ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 27, 1996 TAG: 9610280002
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-22 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: PULASKI
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
MEMO: ***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on Oct. 31 in Current
Correction
A 19th century house in Pulaski County built by an African-American
family, pictured in the Sunday New River Current, is occupied today by a
white family. Incorrect information was added to a photo caption about
the house.
Despite the missing pieces, Linda Killen has reassembled fragments of a lost mosaic that tells the story of black Pulaski County residents.
"These People Lived in a Pleasant Valley: A History of Slaves and Freedmen in Nineteenth Century Pulaski County, Virginia," is a new history by the Radford University professor that addresses large questions in a small place.
It spans the era when society loosened the lock and chains of bondage for black Americans without ever discarding the key.
"These People Lived in a Pleasant Valley" brings the rural black countians out of the historical shadows for the first time. But, at its core, the book is also a detective story.
This is Killen's fourth book of local history during the past four years. Previously she's written about New River Deport and Belspring, tapping a rich research vein that's been regarded as too close to home for notoriety.
"I know more about black history than anyone else in the county," Killen says matter-of-factly.
She's fully aware of the irony of such a statement, from a white women who moved here 20 years ago to teach diplomatic history, not knowing Claytor Lake from Peak Creek.
Her interest in learning the region from the inside out began when Killen bought a old farmhouse along the New River in Belspring. Killen overcame the disadvantage of not knowing the turf by curiosity and persevering. Those personal traits served her well, because she soon discovered she'd be blazing her own pathway of research.
In regard to the 19th-century black residents of Pulaski County, Killen discovered, "They were invisible, except to themselves."
That's typical of the hazy footprints left by forgotten people, overshadowed in the history books by their prominent and wealthy contemporaries.
But times are changing. And the history writers of today, searching for fresh material,
have begun to record individual voices from yesterday's muted masses - blacks, women, immigrants or members of the working class.
Killen belongs to that new school of thought. She also relishes the painstaking process of research, a methodology she calls "playing historical detective."
The book consists of scraps gleaned from a variety of sources: cemetery and church records, courthouse deeds and documents, old country store ledgers, personal letters or papers and personal interviews.
Her best sleuthing was undertaken in the attic of the Wilderness Road Museum in Newbern. There Killen discovered a musty box of documents that was narrowly salvaged from a heavy-handed cleanup at the Pulaski County Courthouse some years earlier.
Possibly someone at the courthouse took a cursory glance at the documents and decided they were expendable. Killen, on the other hand, struck gold when she found a pre-Civil War registration list in the box of all Pulaski County blacks who were free, rather than slaves.
"As I went along, I discovered more and more," she said.
Another facet of Killen's journey into the past is her collection of old photographs, gathered from individual families she's come to know in the area.
Some of the pictures are portraits of gussied-up families taken in a Radford photographic studio sometime around the turn of the century.
Others were shot by a Covington amateur photographer, Christopher B. Cushing, a man who apparently sought to record the everyday lives of Pulaski County blacks at home, work and play.
Cushing had family in the area and Killen knows the pictures were taken in 1895 near Dublin. However, the names of all subjects in Cushing's photos and many of those in the studio portraits have been lost.
But the faces endure.
They, like the other black Pulaski County residents occupy the pages of "They Lived in a Pleasant Valley" were common folks who pursued ordinary lives under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
Brought to a remote, rural area at the edge of the Appalachian frontier as slaves, they worked the fields beside the men who owned them, or helped the white matrons tend their modest homes.
Pulaski County had only a few large-scale farms that held most of the county's slaves, the largest group being the 89 owned by the Cloyd family in 1850. Most whites didn't own slaves; many philosophically opposed the institution.
Still, at the Civil War's verge in 1860, nearly 30 percent of Pulaski County's residents were black. Killen says the life of a slave was somewhat "less oppressive" there than elsewhere in the antebellum South, yet still tightly restricted.
And there was little question that blacks were consistently viewed, socially and legally, as inferiors. In 1854 the sale of a working-age male slave could bring up to $500, a capital investment comparable to a farmer's livestock.
When the Union army swept across Pulaski County in the spring of 1864, the momentum of the liberating force caught a number of slaves in its wake. They left their homes and erstwhile masters and followed the army like gypsies.
Killen quotes a Union officer who saw 200 ex-slaves gathered around a roaring bonfire on the New River's banks at Peppers Ferry. On a rainy night, they celebrated their new freedom with "a high carnival under the willows on the sand near the water's edge."
Those who later returned to their homes shared the hunger pangs and despoiled fortunes of their former masters. Not much changed immediately after the war for Pulaski County blacks. They found themselves once again working the fields, this time as sharecroppers.
The U.S. government's Freedmen's Bureau and its dynamic local leader, Capt. Charles S. Schaeffer, had a mission during Reconstruction to improve the social and economic fortunes of new black citizens. In Pulaski County - as elsewhere in the New River Valley - they had some success, founding churches and schools for blacks.
Some of those institutions, such as the Christiansburg Institute and Schaeffer Memorial Baptist Church of Christiansburg, were long-standing. But the idea of elevating the black race profoundly unnerved the white status quo - especially when newly registered black voters numbered one-third of the county's electorate.
Blacks quietly persevered despite the resistance, working as farmers, railroad workers, smiths, masons, teachers, ministers, stable hands, barbers, butchers and domestics. Some accumulated tracts of land, bought or built houses, raised families and occupied substantial parts of communities such as New River Depot. An ex-slave named John Clark had among his grandchildren a medical doctor, a teacher, a mortician and an insurance agent.
The industrial boom that occurred in Pulaski County during the 1880s drew many new black families to the county. Other longtime black residents left for good, leaving only headstones in cemeteries or lost family lineages.
"They came and went," Killen said, and the process continues today. Blacks remain a small percentage of the New River Valley's population. Some leave to find better opportunities, others come back home after spending years in other places.
In the preface to "These People Lived in a Pleasant Valley" Killen issues an invitation and a challenge for readers to use the book as a foundation for researching their own family histories.
"This is an attempt to bring the blacks of 19th-century Pulaski to life and, in so doing, give 20th-century residents of the county a better sense of their personal place in history," she writes.
Will they take advance of the opportunity? There's been recent talk of the need for more instruction about black history in public schools. And a Virginia Tech-aided campaign to renovate an old Christiansburg Institute building into a regional black history center continues.
But Killen says she's received little attention or feedback from her previous books, which dealt substantially with the history of local black communities.
If that trend continues, black history may remain relatively isolated, and the modern-day relatives of those who overcame so much will be stranded in the present.
"These People Lived in a Pleasant Valley: A History of Slaves and Freedmen in Nineteenth Century Pulaski County, Virginia," a 140-page softcover book with historic photographs, was published by Radford University's College of Arts and Sciences. It is available for purchase through several sources, directly from Linda Killen at P.O. Box 98, Belspring, VA. 24058, (540) 831-5247; at the Wilderness Road Museum in Newbern or through the Radford University bookstore. The cost varies from $10 to $22, depending on where the book is obtained.
LENGTH: Long : 183 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. ALAN KIM/Staff. Radford University professor andby CNBauthor Linda Killen near the New River community at one of Pulaski
County's few remaining 19th century houses built and still occupied
by an African-American family. color. 2. Visting minstral
photographed in 1895 at Dublin by Christopher B. Cushing. (Photo
from Linda Killen's collection, courtesy of Mrs. Caleb Cushing.)
(ran on NRV-1). 3. Christopher B. Cushing photographed generations
of black Pulaski County residents at this home (right) near Dublin
in 1895. Their identities are not known. (Photo from Linda Killen's
collection, courtesy of Mrs. Caleb Cushing.) 4. A
turn-of-the-century portrait of Pulaski County resident Viola A.
Garrett (above left) and her doll. (Photo courtesy of Annie
Charlton.) 5. No date is known when this portrait of an unidentified
little girl (above right) was taken in Pulaski County. (Photo
courtesy of Georgia English.) 6. An unidentified young black Pulaski
County resident (right) struck a jaunty pose for this turn-of-the
century studio portrait, possibly taken in Radford. (Photo courtesy
of Georgia English.) 7. An unidentified woman was photographed
making apple butter in 1895 near Dublin by Christopher B. Cushing.
(Photo courtesy of Mrs. Caleb Cushing.) 8. An unidentified Pulaski
County family is dressed up for this studio portrait (left) taken in
Radford. The date is not known. (Photo courtesy of Georgia English.)
9. Christopher B. Cushing, chronicler of late 19th century black
life in Pulaski County, poses with his photography equipment. (Photo
from Linda Killen's collection, courtesy of Mrs. Caleb Cushing.)