Union Hill

In the decades following the Civil War, Black residents of Buckingham County, Virginia, purchased hundreds of acres of land and formed independent, self-sustaining communities. These settlements, or "freetowns," were home to dozens of families and hundreds of individuals who, in spite of the enduring legacy of slavery, successfully transformed the forests and fields of Buckingham into centers for economic opportunity and social and spiritual communion. Embodying the many promises of Reconstruction-era legal and social progress, Buckingham's freetowns speak to the resourcefulness, resilience, and solidarity of Black Americans in the post-Civil War South.

The very idea that there existed such communities in Buckingham County and that they could be identified and mapped owes its inception to the extensive genealogical and historical research done by Buckingham's Black residents, most influential of whom was Charles W. White, Sr. For example, his seminal book, The Hidden and the Forgotten—a text of enormous archival significance, with references to a variety of church records, personal accounts, and other sources of information related to Black history in Buckingham County—helped us identify the Union Hill area as a potential location of interest during our initial search for Buckingham's freetowns. In particular, Mr. White's detailed description of the founding of Union Hill Baptist Church in 1868 indicated that its environs may have encompassed a prominent Black community given the number of local freedmen who worked to build it.

Using Mr. White's book as a foundation, we set out to identify, locate, and provide descriptions of communities formed by Black Americans throughout Buckingham County after the Civil War. After much trial and error, and with the help of local genealogists familiar with Buckingham's public records, we were able to develop a groundbreaking method for identifying and digitally mapping clusters of Black land ownership using publicly available "landbook" records that recorded the race of property owners. Using this method, which is also applicable to other counties where landbooks are available, we have begun to map the many freetowns established in Buckingham County following emancipation.

One, Union Hill, was a freetown composed of no fewer than 18 Black landowners and their families in an area just a few miles northwest of the county courthouse, near Union Hill Baptist Church and the intersection of today's Union Hill and Shelton Store roads.   

Below, we provide a detailed account of how our method—that is, our use of county landbook records and ArcGIS, a geospatial software, to identify and digitally map clusters of Black land ownership—enabled us to find and learn more about this central-Buckingham freetown. We also describe some of the important features of that freetown including who lived there and how much land they owned. It is our hope that through this work we'll begin to not only unearth a long-forgotten history of a thriving, independent postbellum Black community in central Buckingham County, Virginia, but help prepare a path for future inquiry into Buckingham's and Virginia's numerous other freetowns.

Thanks to a suggestion from central Virginia genealogist Sam Towler, who has long worked on Black-American genealogy in and around Albemarle County, Virginia, we searched the 1891 landbook records held at the Buckingham County Circuit Court Clerk’s Office, a source that would become essential to our efforts to locate and map Buckingham's freetowns.  

On a summer afternoon in July 2022, only a few days after having met with Sam, we travelled some 40 miles south from Charlottesville, Virginia, to the Circuit Court Clerk’s Office in Buckingham County. There, we pulled the 1891 landbook records from the shelf and took note of what Sam said we would find inside: groups of landowners separated not only by district but by two racial categories, "white" and "colored." As Sam explained, 1891 appears to have been the first time in Buckingham County that the county commissioner, an elected body of persons responsible for the administration of the county government, separated landbook entries by race. Sam subsequently suggested that we focus our attention on these records given how much easier it would be to sort for Black landowners—a group of people whose property information could help us locate Buckingham's freetowns. And while searching through the books, we found that apart from mentioning a landowner’s name, the acreage of his or her property, and the general name of the location of that property, each row provided both the distance and bearing of that property from the "C.H.," or "Court House."

Nothing short of a eureka moment, we immediately recognized the potential utility of this geospatial data: if mapped, we would be able to identify clusters of Black landowners, and these clusters would indicate the presence of a freetown. We subsequently took images of every page labeled "colored" in the 1891 landbook records, transferred their distance and bearing data into an Excel spreadsheet, and worked with GIS specialists Chris Gist and Drew MacQueen from the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia to build a digital map in ArcGIS that could incorporate and visually represent this data.

Because the landbook records measured distance from the courthouse at intervals of one mile (1, 2, 3, etc.) and indicated bearing in the form of either cardinal or ordinal directions (N, NE, E, etc.), we asked Chris and Drew to design a map featuring concentric circles at intervals of one mile starting from the courthouse in Buckingham. That way, we could easily plot and view the approximate geographical location of each 1891 landowner’s property relative to both the courthouse and other properties. Chris and Drew were able to produce and provide such a map thanks to an ArcGIS feature that allows a user to input distance and bearing for a given data entry. The map also permitted users to manually relocate points, which allowed us to address discrepancies between the location name of an entry and its distance and bearing data.

Below, we provide access to that map in its current iteration. Unlike the first, which only included data from the 1891 landbook, the map today incorporates data from the 1891, 1896, and 1901 landbooks—each of which separated groups of landowners by race. Moreover, today's map reflects a set of informed and reasoned decisions that dictated the manual relocation of many points. There were, quite often, discrepancies between the general location name of a property and its distance and bearing from the courthouse. To address these disparities, we consulted historical maps, personal accounts, legal documents, public records, contemporary blogs and articles, and other sources of information.

We believe that, in its current form, the concentric circles map displays the location of those properties that are within Buckingham County's borders with a moderate to high degree of accuracy. Much more work is required to accurately place the properties that are presently marked outside county boundaries, with the exception of those that are in and around the town of Hatcher in Cumberland County, Virginia, which is on Buckingham County's eastern border. Nevertheless, we are confident that most of the points provide an indication of the general vicinity in which their associated properties were located. And what is immediately evident from a quick survey of the map below is its unique ability to not only display the probable locations of Buckingham's many freetowns but also provide insight into their geographical extent and population density.

By cross-referencing these insights with additional research on Black history and genealogy in Buckingham County as well as data from a separate ArcGIS map that catalogs Black churches and other such sites of significance across central Virginia (see "Virginia Freetowns Map, 2022" below), we determined that there likely existed a thriving, independent Black community in the Union Hill Road and Union Hill Baptist Church area in 1891. Since this community does not appear to have had a formal appellation or one recognized informally by its contemporary residents or residents of the area today, we will simply refer to this community as the "Union Hill Community."

A careful examination of 1880 census records, for instance, indicated that many of the Black landowners in the area were connected to a broader family network and that, altogether, these families constituted a cohesive community. The reappearance of the landowners in subsequent landbook records (post-1891) and censuses, moreover, provides compelling evidence that the Union Hill Community was not a transient body but, rather, a permanent and enduring presence in the region for several decades and possibly many more.

The current iteration of the concentric circles map also points out that this community may have been much larger than we originally thought (possibly encompassing many of the other property clusters north and east of the Union Hill area). That is, the Union Hill Community, in its entirety, may have been the de facto counterpart to the predominantly-white town of Maysville where the courthouse was and is presently located. If true, however, the fact that the community was unincorporated and its members distributed across a large forested area relatively far from the town would likely have enabled residents to avoid unwanted attention from white townspeople and, thereby, maintain a degree of social and economic independence.

Having identified many of the individuals who owned land in the Union Hill Community between 1891 and 1901, we wanted to learn more about them, their families, and their community. We also wanted to make what we learned publicly available. So, we turned our attention to a group of public records that could tell us more about them than perhaps any other kind of resource: the 1880 and 1910 censuses (the 1890 Census isn't very helpful since much of it was destroyed in a fire). These censuses list information such as an individual's family members, occupation, ascribed racial identity, and even, in the 1910 Census, whether the individual owned or rented a home or a farm. Our investigation of these records enabled us to paint a rather detailed picture of some of the Black families that lived and held property in the Union Hill Road and Union Hill Baptist Church area, which we present below.

Beginning in 1879, formally trained census-takers replaced the U.S. Marshals as data collectors for the U.S. Census ("Census Instructions"). These census-takers, unlike the U.S. Marshals who received little instruction or training on how to collect census data, systematically indexed entries as they went door-to-door until 1960—meaning the proximity of names in older census record books indicated geographical proximity, hence why those names were not listed in alphabetical order ("Census Instructions"; "Census Techniques"; "Browsing U.S. Censuses"). Simply put, older census records provide information about both an individual's family members and his or her neighbors, assuming, of course, that such information was recorded correctly. This fact has been critical to the work of countless genealogists who have relied upon their knowledge of the geographical relations of names in older censuses to identify direct ancestors and other relatives.

By combining the information and insights provided by the 1880 and 1910 censuses with the concentric circles map, we substantiated the following conclusions: (1) that the majority of the 18 Black landowners marked along Ripley Creek on the concentric circles map were, at some point between 1880 and 1910, neighbors; (2) that each landowner was part of a broader family network; (3) that this group of people constituted an unincorporated community in the Union Hill area; and (4) that this community, which we've referred to as the Union Hill Community, was probably much more populous than we had originally believed.

It is important to note that the 1880 and 1910 census data relevant to our research are listed under Enumeration Districts 34 and 64, respectively, of Buckingham's James River District, a census district that, according to the 1940 Enumeration District Map, encompasses the western and northwestern portions of Buckingham County, including the Union Hill area. Unfortunately, there do not appear to be earlier versions of the Enumeration District Map to further clarify the area of residence of those listed in the 1880 and 1910 censuses; nevertheless, based on the plethora of information provided by the relevant census entries themselves and how well this information, on the whole, corresponds and relates to the insights provided by the concentric circles map, we are extremely confident that we have correctly matched names across the two sources of data.

The significance of the evidential support of the censuses cannot be overstated. Although the concentric circles map provided reliable and reasonable support for the conclusion that there existed a freetown consisting of no fewer than 18 Black landowners and their families in the Union Hill area for at least a decade (1891-1901), the 1880 and 1910 censuses more than any other resource helped to validate that conclusion by indicating that the vast majority of those landowners likely lived in close proximity to one another at some point during the 30-year timeframe. They also strongly suggest that the Union Hill Community existed as early as 1880 and as late 1910, giving it an age range of at least 30 years.

The two censuses list many other names (who had no apparent familial relation to the 18 Black landowners) in between the names of the landowners, suggesting that the Union Hill Community, even in the immediate Union Hill Road and Union Hill Baptist Church area, was far more populous than the concentric circles map would suggest. Ultimately, and in tandem with the concentric circles map, the 1880 and 1910 censuses suggest that despite the manifold challenges they likely faced living in the Jim Crow South, the individuals and families of the Union Hill Community appear to have collectively owned and successfully managed hundreds of acres of land over a span of no less than three decades. Further investigation of later censuses and both later and earlier landbook record data will help confirm how long the Union Hill Community existed and what kinds of changes occurred over time with regard to its population and geographical distribution.

Although there were probably many more, we identified 18 Black landowners in the Union Hill area using the concentric circles map. These include Sarah Bailey, Early Bennett, Fred Bennett, Jacob Benning, Charles Carson, Archer Cobb, Gabriel Deane, Samuel B. Eldridge, John Eldridge, Harper Taylor, Jordan Jefferson, Stephen Jones, Joe Jones, Sarah Moseley, Harry Patteson, Abraham Pride, Lucy A. Scott, and Lee Shelton. It should also be mentioned that a certain "Trustees Union Hill / Col'o Baptist Church" was listed as a property owner in the Union Hill area in 1896; and although we are exactly not sure who the trustees were, we know that the group was composed of Black residents and that the existence of such a group suggests the collaborative maintenance and upkeep of an important communal hub.

Of the 18 Black landowners listed previously, we did not find the surnames Bailey or Carson in either the 1880 or 1910 census and thus cannot offer additional support for the conclusion that these two individuals lived near the other 18 landowners. We found the surname Benning in the 1880 Census, but it was so many pages removed from the remaining 15 names that we couldn't conclude it had any relationship to Jacob Benning. Additionally, Charles Carson is listed in the 1901 landbook as being part of the Maysville District, while the other 17 names are located in the James River District. Thus, it is possible that Charles's property was not, in fact, located in the immediate Union Hill area.

As for the 15 other landowners, we were able to locate 10 given names and their accompanying surnames in the 1880 and 1910 censuses (Early Bennett, Archer Cobb, Gabriel Deane, Sam Eldridge, Taylor Harper, Jordan Jefferson, Stephen Jones, Joe Jones, Abraham Pride, and Lee Shelton); for the other five, we identified matching surnames but not given names. Several entries name a certain "Henry Patteson," for example, which may refer to Harry Patteson, as it is written in the landbook records. Despite having the same surname, however, we were unable to confirm that the two given names referred to the same person.

According to the two censuses, at some point between 1880 and 1910 those 10 landowners were neighbors—some in consecutive households and others separated by several households. If we assume that the five matching surnames without matching given names have their proper counterparts in the Ripley Creek cluster on the concentric circles map, then each would also have been neighbors with one another and the other 10 landowners. This assumption aside, it became increasingly clear that, by counting the people listed in between the names of any of those neighbors or their immediate family members, we had established a potential lower limit to how populous the Union Hill Community was in 1880 and 1910: 71 and 151, respectively.

Many of the Black residents mentioned above were listed as head of household in either 1880 or 1910. Many also had families with more than two children. For example, the 1880 Census indicates that Archer Cobb was 66 years old, his wife, Jane, 40 years old, and that his three sons, Sam, Brack, and George, were each 16, 18, and 15 years old, respectively. Although a farmer who could neither read nor write like the rest of his family, Archer owned 15 acres of land six miles northwest of the courthouse in the Union Hill area. This information strongly suggests that Archer used the land to sustain himself and his family, either economically or otherwise; and the fact that his young sons were each listed as laborers would further suggest that they worked with and for their father and that the 15 acres of land was the family's source of livelihood. On the same note, Jane, Archer's wife, was described as "keeping house," meaning she was probably the chief homemaker.

A recent and rather serendipitous conversation with a current resident of the Union Hill area, Mr. Jones, provided possible background information for two other Union Hill Community members, Stephen and Joe Jones. According to Mr. Jones, just after the Civil War the Bondurant family—a prominent land and slave owning family in Buckingham County—gave a significant plot of land to one of his female ancestors in the Union Hill area, right next to the intersection of the Union Hill Road and Shelton Store Road, under the Jones surname. This property passed down to successive generations until the present day, and it appears that Stephen and Joe Jones, who are listed as property owners in the concentric circles map, may have been her descendants.

Joe Jones, 40, is described as a farmer and a father of nine children in the 1880 Census. He was married to Judith Jones, 39, who, like Jane Cobb, was described as "keeping house." One of Joe's sons, Irving, 13, was listed as a laborer and so probably worked the land with his father. The family appears to have lived on a five-acre plot that Joe owned and, similar to Archer Cobb and his family, used to sustain himself and his family. Neither Joe nor anyone in his family could read or write.

Stephen Jones is in both the 1880 Census and 1910 Census. In the former, he is listed as a 22-year-old laborer and Sallie Jones's son. No father is listed, so it is possible that, given he was a property owner by 1901 according to the concentric circles map, the 10-acre plot of land he would later own was previously owned by his mother, Sallie. Stephen had one sister, Cathrine, and lived with two other children, Richard and Sarah, who are listed as Sallie Jones's grandchildren. By 1910, we learn that Stephen Jones, now 56 (note that although the ages in the 1880 and 1910 censuses don't add up perfectly, other related data, such as the neighbors, occupation, and race would suggest these are the same person), had married Patsy Jones, 49, and had nine children. Of these nine children, some were miners, cooks, and laborers. The 1910 Census, unlike the 1880 Census, also tells us that Stephen owned, rather than rented, his property and that this property, which was a farm, was owned "free" instead of "mortgaged."

There are numerous other unique stories to tell based on the census and concentric circles map data, but in aggregate, these data reveal to us that the Union Hill Community sustained the growth and employment of more and more young children and adults over time. These data also tell us that, of the almost 300 acres of land owned collectively by community members between 1880 and 1910, most or all of the families that owned portions of this land successfully used it to sustain themselves. Thus, it can be reasonably concluded that there existed a thriving and flourishing settlement of Black Americans in the Union Hill area after the Civil War for at least a 30-year period.

In a microcosmic sense, the internal operations of the families of the Union Hill Community, where each individual member, according to census data, played what appears to be a cohesive and complimentary role within the family unit, may reflect the operations of the community writ large. Each family, that is, seems to have performed a particular function and fulfilled a certain role that, altogether, enabled the flourishing of a broader community. Whether in the form of property ownership or raising children, these families contributed their time, effort, and resources to building and maintaining a settlement in central Buckingham that both they and their ancestors had helped to construct. They were, simply put, the body and soul of the Union Hill Community.

Although many of the particulars of the Union Hill Community before 1880 remain unclear, we do know that in 1868, just three years after the end of the Civil War and five years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Union Hill Baptist Church was established by freedmen who had left Mulberry Grove Baptist Church. According to Buckingham County author Charles W. White, Sr., in his book The Hidden and the Forgotten, "in June of 1825, W.P. Mosley gave his permission to allow his slave ‘Daniel’ to join this body of believers [Mulberry Grove Baptist Church]. The records of this congregation also show that in 1867 there were 286 members, of which 73 were white and the remaining 213 were black. Soon after, these freedmen withdrew their membership and established the Union Hill Baptist Church and the Clear View Baptist Church" (138). Unfortunately, there appear to be no public records that clearly identify these freedmen or by whom they were enslaved. There also appear to be no records explaining how these freedmen acquired the means to build new churches in the Union Hill area.  

However, the previously-mentioned serendipitous conversation with Mr. Jones, whose ancestors appear to have lived and owned land in the Union Hill area, led to a discussion of those churches’ origins; and it seems that the Bondurant family—a prominent land and slave owning family in Buckingham County—may have, according to Mr. Jones, provided the freedmen of Mulberry Grove with the land and capital to build the churches, though Mr. Jones did not offer an underlying motive for such provisions. This claim has not yet been fully corroborated by historical records, but since the Bondurant’s owned the Eastview and Variety Shade plantations and were connected to the Oak Shade plantation via the Perkins family—each of which is listed under the "name of the tract" category for several Black landowners near the Union Hill area in the 1891 landbook records—it would not be unreasonable to assume that the Bondurant family may have played some role in the construction of the 1868 Baptist churches and in the large amount of land owned by those 1891 Black landowners ("BONDURANT DESCENDANTS"; see "Variety Shade," "Eastview," and "Oak Shade" points on Freetowns map). Moreover, the 1880 Census indicates that there were many Black residents with the surname Bondurant in the Union Hill area and that these residents were also neighbors of the Jones family, which, according to Mr. Jones, was given land by the Bondurant family. Combine these observations with Robert Zullo's article about Union Hill residents' recent resistance to the construction of a massive compressor station for Dominion Energy's Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and it seems quite possible that Mr. Jones's account is accurate: "Dominion plans to place the compressor station on a 65-acre site about a mile away from the Union Hill Baptist church but much closer to some of Wilson’s congregation and other members of the largely black community. Many trace their roots to the freedmen who lived in the area after the Civil War and before it the slaves who labored on the former plantation that comprises part of the compressor station site" (emphasis added).

With that said, churches almost always functioned as an anchor and hub for rural Black communities in the postbellum South. As Lois E. Myers and Rebecca Sharpless explain in "Of the Least and the Most," 

By most indications, the rural church, which represented the majority of African American congregations in the American South, was the foremost institution for African Americans. On a secular level, the church served as a social and community center, providing a safe gathering place and activities to people isolated on farms. On a spiritual level, the church played numerous roles: giving comfort to those pressed down by the crop-lien system, serving as an arbiter of morals, and, in some cases, providing the impetus for social and economic reform. (55) 

As such, the presence of the Union Hill Baptist Church signifies the likelihood that the Union Hill Community had successfully transformed the region into a center for economic opportunity and social and spiritual communion. Indeed, the fact that between 1880 and 1910, a fast-growing neighborhood of Black landowners, along with their family members and others, owned and managed nearly 300 acres of land in addition to the church itself indicates that such a prospect was almost certain.

Our pursuit and discovery of what appears to be a freetown in central Buckingham County, Virginia, illustrates the power and utility of public records. There is no doubt that they offer a glimpse into lives and places too quickly forgotten or overlooked. Yet, even though we have endeavored to leverage these records in the pursuit of finding and have, it seems, found a central Buckingham freetown, our work nevertheless remains incomplete. This freetown and many others in Buckingham County demand additional and careful attention from dedicated individuals who seek to bring their stories out of obscurity. Indeed, we hope that the work we’ve done and described above will help guide future researchers in their search for and understanding of not only Buckingham County's freetowns but the numerous other freetowns across the Southern United States. 

This StoryMap on the Union Hill Community is the first in a series of publications on Buckingham's freetowns. Links to other StoryMaps in that series will be added here upon publication:

If you're interested, learn more about Finding Virgina's Freetowns:

"Browsing U.S. Censuses by Neighborhood." Ancestry Support, https://support.ancestry.com/s/article/Browsing-U-S-Censuses-by-Neighborhood?language=en_US.

"BONDURANT DESCENDANTS." Accessed at the Buckingham County Circuit Court Clerk’s Office, June 2022. 

"Census Instructions." United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/census_instructions/.

"Census Techniques and Strategies for Finding Elusive Ancestors." FamilySearch, https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Census_Techniques_and_Strategies_for_Finding_Elusive_Ancestors.

Myers, Lois E., and Rebecca Sharpless. "Of the Least and the Most." African American Life in the Rural South, edited by R. Douglas Hurt, University of Missouri Press, 2003, pp. 54- 80.  

White, Charles W. The Hidden and the Forgotten. Charles W. White, 1985. 

Zullo, Robert. "In Buckingham's Union Hill, a center of resistance for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, Dominion brings in a ringer." Virginia Mercury, 2 Aug. 2018, https://www.virginiamercury.com/2018/08/02/in-buckinghams-union-hill-a-center-of-resistance-for-the-atlantic-coast-pipeline-dominion-brings-in-a-ringer/.