Person

Robin and Polly Holmes

Historical portrait of a woman. — Mary Jane Shipley, daughter of Robin and Polly Homes.
Courtesy of Oregon Historical Society Research Library, OrHi89474.

Before the Civil War, most African Americans traveled west as enslaved persons. Slavery could be found in every state and territory, and intense debates took place about its suitability in places such as Oregon Country, where Robin and Polly Holmes (along with their three-year-old daughter Mary Jane) arrived after a long journey on the emigrant trail from Missouri in 1844. Brought there by their owner, Nathaniel Ford, the Holmes family had landed on “free soil”—meaning slavery was not legal there. Yet this law was not enforced, and the Holmes’ long journey was only the beginning of their ordeal.

The Holmes family left Howard County, Missouri, on 14 May 1844, traveling with Ford, his wife, and their six children. Taking what became known as the “usual route” of the Oregon Trail, they reached the Willamette Valley on 6 October 1844. Once Ford staked his claim in the nearby Rickreall Valley in early 1845, he retrieved Robin, Polly, and Mary Jane from Oregon City to start the work of establishing a farm. The Holmes family lived in a small cabin on Ford’s farm, from which he allowed them to sell the produce that they raised. Ford refused, however, to honor his promise of emancipation. Robin Holmes traveled to the California gold mines to earn enough money to buy his family’s freedom. Once in California, Holmes found work as a cook in a mining camp; in his off-time, he prospected for gold. When he returned to the Rickreall farm in 1850, he brought a considerable amount of money with him.

By that time, Robin and Polly had five children. Not long after Holmes’ return from the gold mines, Ford agreed to free Robin, Polly, and their newborn baby, but kept their other three children, Mary Jane, Roxanna, and James. (A fifth child, Harriet, died in 1851.) Although illiterate, Robin had learned from Oregon’s Black abolitionist community and their allies that Oregon Territory had disallowed slavery. In 1852, Holmes sued Ford for the custody of his children. Frustrated with the local legal system in Polk County, he took his fight to the Oregon Supreme Court in the summer of 1853. On 13 July 1853, Judge George H. Williams ruled in favor of Robin Holmes, ruling that Mary Jane, James, and Roxanna were “hereby awarded to the custody of their parents …and remain with them as their children as fully in all respects.” Williams also ordered Ford to pay all costs associated with the proceedings.

Ford had a difficult time letting go of the children, including Mary Jane—who stayed on as his paid servant. At age twenty-two she married Reuben Shipley, also formerly enslaved, but not before Ford required her husband to pay $750 for her “ransom.” The Holmes family was not wealthy; at one point, a Polk County survey valued Robin Holmes’s personal property at roughly half of the county-wide average. In his will, dated 1 February 1862, he ordered that—after the payment of his debts and burial cost—each of his four children receive a five dollar “legacy” payment, and that whatever remained be “given to my wife Polly Holmes, for her life, to be used and enjoyed by her.”

Robin Holmes died and was buried in the Salem Pioneer Cemetery the next year. In 1870, at the age of sixty-eight, Polly Holmes was living at the Oregon Hospital for the Insane, an asylum in East Portland. She was still there in 1872, and she lived on into the 1880s. The only child of Robin and Polly Holmes who lived to see the turn of the century was Mary Jane Holmes Shipley Drake, their eldest daughter, who lived until 1925.

The Holmes’ victory, alongside similar cases tried throughout the Pacific Northwest, was part of a larger effort by African Americans and their allies to challenge unjust laws in the nineteenth-century American West.

(Special thanks to UNM PhD candidate Angela Reiniche for compiling this information)

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