Warrenton Historic District - African American Presence

Maury Mason Dade and his store in Frytown. (Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County).

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In the years following the Civil War and Reconstruction, African Americans built institutions, neighborhoods, and businesses. In 1865 local freedmen persistently lobbied the Freedmen’s Bureau for a school for seventy-five children eager to attend. In mid-February of 1865 a school opened at the corner of Lee and Fourth Streets with a teacher from Massachusetts. In 1867, black Christians in Warrenton established First Baptist Church. Rev. Leland Warring, a gifted minister and leader from Spotsylvania County, helped them organize and purchase property on Lee Street for $400. They accomplished this amidst reports by a Freedmen’s Bureau agent of Ku Klux Klan activity in Warrenton. At midnight groups of mostly young men were “disturbing the colored people, and committing outrages upon them.” The congregation purchased and worshipped in a former Presbyterian church on Alexandria Pike. They built the current church from 1887 to 1890. Mount Zion Baptist Church in Warrenton also traces its origins to Lee Street.

Warrenton contained several African American neighborhoods, including Frytown, Haiti, Madison Town, Oliver City, and Shipmadilly.

While many African Americans worked in agriculture, with some buying or leasing farms, others continued in trades such as masonry. Beverly Howard and Minor Grayson, “colored men and good mechanics” according to the local newspaper, purchased and operated two blacksmith shops in town. Maury Mason Dade opened a store in Frytown.

Designations
National Register of Historic Places, National Historic District

Resources

• Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County.
• Eugene M. Scheel. The Civil War in Fauquier County, Virginia. Warrenton: The Fauquier Bank, 1985.
• Linda Sargent Wood. “Coming to Manassas: Peace, War, and the Making of a Virginia Community.” Historic resource study of Manassas National Battlefield Park, Manassas, Virginia. National Park Service, 2005. Quotation on page 156.

People in the Places

Samuel Johnson (c. 1775 - 1842)

Samuel Johnson worked diligently to overcome legal obstacles to financial success and freedom. In 1802 he arranged for owner Edward Digges to transfer him to Richard Brent with the agreement that he would be freed when he paid $500. By 1812 he had raised the money “by great exertion himself and through the aid of benevolent friends.” In 1806, however, Virginia passed a law requiring that manumitted slaves leave the state within a year. Johnson did not want to risk being separated from his wife and two children still in bondage. So, he found 38 white men who agreed he was a “meritorious man” and signed his legislative petition for permission to remain in the state. The legislature approved, in part because the emancipation agreement was made prior to the law.

Johnson continued to work at Norris’s Tavern and in three years he purchased his wife and children. Before he manumitted them, however, he petitioned the legislators again for permission for them to remain in Virginia. His petition was ignored, so he tried again in 1820, this time documenting his considerable financial worth to prove he could afford to free them. He tried again in 1822, after which his son must have died. Thereafter, he focused on his daughter, Lucy, petitioning again in 1823, ‘24, ‘26, ‘28, ‘35, and ‘37.

In 1826, 229 white people signed Johnson’s petition, likely because the family situation increased in urgency. In 1827, Lucy married a free man of mixed ancestry. Caught in a legal dilemma, Johnson officially manumitted her so the marriage would be legal, but continued to claim her as his property so she would not be forced out of the state. In 1837, he manumitted his wife and his daughter a second time, stating in his petition that he was “getting old” and wished to “liberate his said daughter and her children before his death.” Samuel Johnson died in 1842 and left a will that again manumitted his wife and children, but if they could not remain in the state, left his other property to a trusted white doctor, Thomas Thornton Withers, to be sold for their settlement elsewhere. They remained, in part because they enjoyed the support of many of Warrenton’s white as well as black citizens, but their story shows how legally tenuous a free black person’s status was.

Resources

• Eva Sheppard Wolf. Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.