaved individuals, totaling $565.00, represents nearly
one-quarter of Benjamin Lillard’s entire estate, assuring
him—like neighbor James Ward—of relative social
standing in the slave-based agricultural society of ante-
bellum Virginia.
The written record that so intentionally frustrates ef-
forts to trace the African American residents of the hol-
lows provides insight into the economic stratification
found within the white kinship groups, as played out in
grim detail in the chancery records that record the un-
pleasant family wrangling over the orphaned Susan
Frances Hurt’s inheritance. Slaveholding and non-
slaveholding families were also often one and the same.
Some members of the Hurt, Lillard, and Ward families
held slaves; some did not. Attitudes toward the institution
of slavery and the politics of the Civil War divided
families in the hollows much as they did elsewhere in
the upper South and particularly western Virginia. Two
years after Montella Jones left Susan Frances Hurt behind
in the grudging care of her aunt, he enlisted in Company
E of the Twelfth West Virginia Infantry and fought for
the Union. Back in the hollows, (non-slaveholding) Nich-
olson men joined neighbors from the (formerly slave-
holding) Hurt and Lillard families in the Confederate
forces. Among the many African Americans from the
region who fought in the war can be found several with
the surname of Berry. Madison County resident George
BerryservedintheU.S.ColoredInfantry,whileaGeorge
Berry from Rappahannock County served in Company E
of the Thirteenth U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, and
David Berry from Page County enlisted in the Fifty-
third U.S. Colored Infantry. Could any of those men be
linked with Margery Ward Berry, who inherited people’s
lives in her father James Ward will in 1818 and later
appears as a slaveholder in Page County?
After the war, some of the Shirley lands on Robertson
Mountain, which separates Nicholson and Weakley hol-
lows, were acquired by two former Union soldiers from
Maine, Edward and William Dyer. Whatever tensions
must have accompanied their entrée into the local com-
munity seem to have dissipated, with the Dyer family
becoming well embedded in the Weakey Hollow/Old
Rag community by the time of park establishment.
While the last documented African American residents
of the three hollows were Simon, Betty, and Sharlot in
the household of Benjamin Lillard the Younger in 1821,
no border separated the future park lands around Old
Rag Mountain from the rest of Madison County, and
elsewhere African Americans remained on lands that
would become the park. Hollow residents would have
been aware of and some participants in the 1832 Mad-
ison County evenly split vote over abolition (Davis
1977:296). The economic challenges, political up-
heavals, and racist violence of the Reconstruction era
reverberated up the slopes, such as the unsolved 1868
murder of a Rappahannock County African American
man, Arthur Lee (Freedmen’s Bureau Online 1868).
White hollow dwellers traveling into local villages and
to the county seat of Madison not only witnessed seg-
regated spaces, but, by virtue of their whiteness and
irrespective of their economic status, they were impli-
cated in the maintenance and reification of race-based
discriminatory practices. At the same time, even white-
ness proved insufficient protection against the
Hist Arch
momentum of the park-creation movement and the man-
ner in which it capitalized on the economic marginali-
zation of many mountain residents.
Concluding Thoughts
Lessons learned: by approaching the Blue Ridge
principally from the standpoint of the early 20th-
century experiences of the displaced, the deeper,
more racially diverse history of the Blue Ridge re-
gion was obscured from the start. The complex kin-
ship webs that tied Blue Ridge and piedmont families
were artificially, if inadvertently, severed by the
scope of the archaeological project that was confined
within park boundaries. I employed the archaeologi-
cal record from the hollows in the interest of
deconstructing the inaccurate portrayals of park area
families in acknowledgment of and deference to the
concerns of the displaced and their descendants. The
hurt and trauma experienced by those who lost their
homes to the park is undeniable and worthy of con-
tinued attention and acknowledgment, as
underscored by the recent erection of monuments to
the displaced spearheaded by a member of today’s
Lillard family (Brooks 2015;Lohman2017). But
there is a larger context that also must be acknowl-
edged, that is inclusive of other stories of exploita-
tion, displacement, and inequality. Much more re-
search remains to be done to piece together the whole
story more properly and thoroughly, and inclusive of
the African Americans whose lives were lived out, in
whole or part, on the mountain. Their experiences
and those of their descendants need to be recognized
as a significant element in the narratives of injustices
and displacement in the Shenandoah National Park
vicinity. The descendants of the individuals once
enslaved by the Wards, Hurts, Berrys, and Lillards
are out there, perhaps still in the same region. My
archival awakenings may just be chasing after what
they already know in their family histories and leg-
ends, but maybe not. My knowledge of physical
places where enslaved people lived out their lives
within what is now Shenandoah National Park may
be of real value to people in the present seeking a
connection to their ancestors, to the lives those an-
cestors built, and the fundamental contributions they
made to the historical settlement of the Virginia Blue
Ridge. The new questions and perspectives that could
be brought by descendants have the potential to guide
future research into this critical history.
There is a parallel need to acknowledge and engage
with the descendants of the indigenous people who
shaped the Blue Ridge landscape acquired by 18th-
century settlers. Their stories, at this point in time, seem
even more elusive than those of Blue Ridge African
Americans insofar as all available evidence suggests
that, by the 18th century, the lands around Old Rag
Mountain had been vacated by the Siouan Manahoac
peoples, with the Blue Ridge serving mainly as seasonal
hunting territory for the Shawnee, Iroquois, and
Susquehannock (Egloff and Woodward 1992; Nash
2009). But that elusiveness is likely illusory, as
witnessed by the ongoing presence of the Siouan Mo-
nacan people just to the south of the park, in Amherst
County. Declared extinct in those same Madison Coun-
ty history books that proffered self-serving views of
happy slaves and benevolent masters (Yowell 1926;
Davis 1977), the Monacan attained federal recognition
in 2017. The extent to which the Monacan and the
Manahoac may be related remains a matter of debate.
The key question that remains, as expressed by Carole
Nash (2009:391), is “[W]hat historical processes made
the Manahoacalmost virtually invisible in the documen-
tary record of the post-Contact period?”The answer lies
partially in the same frames of mind that can look past
the considerable evidence for an African American
presence in the Blue Ridge: because that is not the story
that has been chosen for telling.
Historical archaeology’s disciplinary conceit rests
on the belief that access to a multitude of sources
inevitably leads to the construction of more inclu-
sive narratives. But, not if we archaeologists rely too
heavily on records written in support of dominant
white society and, especially, if we fail to critically
acknowledge the impact of structural inequities on
the discipline itself. In particular, revisiting,
reflecting on, and revising our own scholarship,
and being willing to address our own culpabilities,
is a necessary step in developing a critical, self-
reflexive, and decolonizing practice of historical
archaeology.
Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Anna Agbe-Davies and
Rich Veit for reviewing drafts of this article and providing me
with valuable advice for clarifying my arguments. I am very
grateful to Chardé Reid for her constructive comments and
for the conversations that initially led me to write this article,
and to Chandler Fitzsimons for her thoughtful reflections on
Hist Arch
the entanglement of race and 20th-century displacement. The
original research in the park would not have happened with-
out the support of Marley Brown, David Orr, and Reed
Engle. I would have benefited from Reed’s perspective on
this article, and I dedicate it to his memory.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing,
adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any mediumor format,
as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and
the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and
indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party
material in this article are included in the article's Creative Com-
mons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the
material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Com-
mons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory
regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain
permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of
this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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