HISTORY LECTURE LOOKS AT SLAVERY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 9, 1992                   TAG: 9202090165
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: GEORGE KEGLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MONETA                                LENGTH: Medium
HISTORY LECTURE LOOKS AT SLAVERY
On the eve of the Civil War, more than one in three residents of Roanoke, Bedford and Franklin counties was a slave, according to 19th century census figures reported Saturday by historian John Kern.
Kern, director of the Roanoke Regional Preservation Office of the state Department of Historic Resources, was at the Booker T. Washington National Monument for a Black History Month lecture.
Roanoke County's 2,600 slaves made up 33 percent of its population; 16,000 slaves in Bedford and Franklin were more than 36 percent of their totals, and 5,000 people in bondage in Botetourt and Montgomery counties comprised 23 percent of that population, Kern said.
Many slaves toiled in tobacco fields in the Piedmont section of the state, he said, but others worked at furnaces and mills farther west. They earned about 30 cents a day after they were freed, he said.
His research showed that Col. George Tayloe owned 136 slaves, mainly working at his iron furnace at Cloverdale, and about 60 others farmed his bottom land along the Roanoke River. Col. William Fleming had 11 slaves on his 2,000-acre estate along Tinker Creek when he died in 1795, according to census records.
Samuel Harshbarger, a German miller, left his Carvins Creek home, which still is standing, and moved to Indiana in the 1820s because he was opposed to slavery, according to family tradition.
Paschal Buford, who built Locust Level at Montvale about 1820, had 43 slaves. James Randal Kent, the largest slaveholder in Montgomery County, farmed almost 6,000 acres at the confluence of Toms Creek and New River with 123 slaves.
Describing four blacks born in slavery, Kern said Booker T. Washington wrote that emancipation from slavery in 1865 brought blacks questions that whites had addressed for centuries. Washington, a nationally known educator born in Franklin County in 1856, said freed blacks had to deal with a home, a living, rearing of children, education and other problems.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB