From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family

15. From Harvard to Today

15 From Harvard to Today Judging by the photograph of her, you would never think that Emma Turner Ford was the daughter of slaves. She looks like any other middle-class woman of her day. Nor would you think she held such passionate beliefs about the inherent value of education, ones handed down through the family. These beliefs had served her in good stead in the one-room Colored School No. 6 in Pleasant Valley and then at the boarding school at Storer when she was only fifteen, and she was ultimately rewarded by seeing her son graduate from Harvard and five granddaughters earn college degrees. Robert Turner Ford The original intent of setting up black colleges such as Storer was to train black teachers, who would staff the elementary and secondary schools the Freedmen’s Bureau had set up, and so Emma, first in the family to graduate from college, planned to devote herself to teaching others. This proved to be not as easy for her as she expected.1 Her husband Robert had chosen to be a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E.), and she followed him. The church rotated young clergy from town to town almost every year, and the couple was constantly on the move.2 Emma found that she was never in one place long enough to get her feet on the ground and teach. The first of the Fords’ six children, Robert Turner Ford, was born in 1905, eight years after the couple had married.3 Having children did not stop the church transfers though. The family lived in Elkton, Berkley , and Conowingo, three small Maryland towns between Baltimore 190 | from harvard to today and the Pennsylvania border, and in Cecilton on the Eastern Shore.4 Emma had five more children in the next nine years. She was fortytwo years old when her last child was born.5 One of the rotations took the family to Hagerstown, and then to Pleasant Valley. In the words of Robert Turner Ford, in an interview years later by niece Cynthia Richardson, the family moved ‘‘to Mother ’s childhood home in Pleasant Valley.’’6 Robert dated this to ‘‘before the outbreak of World War I.’’ In the Footsteps of Ancestors Rev. Ford was pastor of the A.M.E. church near Knoxville, at the southern end of Pleasant Valley. Robert called it by an old name, ‘‘Weaverton Station,’’ a stop on the rail line. Robert was walking in the footsteps of his ancestors in Weverton. His father’s denomination, the A.M.E. Church, was an outgrowth of the Free African Society, started by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones in Philadelphia in 1787.7 Charles Willson Peale’s son, Rembrandt, had painted Absalom Jones’s portrait in 1810, a work that was undoubtedly a factor in Peale’s decision to paint Yarrow Mamout. The Weverton church, as well as several others in Western Maryland , had been founded by Rev. Thomas Henry,8 who had had the runin with Constable Barnes in Pleasant Valley in 1835. Elie Crampton helped Henry out of the scrape, and Crampton owned Robert Turner Ford’s grandfather, Simon Turner. If this were not enough personal history, in setting up the church in Weverton, Henry was helped by the prominent white landowner, Caspar Weaver, who had given his name to the community (albeit the spelling changed with time) and had been a neighbor of Ford’s great-great-uncle Wesley Sands.9 Of course, it is doubtful that either Robert Turner Ford or his father, the pastor, knew of all these family connections to the place. The house the Fords were living in near Weverton burned down one winter, and the family had to move in with Emma’s brother, whom Robert referred to as ‘‘Uncle Jim.’’10 Robert recalled that he attended one-room schoolhouses in the towns of Berkley and Conowingo. He said he went to school in Weverton , but since he did not say it was one-room, he presumably did not from harvard to today | 191 go Colored School No. 6 or the one-room school at Mt. Moriah. Both of those places are several miles from Weverton. Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore After more than a decade of church rotations, Rev. Ford was finally rewarded with an assignment to Baltimore. He and Emma would live there the rest of their lives. Rev. Ford...