Hi, I’m Turk McCleskey, author of The Road to Black Ned’s Forge: A Story of Race, Sex, and Trade on the Colonial Frontier, and I’m here today to answer your questions about frontier settlements in the Virginia backcountry from the 1730s through the 1770s. That’s a period when settlers moved through Pennsylvania into western Virginia. Most of them were from Northern Ireland, but one, Black Ned, was a formerly enslaved but recently freed Pennsylvania industrial ironworker who moved to Virginia in 1752 with his Scottish wife. There, a few miles north of modern Lexington, Virginia, Ned bought a 270-acre farm, set up a blacksmith shop on one of the busier roads in Virginia, and, with his white neighbors, helped to found the still-active Timber Ridge Presbyterian Church. Taking the name Edward Tarr, he became the first free black landowner west of the Blue Ridge. Things went really well for Tarr until the neighbors objected to the woman they called his concubine, a second white woman who moved in with Ned and his wife.
I’m a history professor at the Virginia Military Institute, and if you want to know more about my courses and other activities at VMI, here’s a [my short professional biography] (http://www.vmi.edu/content.aspx?id=37533&libID=36085)
If you’d like to know more about what we’re doing at the Department of History at the Virginia Military Institute, check out our Facebook page, “VMI Department of History”.
My research and publication now focus on legal history on the colonial Virginia frontier, especially lawsuits over debt. Those publications are cited at [my Academia.edu website] (https://vmi.academia.edu/TurkMcCleskey) and can be obtained through interlibrary loan.
I’ll be checking for your questions through the work day on Tuesday, 15 September 2015, beginning at 7:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time (USA), which is Greenwich Mean Time minus 4.
Thank you for taking the time to do this AMA!
In my studies of early African American history I find time and time again when the job of blacksmith or ironworker is carried by an African American, there is great emphasis placed on the transformative properties of the job. Almost on a religious level, with roots of this emphasis going back to various places in Africa with long metalworking traditions. Did you find any evidence of this in your research?
Secondly, did Black Ned's experience with whites differ because many of them were from Northern Ireland and not native born Americans, already steeped in our developing cultural racism? Do we see interactions between Ned and the various "kinds" of white differ based on their own background?
Hi Turk! I'm very interested in Ned's marriage and "concubine" relationship with white women. I'm curious about the backgrounds of the women and if you have any sense that that would have been a "privilege" of a free man, or if the legalities of marriage or official relationships were different across racial lines, or how that may have affected his right to own property. I know such things change pretty dramatically in the nineteenth century, so I'm curious about the ways in which his Ned's relationships shape/inform/change his capacity to work as a freed man in the area.
Really appreciate you being here. Mr. Tarr's story is incredibly fascinating! Where did you first encounter it, and why did you decide to follow it?
Regarding Augusta County, why did slavery grow in the region but not in Schute's native Pennsylvania?
At the Virginia Festival of the Book, you mentioned that everywhere you look in Virginia history, you find free black families, and in most of those cases they are the result of interracial marriages between black men and white women (since slavery follows the mother's race). How common were relationships like these, and do we know how they developed?
Edward Tarr was able to buy his freedom from Thomas Schute through installments ─ why were slave masters willing to allow their slaves to buy their freedom, and how were slaves able to accumulate the resources to do so?
And one last thing that isn't really a question, but could you share your Augusta County courthouse "ghost story" here? I think the readers would get a kick out of it. I think it's pretty funny.
You mention Northern ('Scots') Irish settlers coming from Pennsylvania, but what about German settlers? How far down did they extend into Virginia? I know them mostly from the Northern Shenandoah Valley. What was their background?
As a proud Hokie I was wondering if you could say anything about the early history of Blacksburg and Montgomery County. In particular im interested about what drew settlers back tot he region after the Draper's Meadow Massacre, with Smithfield being founded 2 decades later. Was it just the inevitable progress of settlers, was there anything advantageous about the location?
My other question relates to the founding of Virginia Tech. What was VMI's reaction to it? I know they and UVA had competed to be named Virginia's Land Grant School. So what was the reaction when a new school was founded in the same region, who was now also a military college.
Do you know of any good resources on Indian relations with the settlers of Powell Valley in modern day Wise and Lee Counties, such as Benge and other Natives of the area? Was Martins Fort and Fort Blackmore established because of primarily trade and travel or because of the Native threat to the movement of white settlers?
Did Ned have children? Did he or they fight in the Revolution?
Hello, I hope this question isn't too late. I hope this is within the topic, but I am very curious about "everyday" native settler interaction. here is a question I asked a while ago regarding the colonies in general, but I am happy to hear about it just in your area of focus:
Broadly speaking, I would like to know where, if anywhere, there was common, everyday peaceful interaction between natives and colonists for the purpose of trading or cooperative projects. And secondly, throughout the colonies how common would it be to see a native in the "interior" of colonial America, or to put it another way, were there natives walking around colonial Boston (or other major cities)?
What crops did Ned grow as a slave?
Were the North Irish settlers Ulster Scots? I don't remember Presbyterianism being popular among the Irish-Irish.
How common were runaway slaves on the frontier, and how was that handled?