MY LAURENS ANCESTRY

Julia Ann was born into slavery in Laurens, South Carolina, about 1833, being listed as age 47 in the 1880 census. Nothing is recorded of her life from that inauspicious beginning until February 1860, when she was about 27 years old.

 

Julia Ann’s slaveholder was James Henderson Irby, a prominent Laurens lawyer and politician. He died in February 1860 at which time his estate was inventoried. In that document, Julia Ann was listed with her children John and Corry, along with about 200 other slaves. (Julia Ann apparently had two children named John. The first John is listed on this inventory and thus was born before 1860. The second is listed on the 1880 census and was born in 1873.) According to Irby’s inventory, Julia Ann and her children were retained from the estate by his widow, Henrietta. Five years later in 1865 at the end of the Civil War, they would have been emancipated along with all other slaves in the country. From 1865 to 1877 was the period of Reconstruction. Federal troops occupied the South and enforced to a greater or lesser extent the laws which were enacted to protect the newly freed slaves.

 

Although not found in the 1870 census, Julia Ann was listed in the 1880 census along with children Lee, Ellen, Morgan, Walter, Florence, Clarissa, John #2, and Louisa. They are all using the last name of Crout. The only Crout ever listed in Laurens county, other than Julia Ann and her children, was Azariah. An entry in the history of the white Crout family written by Charles Nichols, “The Crout Family of South Carolina”, provides a vital clue to link Azariah and Julia Ann:  “Later he surfaced in Laurens County as A.M. Crout and had children by a black woman (Juliana).”

 

Also listed on the 1880 census in Julia Ann’s household was Mary Boyd, age 64, old enough to have been Julia Ann’s mother, but no substantiating documentation has been found.

 

The father of the first John is not confirmed at this time either through documentation or oral history, although it is most likely Azariah. It is more certain that Azariah was the father of Julia Ann’s other children born during and immediately after slavery: Corrie (1857), Lee (1861), Ellen (1862), Morgan (1864), and Walter (1866).

 

We know much more about Azariah than we do about Julia Ann. Apparently, he worked for James Irby as an overseer and that is how he and Julia Ann came together. He was born in 1819 in Lexington County, South Carolina, to a family of modest means. In May 1839, at about the age of 20, Azariah married Christina Elizabeth Lybrand. She died nine months later, perhaps in childbirth.

 

Azariah soon remarried to Delila Austin. He had four children with her between 1843 and 1848. In 1850, Delila died. By 1860, the children had been farmed out to various families and Azariah was working as an overseer for the Irby family in Laurens, South Carolina. Julia Ann and Azariah’s relationship seems to have terminated at the end of the Civil War. The date of Azariah’s death is not known. According to Charles Nichols, his solitary grave is located on his (Azariah’s) home place in Lexington County, marked only by stones.

 

Oral history identifies the father of Julia Ann’s last four children, Clarissa, Florence, John, and Lula, as a white Cunningham, although all of the children used the surname Crout. Although there is no documentation to confirm it, I believe the father was Matthew C. Cunningham. According to Cousin Bobby Mills, H. Douglas Brown, a white merchant in Laurens, always acknowledged Bobby's grandmother Florence Crout Mills, as his aunt. Douglas' mother was Lena Cunningham, indicating that Florence was her half-sister. Lena's father was Matthew Cunningham. Perhaps DNA testing will prove the relationship in the future.

 

Julia Ann and her children were farm laborers according to the 1880 census, most likely working under a sharecropping contract. As such, she and her children stood little chance of ever owning their own land, especially in the restrictive atmosphere of post-reconstruction South Carolina. Reconstruction ended in 1877 with the withdrawal of federal troops which opened the way for Jim Crow and intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan. Many black folk were shaking the dust of South Carolina off their shoes and heading west for Texas and Arkansas. Push was provided by the worsening social conditions for blacks. Pull was provided by labor agents who roamed the South recruiting blacks to move west with tales of paradise, a land of endless sunshine and abundant crops with little toil. Considering the worsening social conditions in South Carolina, the promise of a future in Arkansas would have been irresistible to many.

 

An 11/19/1884 article in the New York Sun stated:  “The methods that were adopted by emigrant agents were later recalled by William Pickens…An agent representing a planter in the Mississippi River valley of Arkansas persuaded the elder Pickens to sign a contract to move his entire family to that state.

 

            The agent said that Arkansas was a tropical country of soft and balmy air, where

            cocoanuts, oranges, lemons and bananas grew. Ordinary things like corn and

            cotton, with little cultivation, grew an enormous yield. On the 15^th of January,

            1888, the agent made all the arrangements, purchased tickets, and we boarded

            the train in Seneca, S.C., bound toward Atlanta, Ga. Our route lay through

            Birmingham and Memphis and at each change of trains there seemed to be some

            representative of the scheme to see us properly forwarded, like so much freight

            billed for we knew not where.”

 

An excerpt from “South Carolina Negroes 1877-1900”, pg. 174, states, “Large farmers in the West and the major railroads maintained regular agents whose job it was to entice emigrants from the Southeast, and the railroads had special emigrant rates. Since federal aid was not forthcoming, Negro emigrants, like the latter-day Joads of Oklahoma, were at the mercy of labor and railroad agents and their propaganda of better conditions and higher wages in the West. At the end of 1881 the emigrant rate from Greenville to Little Rock was $22.50….most of them going to Arkansas, although some of them went to Memphis and others to Texas.”

 

Although it must have been a difficult decision, in about 1883 Julia Ann and her younger children—Lee, Morgan, Walter, Florence, Clarissa, John, and Lula—bid farewell to her married daughters, Ellen and Corrie. The departure must have been filled with tears for they could not have known if they would ever see each other again.

 

According to one version of oral family lore, the eight travelers went by train, heading for the town of Conway in Faulkner County, Arkansas. Another oral version says that they came in a wagon train, taking six months to make the journey. The usual procedure at the other end of the line was described by another emigrant:

 

“…they were met by a land agent, who took charge of them at the depot where they disembarked and provided for them by accommodating them in large buildings which have been erected for the purpose near the principal points at which the final stop is made, until some arrangement is made for the purchase of a small lot of ground by the emigrants. In cases where they are without means, they are housed until they can obtain work, which is said to be very plentiful and remunerative on the farms in that section, the wages for hands being from twelve to twenty dollars per month, board included.”

 

It would not have taken Julia Ann’s family long to realize that the labor agent’s claims of endless sunshine and easy crops were lies, but Lee, Morgan, and Walter were not deterred. They married, had children, and Lee and Morgan were eventually able to realize the dream of owning their own land. Walter died in 1891.

 

Perhaps it was homesickness, perhaps it was disillusionment. Whatever the reason, “Julia Ann came to Arkansas, didn’t like Ark. And returned to South Carolina, taking…John, Lula and Clarissa (maybe Florence)”, according to a 1977 letter written by Julia Ann’s granddaughter, Martha Madden Pitts. Julia Ann never left Laurens again. She died and is buried there at New Grove Baptist Church.

 

 

© Copyright by Annette Madden, 2006