Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction

2. Out of Mount Vernon’s Shadow: Black Landowners in George Washington’s Neighborhood, 1870–1930

2 Out of Mount Vernon’s Shadow Black Landowners in George Washington’s Neighborhood, 1870–1930 Scott E. Casper Three “farmers,” three life experiences: On September 24, 1894, black people lined the central streets of Alexandria, Virginia, to mark the anniversary of Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. As anticipated by the Washington Post, the “big military and industrial parade” would include representatives of the city’s black-owned businesses and trades, “showing the progress made during the past thirty-one years”; military companies and other clubs from Washington, Baltimore, and Fredericksburg ; and an “emancipation ship, drawn by six horses.” The grand marshal would hail from neighboring Fairfax County: “Farmer Dandridge Smith, of Mount Vernon township, being the man who will ride at the head of the line, aided by a staff of farmers.”1 Thirteen Septembers later, a young couple filed a marriage license with Fairfax County’s court clerk. Florence E. Ford, aged twenty, and Wilbert P. Brown, twenty-four, both lifelong residents of the county, were married in the black enclave of Gum Springs where the bride’s parents lived. The Reverend Alexander Truatt, minister of Alexandria ’s Alfred Street Baptist Church, officiated. Where the license asked for the “Occupation of Husband,” either Wilbert or Florence declared, “Farming ,” even though he had no work at the time and would soon take a job with the local electric railroad company.2 Two years afterward, in the summer of 1910, the U.S. census taker visited an old, twice-widowed woman named Sarah Robinson, in childhood a slave at Mount Vernon and later a free employee there. In the enumerator’s estimation, Robinson too was a 40 · Scott E. Casper “farmer.” Describing her own pursuits that November, she explained what that occupation entailed: “I am very seldom home. I am a market woman.”3 Dandridge Smith, Wilbert Brown, and Sarah Robinson all belonged to the African American community that lived along one historic nine-mile stretch: the roads between Mount Vernon, George Washington’s storied home, and Alexandria, the city of about 15,000 that had been an antebellum hub of the interstate slave trade. That vicinity was in turn a small part of what federal census takers and local officials called Fairfax County’s “Mount Vernon district,” a spatio-legal entity that encompassed not just the eight thousand acres once owned by the “Father of his Country” but an area roughly six times that size, home also to the founding father George Mason and other Revolution-era statesman-slaveowners (map 2.1). Smith, Brown, and Robinson had probably worshiped together, attended the same celebrations, and known many of the same people all their lives. Smith (born in 1840) and Robinson (1844) had been acquainted since childhood, residing at or near Mount Vernon but on different sides of the line separating freedom from slavery. Robinson’s second husband was Brown’s grandfather , and she had helped raise him since he was a small boy. And Smith was distantly related to Florence Ford, Brown’s bride. In some respects, the common elements of these people’s life experiences grew out of the specificities of community and place: links to Mount Vernon on one side and Alexandria on the other; and changing local economic opportunities and constraints around the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, the divergences among these people’s and their families ’ roads into and out of farming reveal two significant aspects of the experience of “black farmers”: the economic fault lines that divided people within ostensibly the same place and a shared community, and the transformations between 1870 and 1930 that diminished the economic viability of farming for most black landowners. The differences stemmed from more than the alternative potential meanings of “farmer” and “farming” in the symbolic public space of a civic parade, the aspirational blanks on a marriage license, and the classificatory boxes of a census page. Time mattered: whether one had been born free or enslaved before the Civil War; when and under what circumstances one entered the ranks of landholders. So did gender, even though farming was at root a family’s occupation, not exclusively the province of husband or wife. Class distinctions counted, too, even (perhaps especially) within a small, geographically contained community. Finally, it is crucial to take account of place, in two senses: the existence of distinct spatial enclaves even within one “community”; and Map 2.1...