A few years ago, my younger sister, a churched lady, like my mother up from Virginia told me that my childhood friend Daniel, born abt. 1937, had passed over and numerous unknown and seldom seen men in our age group attended the funeral in our hometown church. My first thought was yes, like me and my deceased friend Dan they too were of the Jenny Jackson midwife caring to our mothers back in the 1920-1950 era. Mrs. Jackson is the woman who told us boys on many occasions we were born to be brothers in Christ; and though mentally retarded Daniel was always our hometown brother.
Growing up during boyhood, it seemed to me that parents of everyone in town were from someplace else like Alabama, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia and even Europe; working in the coal mines and living in housing built and owned by the Pittsburgh Coal Company. From age 8 to 10 years I had a newspaper delivery job to about 50 different homes; and I knew which houses my school friends lived or did not live in.
Coal miner readers like my father read everything, and believed Duvall Williams was their brother down in the coal mines and many like my father, in spirit of Jesus Christ also, before and after Jackie Robinson said he was a believer. And, so those were added reasons for me to view Daniel as my brother and good boyhood friend.
baseball with Jackie Robinson was a daily social conversation topic among African-American laboring men and women. For men like my father and Mr. Duvall, Jackie Robinson epitomized the doctrine of Booker T. Washington that young Black men should use their minds, hearts and hands to gain marketable skills. They encouraged young boys to men like Duball’s son Henry, my friend to learn and practice, and he demonstrated so well that older men of community baseball team (Library Monarchs) drafted him onto their team.
That’s about time era when Henry told us younger guys like Daniel to stop calling him Cockeye, his boyhood nickname. He was called Hank by older men on team as a sign of respect. We younger boys did the same and he joined the Air Force and during his 20 year career became known as Henry Hank Williams champion amateur boxer and semi-professional golfer.
Second baseman Jackie Robinson played 10 seasons for the Dodgers. Robinson had a .311 batting average with 1,518 hits, 137 home runs, 734 runs batted in, and 947 runs scored. Robinson was elected to Hall of Fame.
My father cared and admired Jackie’s courage and determination ducking pitches at his heard, hitting the dirt and getting back in the box to bat again. I learned about the games listening to him talk to Deacon Pope whose two sons were professional baseball players. Their daily travels and news-paper opinions were part of our town culture chats by men and women including the Duvall family.
My friend Daniel’s family were not subscribers, and he was assigned to the special education room (many students called it the dumb room) in our elementary school building. In my 8th year of schooling in another building, I learned that many kids I knew from the dumb room were not my inferiors, and some like Daniel were brotherly in classes and social relationships to me. Not Daniel, but others did go on into the 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th grades to graduate high school. Daniel like many dropped out after 9th grade, and I seem to remember him getting a job on a local garbage pickup truck of a local pig farmer.
It was not until after graduating high school that I learned from my mother and understood why Mrs. Jackson viewed all of us boys to be brothers. In fact, I learned that Daniel’s name was not Daniel Duvall, I had always assumed because his father was known in the community as Duvall. I had not known their family name was Williams, probably because I never saw or heard him addressed by it in our church that he apparently did not attend. He was a coal miner like my father and he and all the men I knew spoke to him as “Duvall or Mr. Duvall and his wife as Mrs. Duvall who I quickly learned that like Daniel her son, she was also mentally retarded.” And, by the grace of God Almighty, I had a mother who was not.
My mother taught me a lot about “the least of us” of which our family was surely of them. She explained for me to understand that like me Daniel was part of a sizeable family with an older sister who had a son (Clyde) and daughter (Mary/Sugar Lump) in the age group of me and my sister, four years senior to me. The oldest Duvall offspring was not mentally retarded and functioned like a Godmother to her siblings and natural mother. Her name was Elizabeth who had a strenuous burden being a mother, godmother and sibling to her oldest brother Davy who was gay and looked like her when he dressed in same clothes and make-up.
A related burden for Ms. Elizabeth was her next older brother “Nukie” severally retarded since birth and often known to walk down the street buck naked. I saw him once when Mrs. Jenny Jackson turned him around and walked behind returning Nookie home. It was a similar incident to what I saw around 1971 in Accra Ghana with a naked man walking in the street and no one, not even policemen, stopping him. My Ghana friend explained to me that it was their custom to not embarrass the family but wait for a relative to show up and take the man home.
Younger brothers to Davy in Mr. Duvall’s family were James, Henry, Daniel and Leonard all born in my hometown of Library. I very well remember Leonard at age 6 years dying when his appendix burst; and many mothers like mine assembled to mourn in the Duvall home. The family members were not attendees or baptized in our nearby Baptist church because Big Sister Elizabeth was active in a Seven-Day Adventist Congregation in Pittsburgh and wanted her siblings and husband Burley Carrington to be so-saved. I was told that in early years of Pittsburgh Coal Company Mr. Burley was a mule team driver moving the coal from the mine to a location where good coal was separated from the dirt and slate.
And, he was known to at one time in the past, he was a prize-fighter and likely the person who gave my buddy Daniel the boxing gloves he loved caring around his neck and getting buddies like me to put on a pair to box him. I did and like everyone else put the gloves on with Dan I quickly learned that he knew how to punch. I turned down his future offers to box me. Our group of friends with Dan played with him just about every day it was him that Alvin Ross called Dangerous Dan along with other names like Man without fear. My near death experience on the red hot slate dump was me trying to imitate Dangerous Dan who a week earlier had make the forbidden walk without fear of being sucked into the mass of red hot slate.
Dan did a lot of things in play with my friends and me that we kept quiet about because no one ever asked us. Example was the three alarm fire that burned the great field at the end of Overhill Avenue on which we all lived. Playing cops and robbers on a long day in which Dan was the town sheriff, he ended his search for our hideout by setting the field on fire after we refused to surrender and show ourselves.
So far as I ever heard, none other than son Clyde ever did get dipped in the water of salvation. The death of Leonard, less than seven years of age, shocked my mother and other mothers in town, Black and White, when they learned the facts. He died from child neglect by a retarded mother who did not, could not, diagnose a underage child’s complaint about a stomach ache, even after the first-grade teacher sent him home for caring. My mother and others in town realized that Elizabeth needed help in helping her care for her mother and siblings. The Library Civic Women’s Club that included Mrs. Jenny Jackson decided that one of them would visit the needy household each day to be useful and helpful; and Mrs. Jackson would extra care about boys like Daniel and Leonard to make certain they were not ill.
That declaration of my mother and other mothers helping Elizabeth get help caring for her mother and siblings was after World War II; and I remember it was about 1946 when Leonard died in the first grade while I was in the second grade, Mrs. Gates class.
Women’s Civic Clubs (moremarymatters.com)
Pittsburgh Coal Company, owned by Mellon Bank, had initiated and sponsored civic social clubs for men and women, including midwives, even before I was born. But, so far as I know it was the Duvall Williams son Lenard’s death in which I best remember my mother as a Christian activist in action. There were many mothers, Black and White, who mourned and suffered together when a neighborhood child died, or like me almost died in red hot slate dump accident imitating my friend Daniel walking on the edges. To this day, I believe GOD heard me holler and sent Freddy Austin dashing to my rescue, no one else.
I would like to tell readers that my beloved mother not only visited and went into Daniel’s household talking to his mother about him and her; and told my brother and friend that if Daniel were ever hungry he could come eat dinner with me and my siblings. And if she saw him in the yard or streets playing when time for me to eat, she would wave him into supper also. But, its not a true story of my household, but a neighboring Italian mother and large family that emotionally adopted Daniel.
I do well remember the day my mother carried baked three sweet potato pies, and we walked to carry and give one to Mrs. Duvall in her house. Daniel was there when the pie was given to Daniel’s mother who exclaimed in thanks that she would eat it and Dan asked to be included in the eating with her replying “no, Miss Cora (my mother) brought this for me.” My mother promptly cautioned the pie is everyone and Dan’s replied with a big smile, “OK.”
I want to remember, maybe exaggerate a bit, that at Thanksgiving-Christmas time our Italian neighbors always did so even giving him a turkey supper with greens and sweet potatoes along with other delights. Daniel heard his name called out to God Almighty as an Italian father made blessings for all present, including him.
Other men in the church of my father did the same thing so far as I remember hearing my mother and father talk about the Duvall family. Elizabeth’s brother Davy often came to the house for talking with my mother about any and everything he wanted to discuss, especially what he was doing for his mother and siblings. He was not a coal miner and I do not recall him ever saying where he worked. He was welfare qualified as head of household beneficiary and the women in town apparently were very fond of his visits and talks.
Men like my father were tolerant; but would be less so when Mount Zion Baptist Church caught fire in year 1957, and Davy who was not a member rushed into the burning church and took the big famous bible to his home. My mother counseled him that it was wrong of him and he promised to return when he finished reading. Folks in town claimed he went crazy going down to the Roman Catholic Church waving the bible and shouting to whoever was inside that he now knew what they were hiding.
Community Health (moremarymatters.com)
By my 10th year in public school, Old Man Duvall had retired as a coal miner and moved himself and family dependents minus Davy and James back to a farm in Erie, Pa. which used to be a part of Allegheny County in the 19th century. I thought about him when deciding to write about my childhood buddy Daniel (some guys called him Boone). I decided I needed to start with his father in Erie, PA. just as I did with my own story, starting in Salem, VA. I learned a lot about the place and African-American heritage within it dating back to the pre-revolutionary war era patriots of 1775 to 1783.
Researching and reading more I have since learned by copyrighted article below and concluded Duvall Williams was likely of the AME Church that my father was baptized into as a boy; and became a Baptist after marriage and coming to live near a Baptist church literally just steps away with doors open and inviting. And, he was likely one of those World War I veterans like others I know something about who came into the Pittsburgh Region pursuant jobs in the coal mining and steel mill industries.
There were no coal mine jobs in northern Allegheny County that once included Erie County. Many Pittsburgh Region African-American military veterans dating back to Civil War came from Erie County.
I remember as a teenager that Mr. Duvall (Duvall Williams) had retired as a coal miner, and moved back to his farm home in Erie, Pa. a county about two hours distance from Library. I later learned he grew up there but kept ownership of the family house in Library where most of his children, including my friend Dan, and his older brother Davey who became head of household and rented out two rooms. I was excited to learn and including what follows from copyrighted material of the Shared Heritage folks in Erie, PA.
Settlement and Slavery to the Civil War: 1795-1865 https://www.sharedheritage.org/
Erie’s early history is traditionally told as a story of Revolutionary War veterans and brave white pioneers carving frontier settlements out of the wilderness of northwestern Pennsylvania. Often missing from that narrative are the enslaved Africans brought here by their owners.
Lost on most of us in the 21st century is the fact that Pennsylvania, cradle of American freedom, even had slavery. In 1780, even as American colonists were locked in a bloody fight for independence, Pennsylvania became the first democratic body in world history to move toward gradual abolition of slavery. The law passed that year banned the importation of slaves and mandated that enslaved persons born before 1780 would remain so for life, while their children born after 1780 would remain “indentured servants” until the age of 28.
Among the prominent Erie citizens counting persons among their substantial property were Judah Colt, P.S.V. Hamot, Rufus Reed, and the Kelsos. When John Kelso died in 1821, the Erie press ran an advertisement selling “the time” of 18 year-old Bristo Logan. Following his purchase by John Cochran of Millcreek and ten additional years of enslavement, Logan married and ran his own ice cream business, pioneering a tradition of notable African American success in that enterprise.
I know that Allegheny County, wherein I was born, in the 1810 U.S. Census, listed some 28 living slaves subject to gradual/eventual emancipation under Pennsylvania law. I do not know about Erie County and the non-profit insight cited is very informative to me knowing what kind of work Black men were doing, for who and why. Fighting in the War of 1812 included the U.S. Navy and Black sailors therein which I long suspected in writing about military history. But, then afterwards where did they go to do what with their lives before the Civil War erupted and give a history as to who, what, when and where.
Whose brothers were they, and how do I know my relatives down in Virginia were or were not related to them. Virginia was right across the Ohio River from Pittsburgh and I dare not imagine none of my ancestral kin failed to attempt or accomplish escape from slavery before Underground railroad historians love to read and talk about. As the son of a coalminer and offspring of generations that ventured to pursue liberties where no one had dared to do so before reflected a pioneering spirit of men born, not made by, favorable actions of others telling them how and when to go or not go to war or work. I like following the records of men at war and peace because it causes me to think I might indeed be a brother to Daniel, and his story is part of my story to tell. If not, why do I know so much and care about him since our childhoods in the same town and streets. Indeed, God works in mysterious ways for us to think about.
One of the first white settlers in northwest Pennsylvania was John Grubb, who brought with him from Maryland a black man named Boe Bladen. Census records tell us that Grubb had several African Americans living in his household (likely Bladen and his sons), and we also know that Grubb moved at some point from enslaver to abolitionist. Originally taken from Guinea, west Africa, Bladen arrived with striking marks on his body. Conflicting accounts hold that the markings were indicators either of his tribal identity or savage treatment by a previous owner.
Sometime around the turn of the century Bladen purchased a 400-acre tract of land in Millcreek Township from the Pennsylvania Population Company. Though reduced somewhat in size over time, the Bladen Farm (marked on the landscape today only by the “Bladen Road” street sign) remained the property of three generations of Bladens for a full century. How Boe Bladen was able to purchase the land, and how and when he earned his freedom remains murky, but John Grubb almost certainly played a role in helping the man become one of the first–and, if we include his sons, longest-tenured–landowners in early Erie County history.
By the early nineteenth century, Harborcreek Township was home to the largest population of enslaved and free African Americans in northwest Pennsylvania. Robert McConnell and James Titus were first to arrive, brought here as young children by early settler Thomas Rees. It is quite possible that at least Spanish American War veteran Robert McConnell, buried alongside Rees in Gospel Hill Cemetery and described in early Erie histories as a “mulatto,” was Rees’s son. Upon their 28th birthday, Rees granted McConnell and Titus 50 acres each.
These are just a few of the African Americans from Erie’s early history whose lives remain etched in relative obscurity but who doubtlessly contributed to the growth of the larger community. Indeed, the burgeoning maritime and industrial powerhouse that Erie County became by the mid-19th century was built partly with the toil of enslaved and free black men, women and children.
That truth was reinforced during the summer of 1813 when the county’s still small black population (likely no more than 50) more than doubled with the arrival of African American sailors from the eastern seaboard. Many of them skilled and experienced sailors, African American seamen—who in this era enjoyed a greater measure of respect and equal treatment on board a ship than black men generally received anywhere on land—made up roughly a quarter of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s force that defeated and captured a British naval squadron in the Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813. Following the dramatic U.S. naval victory, the fleet’s commanding officer noted that Perry spoke “highly of the bravery and good conduct of the negroes, who formed a considerable part of his crew. They seemed to be absolutely insensible to danger.”
On land, the struggle for what Abraham Lincoln would call a “new birth of freedom” at Gettysburg intensified in the years leading to the Civil War. Erie had a chapter of the white-dominated American Colonization Society that promoted a “back to Africa” movement, but most patriots who believed a better future possible for African Americans focused their energies in anti-slavery work, some as bravely outspoken members of the Anti-Slavery Society.
In Erie, William Himrod, a pioneer of the city’s renown iron industry and an outspoken abolitionist, used his home at Second and French Streets to house the “Sabbath School for Colored Children.” Himrod then established the community of “New Jerusalem” north of Sixth and west of Sassafras to Cherry Street for free blacks and destitute whites, selling lots at affordable prices with the requirement that they build a home and help forge an interracial community.
The Jerusalem appellation stuck, in part because of the pilgrimage-like journey from the city across a yawning wooded ravine in those years. Over time, Jerusalem became home to many prominent black residents and institutions. Looking north, the community faced Presque Isle Bay and the promised land of Canada; to the south soon would be “Millionaire’s Row,” a prominent stretch of grand mansions housing the richest and most prominent Erie industrialists, shipping magnates, financiers, and political elites.
More widely celebrated than these community-building efforts is Erie’s association with the Underground Railroad (UGRR)—neither a railroad nor underground, but a complex chain of homes, churches and countless other places of refuge extending from the Deep South to northern locales like Erie and Canada in the decades leading to Civil War. Much Underground Railroad history in Erie County remains shrouded in legend—unsubstantiated fables of underground tunnels extending into Presque Isle Bay, for example. By the very nature of what was a criminal enterprise carried out in secret, a lack of documentation has long frustrated historians.
We know for certain, however, that for reasons owing to its location at the southern edge of narrow Lake Erie just across from Long Point, Ontario, northwest Pennsylvania was a region of vigorous UGRR activity by black and white residents. From the late 1820s through the Civil War, Erie citizens helped many of the hundreds of slaves a year who managed to escape to their freedom on the Underground Railroad.
We know of Albert and Robert Vosburgh, father-and-son barbers who for many years used their shop at 314 French Street to harbor, re-groom, and outfit anew runaway enslaved persons who would then move by night northeastward along the edge of the shoreline, or across Lake Erie to Canada. Indispensable to their work was Hamilton E. Waters, (maternal grandfather of world-famous musician Harry T. Burleigh), hired by Albert Vosburgh to clean and press clothes—and also to surreptitiously help direct fugitives toward their freedom. Refuge in Canada was essential after the passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Act, which heightened the fear and resentment of slave catchers who roamed the region.
We know of local Underground Railroad conductor Frank Henry, who hid persons seeking freedom in the Wesleyville Methodist Church. Henry often received them from Hamilton Waters, who directed their clandestine route eastward out of Erie to the shoreline at Four Mile Creek. At the west end of the county was conductor Reverend Charles Shipman of the Universalist Church in Girard. An outspoken abolitionist, Shipman received and gave sanctuary to fugitives coming from the south, redirecting them either west toward the Ohio border or eastward to Erie and Harborcreek.
The cause of abolition was bolstered by the True American, a newspaper published by Henry Catlin from the second floor of the Lowry Building at East Fifth and French. For years, runaway enslaved persons were hidden from slave-catchers in the newspaper bins of Catlin’s office. It was Catlin who on April 24, 1858 brought to Erie the nation’s most eloquent anti-slavery voice, Frederick Douglass.
In the face of an angry mob that nearly ran Catlin and Douglass out of town, the great orator delivered his lecture that evening at Park Hall carrying the title, “Unity of the Human Race.”
The Lowry Building that housed The True American belonged to state Senator Morrow Barr Lowry, in the Civil War era one of Erie’s most successful businessmen, but far more than that. Remembered as the “Moral Conscience” of the senate, Lowry advocated abolition in the state legislature, as well as debt forgiveness for the poor. An acquaintance of John Brown, Lowry visited the radical abolitionist in Charles Town, Virginia while he awaited execution for the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry that helped trigger the Civil War. When war came, Lowry contributed $2,000 toward the fabled 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry that would fight at Gettysburg under the command of Colonel Strong Vincent, and also pushed for arming free black men as soldiers for the Union Army. Lowry later championed the establishment of the Pennsylvania Soldiers and Sailors Home. His farm on what was then Cooper Road eventually was sold to the Sisters of Mercy to establish Mercyhurst College.
Another former Maryland slave who landed in Erie was the aforementioned Hamilton Waters, who worked not only as a clothes presser at Vosburgh’s barber shop, but also served as a town crier and the city’s lamplighter. Waters was partially blind, the reason for which is unclear, but evidence suggests that while enslaved he was caught reading a book and punished accordingly. As he walked the streets lighting Erie’s gas lamps, Waters sang the old spirituals and plantation work songs of his youth. Accompanying him was grandson Harry Thacker Burleigh, who went on become one of the world’s great composers (see next section).
The terrible Civil War that had been coming on since the nation’s founding did not leave Erie untouched. Historical research is ongoing concerning the military service of African Americans from northwest Pennsylvania in both the army and navy. The 3rd United States Colored Regiment was organized August 1863 near Philadelphia, the first Pennsylvania unit of African American men.
Among the black men mustered in at Erie, Waterford or Meadville, we know the 43rd regiment of U.S. Colored Troops fought with great skill and courage during the 1864 Wilderness Campaign. That is underscored in this account of the Siege of Petersburg from the unit’s Chaplain, J. M. Mickley:
Colored non-commissioned officers fearlessly took the command after their officers had been killed or borne severely wounded from the field, and led on the attack to the close. . . .Here, on this, as on many other fields during this war, for the sacred cause of our republican liberties, free institutions, and the Union, the blood of the Anglo Saxon and the African mingled very freely in the full measure of devoted offering.
Sources
“Erie’s Underground Railroad,” Erie’s History and Memorabilia, April 1, 2017; at https://eriehistory.blogspot.com/2017/04/erie-underground-railroad.html; retrieved July 20, 2020.
“Morrow B. Lowry,” Pennsylvania State Senate; at https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/BiosHistory/MemBio.cfm?ID=4956&body=S, retrieved July 20, 2020.
Thompson, Sarah S., with additional research and an essay by Karen James. Journey From Jerusalem, 1795-1995 (Erie County Historical Society, 1996), pp. 11-27.
Image Sources
- Josiah Wedgewood, 1787 https://www.eternitynews.com.au/opinion/am-i-not-a-brother-or-sister/
- 1876, H.B. Robinson
- Photo by Chris Magoc, 2019
- Erie Maritime Museum website
- Image courtesy of Find a Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/7134179/william-himrod
- Illustration courtesy of the Harry T. Burleigh Society, and Jean Snyder’s superb book, Harry T Burleigh, From the Spirituals to the Harlem Renaissance (University of Illinois Press, 2016, p. 23)
- Illustration courtesy of Debbi Lyons’s richly illustrated and wonderful “Old Time Erie” site: https://oldtimeerie.blogspot.com/2013/01/wesleyville-me-church-and-underground.html?m=0
- Illustration from the Black Past (public domain): https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/1860-frederick-douglass-constitution-united-states-it-pro-slavery-or-anti-slavery/
- Illustration from the Pennsylvania State Senate: https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/BiosHistory/MemBio.cfm?ID=4956&body=S
- 1863 lithograph, Peters Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution: http://www.civilwar.si.edu/soldiering_join_us.html
*One of the most widely reproduced images of the abolition movement, this Josiah Wedgewood engraving dates to the founding of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in England. The question “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” is rhetorical to our modern sensibilities, while the black man on bended knee holds a complex set of meanings: is he a piteous supplicant pleading for his humanity to a dominant, presumably benevolent white society? Or is this the Christian archetypal appeal to moral conscience—a “taking the knee” prayerful entreaty that has continued, often with defiant courage, through the civil rights movement and now the Black Lives Matter Movement?
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