Struggling to move away from renting farmland to owning their own property was a dominant theme in the lives of many of the people interviewed and in the lives of those they knew. Through buying land, African Americans took another important step towards independence, and how some achieved the status of property owner was a lingering source of pride.

Acquiring land was all the more difficult because most African Americans in the late 1800's had little money. And there were other obstacles they had to overcome, roadblocks demonstrated through the story the Reverend Janie Hampton told about her father, a man of considerable ability who worked as a tenant farmer at Millwood Plantation in the late 1800's.

He was "a slow talker, but whenever he spoke, it had weight to it," Hampton said of her father. His neighbors respected him as someone with knowledge and wisdom, she remembered, and sought his opinion and advice. "He used to go back and forth around to different people and doctor on animals... He knew when to plant certain things that grew underground, it was a certain moon that you plant those on. And [he had similar knowledge about things that grow above the ground, things that you freed from the stalk....And there's certain times you kill [livestock and the meat will be good and tender and everything and the fat will come from it. And then there is a lot in feeding an animal. When you get an animal ready for the table, the market, there is certain things you feed him," she explained.

Hampton learned some of his methods through experimentation and gleaned others from combing through magazines. He taught himself to read and was avid in the pursuit of information, according to his daughter. "[There really wasn't anything around the farm he couldn't do. He used to get farmer's magazines... He was just apt at learning things... .He had an orchard... .He had different kinds of peaches. He had red peaches, then he had a real sweet, white peach. And then he had apricots, plums. He used to graft trees and make them grow, you know, mixed fruits."

Her father's goal was to own his own farm, and he steadily saved to fulfill his dream. But when he was close to accumulating enough money, he delayed buying because he had promised his elderly parents that he wouldn't leave them. "He stayed and took care of them. He lived there [at Millwood and buried his mother and father. And then he was somewhat stuck with us," his daughter explained. "See, 14 children had been born. Twelve of them were living. The first two died. But 12 of us were living when Grandma died."

Hampton eventually did buy land, but at an unexpected price. His daughter remembered that once overseers learned of his plans to become a property owner they made life more difficult for him. "People knew that he had bought. And they figured he was planning on building and they just wouldn't be but so nice to you, if they thought you was trying to help yourself... .They took more rent from you than you was supposed to [pay].... Whatever they said you owed, you just had to pay it... .You couldn't appeal to anybody."
 

Careless farming practices severely eroded the land and further depleted fertility, already sorely taxed by the heavy demands of growing cotton.

Such resistance from whites to African Americans owning land was common, researchers learned. W.T. Smith's father, William Smith, began buying property in the 1920's and had three farms in succession. When he died in 1949, Smith, who was 79 years old, had acquired 280 acres, but his son remembered that during his lifetime he had faced resentment: "They [the whites] didn't wanna see colored folk with nothing but a pair of patched-up, white overalls. Some of them don't want to see you with a new pair of overalls on."

Not all whites, however, were unsympathetic to the aspirations of African Americans, as exemplified by the story of Gilbert Gray, born a slave in September 1852. Son of a slave woman and white father, Gray's own skin color was light, allowing him, perhaps, to pass for white in some situations. The post-bellum South, however, "still operated under the notion that children assumed the race of the mother," as Eleanor Ramsey pointed out, so Gilbert Gray was considered black by those who knew his parentage. Not surprisingly, however, considering the privileges accorded to whites, Gray may have tried to be identified as white instead. According to one account, he required his black, common-law wife, Clarissa "Classie" Jones, to walk the last mile to church alone so that they would not be seen driving together.

Gray, who was apparently trained as a blacksmith, spent many years as a tenant farmer. Then, sometime between 1903 and 1909, the record is unclear, he gained title to about 140 acres formerly owned by a white family, the Verdels. Explained Edward Brownlee, "[Gray] bought that place for $1,000. For ten years, he paid off $100 a year...Sometimes he couldn't get no more than $60...The Verdels would just cancel the note [as] paid."

A deed search by researcher Marlessa Gray indicated that title to the Verdel land actually passed through several hands in the first decade of the 1900's before Gilbert Gray acquired it in 1909, although he apparently paid taxes on the property for years before then. Why he did this is uncertain. What is clear is that Gray lost the farm sometime between 1912 and 1914.

Brownlee remembered that Gray was tremendously troubled by the loss, particularly of his house, which he had built himself. The single-story dwelling was moderate in size. There was a central hallway, two rooms on each side of the hallway, and an attached kitchen. "After he got his house built," according to Brownlee, "he had it all painted up. And he kept that thing painted. When I was a child, it was just as white." Gray also built another house nearby for the adult son of Clarissa Jones.

Gray blamed himself for losing the property, according to Brownlee, who recalled Gray's words:
"I was runnin' round with other women, throwing it away.... And then [my] boys got up big enough and they started runnin' around, making me borrow money, and that's why I didn't have nothing."

He never bought land again, but despite his financial troubles, he remained a generous friend. "I was a little boy," Brownlee recalled. "My dad had a stroke and couldn't plow... .And he [Gray] would come down and I'd hear him tell dad many a time, 'Say, Ed, I feel sorry for you. You can't plow and got these little children and everything... I'll come up here and plow for you one day a week. I'm too old [so] I can't hold out but one day a week.' And he'd come there soon, before I'd get up [in the morning], and he wouldn't work but that one day a week. But now, if something like stacking hay [needed to be done] or something like that where it wasn't such a hard job, he'd work a day or two."

As an old man, Gray was given to frequent reminiscing about his former prosperity and how he had once owned his own farm. Rufus Bullard remembered that after Gray lost his land he lived in a series of shacks, including one adjacent to the Seaboard Air Line railroad tracks. He died in 1921 or 1922, without leaving a will.
 

Right: Early photographers used elaborate backdrops for portraits.

A further glimpse at what the rural existence was like came from Randolph Davis, who retained vivid memories of his childhood on the farm. He recalled "the old broken [pot belly] stove with a door" sitting in the yard and nearby the "old pot" where the chickens used to drink water. Particularly memorable was a time when he watched his father and his father's brother plowing the fields. When they finished, they led the mule back to the shed where they were unhooking the animal from the plow, releasing it from the sweaty harness. Suddenly, "People were calling and shouting and saying a mad dog was coming in this direction," Davis said. "Then they caught up with the dog on top of the hill and killed him."

His father, Davis remembered, also aspired to own his own land and made regular payments on about 85 acres. But when he had paid nearly the full price, the owners abruptly announced that they didn't want to sell to him, after all. "They took it [his money]. He didn't get anything. You couldn't argue, couldn't say nothing."

Despite such roadblocks, African Americans slowly managed to increase their land ownership in Abbeville and Elbert Counties. The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), which studied housing in the area, noted that between 1905 and 1945, African Americans owned from four to six percent of the available land in Elbert County. By 1950, that figure had edged upward to eight percent. In the late 1800's and early 1900's, most African Americans landowners had inherited their property from whites. For example, in Heardmont, Georgia, and surrounding areas, known then as the Ruckersville Militia District, African Americans in 1905 owned an unusually high 16 percent of the property for the time, largely because before the Civil War three white landowners had fathered children by slaves and bequeathed their property to these descendants.

George Washington Dye's story is the best documented of these three instances of white landowners. As a young man, he proposed marriage to the daughter of a prominent family, but was spurned by the girl's father who said Dye was too poor to marry her. Infuriated, Dye vowed that someday he would be richer than the father was and set out to fulfill his promise. According to Edward Brownlee, who was Dye's great-grandson on his mother's side of the family, and also according to other sources, Dye's business dealings were shrewd, sometimes bordering on unethical. He was quite a gambler and acquired considerable land through winning bets. He never married, but fathered eight children with one of his slaves. Ostracized by many of his white neighbors because of the relationship, Dye apparently cared little about what people thought of him. He reportedly flaunted his ties with the woman, who was named Lucinda and who probably came from the Virgin Islands.

"Yeah, she told some of their grandchildren that we were from the Virgin Islands and that we were not from Africa," Brownlee said, adding, "but in that day, most people with no school didn't know what the Virgin Islands were, so maybe she didn't. I don't know whether she was born here or whether it was her mother who came from the Virgin Islands." Lucinda also had a ninth child, fathered by another man before she lived with Dye. This child, who lived with Dye's children, was included in his will as well.

Historians learned that Dye did indeed accomplish his youthful vow to become rich. When he died in 1865, he owned approximately 3,000 acres near Heardmont, Georgia and other parcels nearby. Much of his bequest to his children, however, was plucked from the heirs within two generations, sometimes apparently by "extralegal, if not illegal, means," according to researchers with The History Group.

Edward Brownlee's grandmother, Laura, for instance, who was Dye's daughter, was tricked into signing away all her land, Brownlee said. The swindle, Brownlee related, occurred not long after his grandfather died in a freak accident. "A cow hooked him up under the chin somewhere, and the doctor wanted to operate. He was scared for them to do it. And I understand that it [the infection] went down into the lungs and it developed into lung trouble. He wasn't but 40 years old when he died."

His grandmother, who remarried, didn't understand her rights to the property she had inherited and consequently lost it. "They weren't even able to get any of it because they had signed their [land] away... But I guess if you don't know, you don't know," Brownlee said. Some of Dye's children were stripped of their birthright "because the administrators met and thought that it was terrible for white people to give their land to Negroes," he continued. "So they took as much of it as they could. If they didn't take it all then, they took it later."

A few of Dye's heirs, however, successfully resisted. Brownlee said of Eugene, one of Lucinda's sons, "Now, old man Gene was smarter than any of them. Old man Gene wouldn't sign nothing.. .he wouldn't sign nothing one way or the other, and when he died, every bit of his [land] came back to his children." Dye's other children, however, or his grandchildren, found themselves ensnared in debt. They either lost large plots of land all at once or sold pieces off bit by bit.

Not all the Dye holdings, however, that were lost by his descendants remained in the hands of whites. Brownlee's parents eventually managed to buy back some of the property that his grandmother had owned, and another African American, Jim White, bought land in 1926 from Shelton Dye, grandson of George Washington Dye. Shelton Dye was forced to sell the property because he was unable to pay his taxes.
 

Jim White lived in this house. He was among the most successful African-American farmers in the area. He grew many different crops and built a number of barns and other structures on his property.

Jim White used the former Dye land and other property he bought nearby as the foundation for a thriving farm with 37 buildings. By 1935, he had acquired 357 acres, the largest holdings belonging to any African American in the Heardmont vicinity. He had not inherited a single acre.

He worked about 17 years for a railroad company, then as a tenant farmer before he began buying property. The resistance that earlier African Americans met from whites in the aftermath of the Civil War when they tried to buy farms had softened somewhat by the time White began to acquire land. Nonetheless, he still achieved a noteworthy degree of success as a farmer in an era when many others were failing. White's industriousness and willingness to innovate were important factors in his accomplishment. Every few years, he built a new barn to accommodate his burgeoning enterprises. He consistently diversified the crops that he grew, cushioning the blow if one crop failed, either in the field or the marketplace. While he raised cotton like most of his neighbors and was hurt along with them by falling prices, he was able to sustain the loss through selling meat and such produce as peas, corn, wheat, peanuts, sweet potatoes, and sugar cane.

Helped by his wife and their 11 children, he produced 70 to 80 gallons of syrup from the sugar cane, and raised hogs, cattle, chickens, geese, ducks, and turkeys. Three milk cows supplied all the family's dairy needs.

During the Great Depression in the 1930's, the family sold approximately one-third of their produce. They were especially successful with sales of peas and sweet potatoes, which they stored and marketed during the late winter and early spring when supplies in most markets were low.

Jim White died in 1956. His four daughters continued to farm the family land with mules after his passing, just as their father had taught them.

Changing Places

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