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3 James E. Youngblood Race, Family, and Farm Ownership in Jim Crow Texas Keith J. Volanto On June 4, 2009, at a ceremony held in Austin, Texas, with state Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples in attendance, eighty-six-year-old Eddie Lee Youngblood and her daughter Vicki Holmes joined members of seventy other families to receive recognition under the Texas Department of Agriculture ’s Family Land Heritage Program, honoring farms and ranches in continuous agricultural operation by the same family for more than a hundred years. In 1894 Eddie Lee’s father, an African American farmer named James Edward Youngblood, had purchased forty acres of land about 2.5 miles south of Coolidge in Limestone County. This initial plot served as the basis of the family’s land holdings for the next century. In this essay I chronicle the quest for information about James E. Youngblood’s background , explore the factors allowing him to purchase land during the Jim Crow period, and describe how the Youngblood family was able to maintain farming operations to the present day.1 For decades the origins of James E. Youngblood, nicknamed “Squire” (or “Square,” in the rustic Texas dialect), were unknown to his descendants beyond some basic information. Using family oral history and some census data, Lenora Youngblood Smith and Eula Williams Youngblood, two family members interested in genealogy, dutifully compiled a family history which they completed in 1998. In this work Lenora and Eula ascertained that Squire was born in either 1868 or 1869 in western Polk County (now San Jacinto County), located in the Big Thicket area of Southeast Texas. In the 1870 U.S. Census for Polk County they also discovered a mulatto man named James Youngblood, who they believed might be Squire’s father, 64 · Keith J. Volanto given the location and the similarity of names. The descendants surmised that Squire left the region at a young age for unknown reasons and wound up in Limestone County, where a white family known to be named the Yarbroughs raised him while he worked on their farm. Squire got married in 1894 and used his savings to finance the purchase of his first forty-acre tract of land. Beyond this outline, little else was known to the family members . Lenora and Eula speculated about possible scenarios but openly acknowledged that their labor of love was incomplete and simply the closest accounts matching the information that they had been given. They were hopeful that “some young family member will continue the search . . . will add to it . . . or will make the necessary corrections.”2 Recent research into James Youngblood’s background, using Lenora and Eula Youngblood’s invaluable compilation as a basis for exploration, has allowed me to produce a slew of new insights into Squire’s past. With information provided by Internet resources, modern DNA analysis, contact established with distant relatives, and traditional research with documentary sources discovered in local archives, I have been able to ascertain some basic facts about Squire’s origins and determine the various factors that contributed to the man’s ability to purchase land and remain moderately prosperous as a small-scale farm owner during the Jim Crow era. In many ways the story of James E. Youngblood begins on a Lowndes County plantation in the Black Belt of Alabama several decades before he was born. There, one day in the spring of 1833, a white planter named Thomas B. Youngblood took advantage of one of his slaves sexually. Nine months later, on December 29, the unknown slave mother gave birth to a boy who was given the name James Thomas Youngblood (figure 3.1). This child remained in Alabama with the Youngblood family for the next twenty years and later accompanied the planter, his wife Matilda, their children, and eighty-six other slaves as they trekked westward to Polk County in 1853, part of the large migration into Texas that occurred in the decade before the Civil War. The allure of virgin cotton-growing lands, and access to the outside world via steamboats ascending and descending the Trinity River, contributed to Polk County’s rapid population growth, soaring 253.5 percent from 2,348 (including 805 slaves) in 1850 to 8,300 (including 4,198 slaves) in 1860. Thomas B. Youngblood died a year after arriving, having just set up an operation of 3,786 acres along the San Jacinto River with sixty-one slaves (he likely sold twenty-five of the original eighty-seven slaves upon arrival...

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