Recently, while re-browsing through The Roving Editor, or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States by James Redpath, I came across his mention of staying in Chesterfield County in 1854. If you are not familiar with Redpath, he was a avid abolitionist, who traveled incognito into the slave states and wrote back to the New York Tribune on his observations.
But back to Chesterfield County. On his travels through the area he met the hospitality of John Alexander Strachan, who owned a plantation at Point of Rocks, which is on the north side of the Appomattox, just as short distance down stream from Petersburg. While there Redpath didn't mention his host by name in his writing. Instead, I suppose to protect the anonymity of his information source, the reporter called him "Mr. S------n, a planter and Baptist preacher." Redpath went on to tell his readers that Strachan owned "a farm of six hundred acres overlooking the Appomattox River. He has some thirty slaves, old and young."
Curious to learn more about Strachan, I looked him up in the 1860 census. He wasn't easy to find in the free schedules, but he was easy to find in the slave schedules. Lo and behold, he is shown as owning thirty-one slaves on his plantation and had four others on a neighbor's farm. The thirty-one on Strachan's land lived in three slave dwellings.
Strachan did not come up when I searched the free schedules. And, I found out why. After browsing through 103 pages of a total of 114 for the Southern District of Chesterfield County, I finally found him. His name was misspelled as Straughn. He is shown as a forty-five year old farmer with 17,000 in real estate and 24,833 in personal property. Also in the household is his much younger wife, twenty eight year old "E.", their six year old son, John Jr., and two year old son "B." This information was corroborated with that found on a couple of family history web pages.
Redpath mentions his conversation with Strachan about slaves and "Farming Utensils." He wrote:
"Mr. S. walked down his farm with me in the morning. I noticed a hoe, which was heavier, at least, than half a dozen Northern ones, and asked why he made them so clumsy.
He [Strachan] said they were obliged to make everything heavy that negroes handled. If you gave a slave a Northern hoe or cradle in the morning, he would be sure to break it before night, and probably in less than two hours. You couldn't make them [slaves] careful. Besides, he said, they preferred heavy implements; you could not get them to use an axe that was less than six pounds weight. They said that it tired them more to use a light axe or hoe.
I [Redpath] remembered, somewhere, to have heard of a slave who objected to the use of a light hoe, 'kase' he grumbled, 'you has to put out your strength every time you puts it down, and in a 'Ginny [Virginia] hoe it goes into the ground, jest so, by its own weight.'
Mr. S. said, he believed this was the real objection which the negro had to the Northern hoe.
I noticed the great size of his fields - one was over fifty acres. He said they called that a small field here."
A few years ago Chesterfield County purchased the Strachan house (pictured above), which was built about 1840 and its surrounding acreage. The lands of Point of Rocks became an important and strategic site during the Bermuda Hundred Campaign. A large hospital complex developed on Strachan's land around the house, which even hosted the famous Clara Barton in 1864. It is my understanding that Chesterfield County is interested in restoring the house to its period appearance as funds become available. I was fortunate enough to visit it a couple of years ago while on a National Park Service Historian's tour of the Bermuda Hundred Campaign. Chesterfield County offers tours of this historic location every so often, so if you get an opportunity to see the Point of Rocks site, please do so and help support their preservation efforts.
Historic photograph of Point of Rock courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Photograph of the Strachan House taken by the author June 2015.
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