Finding Virginia's Freetowns

“Freetowns” are Reconstruction-era settlements founded in rural areas by emancipated Black citizens. The name for the project is taken from the name, “Freetown,” given to several of these communities in central Virginia. They testify to the perseverance of rural Black Americans who claimed space in the face of white oppression and violence. The maps and StoryMaps found here, funded by the University of Virginia and researched by UVA students in collaboration with community members and descendants, document some 50 Black freetowns through data, digital visualizations, archival research, and oral histories. Our goal is to create accessible public-facing tools for community members and historians seeking to learn more about these historic landscapes and their component parts: houses, churches, cemeteries, schools, lodges. Student interns have combed through property tax records, census data, deeds, and land surveys, integrating them with images, maps, media reports, and oral histories to create richly annotated public-facing maps on the ArcGIS platform. So far we have plotted several dozen freetowns in Orange, Fluvanna, Buckingham, and (coming soon!) Cumberland counties. 

If you stand on Cowherd Mountain in Orange County and look in any direction, you’ll see a vast, shallow crater of land that stretches over three central Virginia counties: Albemarle, Louisa, and Orange. In the eighteenth century, more than a dozen plantations were built and worked in these counties by enslaved laborers. Many of these places still exist today, and have been the subject of intense scrutiny by historians and memoirists who have documented the lives of the slaveholders and, in recent years and to a lesser extent, the Black laborers who called this landscape home. 

Largely undocumented, however, are the 50 or more “freetowns” that flourished in Central Virginia from the middle of the nineteenth century, when they were occupied by free Black citizens; through Reconstruction, when they expanded to include settlements of emancipated Black laborers; and into the twentieth century, when they continued to provide a measure of security and self-determination for Black Virginians circumscribed by the violence of Jim Crow. 

Almost all of these communities, centers of Black endurance and achievement, have vanished. Or more accurately, they have been erased by the agents and agencies of white supremacy. The stories of how these communities were built, and the people who built and nurtured them, still live in the memories of lifelong Black residents of these central Virginia counties. There are still traces of them on the landscape. There is documentary evidence waiting to be unearthed in plantation records, historical maps, tax filings, photograph collections, newspaper archives, and other records held in library and museum collections and in historical societies, county tax and probate records. Freetowns have a particular story to tell about how community is built and sustained across time in the most challenging of conditions. This project is intended to record and make visible this important part of American history.

The students and faculty who are working on this project are using multiple methods to document and annotate Virginia’s freetowns, including field work, oral history interviews, archival research, and digital mapping using the ArcGIS platform. Our goal is a digital database of Virginia’s freetowns, starting with central Virginia counties, accompanied by an ArcGIS map that plots and annotates the freetowns and their components: churches, schools, residences, lodges, stores and businesses. We hope this tool will be of use to descendants and community members, whose efforts to keep the histories of these landscapes alive makes possible our research, and to historians, who too often ignore these interstitial rural spaces. 

In Virginia, Black property ownership increased from 1 percent of households in 1870 to 59 percent in 1900—the highest percentage of any U.S. state.[1] And yet little has been written about this phenomenon, especially in rural areas. 

The core mission of this project is to put rural Black freetowns on the map. While many live in the memories of descendants of those who lived there, and a few freetowns persist, most are not to be found on maps of any kind, from any period. Our sources of information about freetowns are varied. Descendants have generously shared their memories of freetowns founded by their ancestors with us. Local and family historians have published information about some of the freetowns their ancestors created, and we have included those freetowns as well—crediting the published sources. County historical societies have pointed us to potential freetowns. Student and faculty researchers have tracked down mentions of freetowns in UVA and other Virginia archives. One of the most fruitful sources of information has been public records, especially land books and deeds from the late 19 ^th   and early 20 ^th  centuries. 

We have so far mapped freetowns in central Virginia, but we hope to ultimately map the entire state. Can you point us toward a freetown? Use the tool below to connect with us. 

 _{[1] Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1997 reprint edition), 174.}  

Mapping is the first step; stories are the next. We hope to add many more StoryMaps about individual freetowns as our research continues. We are deeply grateful to the descendants who have shared their memories with us, to the historical societies who have pointed us in the right direction, and to the history keepers in these communities who have shared their insights and research with us. Any mistakes are ours alone. Please let us know if we have erred. And if you would like to share your freetown story with us, please get in touch using the contact link above.

The Freetown project has the potential to give voice to the residents of freetowns, past and present, but it is also a vehicle for UVA students to acquire and apply techniques and tools that will produce a more just and comprehensive public history. Students from across disciplines will use and apply archival research, data analysis, and oral conversations to reinterpret and discover a more complete history of place. They will engage with the written historical record; the physical landscape; and the living descendants of the free and emancipated Black citizens who built these Freetowns in the nineteenth century. They will geo-reference and document African American sites in the field; transfer that information onto digital maps using ArcGIS tools; and produce digital StoryMaps containing many layers of information, including historical images and maps as well as media reports, census records, and other historical accounts. Students from American Studies, Architectural History, History, Data Science, African American Studies, Education, English, Urban and Environmental Planning, and the Visual Arts have are all contributing their time and skills to this endeavor. 

A major goal of the project will be to gather oral histories from current residents of this area, a level of insight that will only be possible if we engage multiple community partners. That community engagement is at once the most challenging and the most important aspect of this project going forward.

Q. We have collaborated with community members and descendants since the beginning of the project, but no-one asked us to make an ArcGIS map of Black freetowns. Have we created something that can be of use to descendants and community members researching their own history and ancestry? Going forward, what is the best way to, first, ascertain that, and second, to encourage community feedback and critique?

Q. At their best, digital humanities projects are accessible, discoverable, and interoperable. How does this project rate on these criteria? 

Q. What can UVA and other institutions do to make their resources more available to community members seeking to research their own histories? 

Q. How does adding freetowns to the map change what we think we know about Virginia history post-Emancipation?

Q. Emancipated Black rural residents routinely traveled to cities to work—Richmond and D.C., yes, but also Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. What are there patterns of what we now call “re-migration” between rural Virginia and these urban centers, and how did that contribute to regional identities and relationships? Were rural centers not as isolated as we tend to think—were they, rather, “home places” that operated in concert with urban satellites? 

Q. We know that Black urban institutions, the Black church chief among them, were sites of resistance, struggle, and empowerment that led ultimately to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. What about the countryside, where in 1960 half of the Black population of the South still lived? Much of the land purchased by emancipated Black citizens in rural areas in Virginia remains in the same families today. Do freetowns offer a counter-narrative to the Great Migration, as a site of staying-put—and in the south, not just staying put, but buying property and creating communities on the same grounds where you were previously enslaved?

Q. Clearly, emancipated Black citizens created public spaces in urban areas—there’s a vibrant literature on this—but did they do the same in rural areas? We’re not accustomed to thinking about public space in rural areas in the 19 ^th  century. Can we consider the freetowns of central Virginia examples of Black public space? Can we theorize a notion of “rural publics” that might amplify or inform our ideas about urban publics?

Lisa Goff, Associate Professor, English and American Studies; Director, Institute for Public History; School of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia

Chris Gist, GIS Specialist, Scholars’ Lab, University of Virginia Library 

Drew MacQueen, GIS Specialist, Scholars’ Lab, University of Virginia Library

Student Interns

Bethany Bell

Vanessa D’Souza

Georgia Douglas was an archival researcher and digital mapper of Fluvanna County in the summer of 2022. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in History and a minor in Computer Science. She is currently living in Washington DC on the job hunt for even more archival work!

Mara Guyer

Elli Perkins

Olivia Pettee 

Annika Reynolds graduated from the University of Virginia with a BA in Classics and Art History. She is currently pursuing an MA in Italian Renaissance Art History through Syracuse University with the hope of eventually working in an art museum.

John Shimazaki graduated from the University of Virginia with an MA in English and a BA in English and African American and African Studies. He currently teaches English at Chonburi Technical College in Eastern Thailand through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. John hopes to attend law school in the near future.

Kate Wietor

Suzanne Moomaw, Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, School of Architecture, University of Virginia 

Student Interns

Coming soon!

Coming soon!