BoUGHT Tucked away on dusty courthouse shelves across the South, long-forgotten documents record the names of countless AfricanAmericans whose forced labor was a cornerstone of the region’s economy. Western North Carolina lacked the requisite climate and flatland for large-scale rice, tobacco or cotton production. Nonetheless, in Buncombe County, thousands of slaves toiled as cooks, farmers, tour guides, maids, blacksmiths, tailors, miners, farmers, road builders and more, local records show. And after mostly ignoring that troubled history for a century and a half, the county is now taking groundbreaking steps to honor the contributions of those former residents by making its slave records readily available online. Thanks to a partnership between the register of deeds office and UNCA, Buncombe has apparently become the first county in the country to digitize its original slave records, local officials and researchers say. And though the records paint an incomplete picture, the agency “is showing that another group of people existed — and contributed to the building of this state, this county, this city,” UNCA assistant professor darin Waters explains in a recent county-produced documentary about the project (see sidebar, “Forever Free?” on page 13). “It was the government that allowed slavery to exist from the very beginning,” he notes. “And so I think it’s important for government agencies to be in the forefront of acknowledging the past, which was essentially a crime against humanity.”
Unmarked trail Until the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, slaves were considered property, and transactions involving them were recorded at the local register of deeds office, alongside the ones concerning farm animals, wagons and tracts of land. Those sale books basically languished in storage, pushed aside like the memories of slavery itself. But in Buncombe County, that began to change 13 years ago, when local real estate attorney Marc Rudow alerted his wife, deborah Miles, that he’d come across such slave deeds while researching a parcel’s history. As director of the Center for Diversity Education, Miles spied a learning opportunity. She wrote a grant to hire about 20 high school students to sift the thousands of pages of documents, seeking clues about the lives of local slaves. “Sometimes it would describe the sale of a horse, or a load of corn, and other times it would all of a sudden say words like ‘girl’ or ‘14 years of age’ or ‘negro,’ or a name
— Sally or Harriet — would pop out, and you realized they were talking about a person,” she recalls. Some of the results of that research were incorporated into An Umarked Trail, a guide to local African-American history that’s been used in the public schools. For the most part, however, those records remained obscure until drew Reisinger was named register of deeds in 2011. When Miles told him about the slave records, says Reisinger, he “couldn’t believe it.” He then began making some history of his own, becoming the first register of deeds in the South to put those documents online in readily accessible form. “I think it’s our duty as record keepers, as registers of deeds and clerks of court, to make this information more available to the public,” Reisinger maintains. “I hope we can bring more attention to this subject: We want to make it easier for people to find their own family history.”
10 APRIL 10 - APRIL 16, 2013 • mountainx.com
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He recently sent a letter about the project to the North Carolina Association of Registers of Deeds; colleagues across the state (many of whom didn’t even know they had such information) praised the project, and at least one sought advice on putting their own records online, Reisinger reports. “The idea of opening up public records starts in the earliest days,” he points out. “Let’s not pretend that slavery wasn’t a big part of Buncombe’s and the South’s economy.”
GettinG the ball rollinG Local historians are starting to take notice. sasha Mitchell, who owns a business called Memory Cottage, works with individuals and groups to craft histories and exhibits. Current projects include documenting the AfricanAmerican history of the Shiloh community in south Asheville and the YMI Cultural Center downtown. Mitchell also recently offered to research some family histories free of charge.
not forGotten: Center for diverstity Education director deborah Miles and APd officer Ervin Hunter stand before an exhibit honoring local slave history. Thirteen years ago, Hunter was one of about 20 high school students hired to do research that illuminated the lives of Buncombe County slaves, such as sarah Gudger (pictured in the background). Photos by Max Cooper
“I’m so happy that they have these deeds out there, and I hope more municipalities will do it,” she says. “The fact that it’s accessible is huge. … To have it where I can sit in pajamas in the middle of the night and look it up and have things at my fingers in a minute, that’s remarkable.” There are still some big kinks in the system, however. One major flaw, says Mitchell, is that the database is searchable only by the names of owners rather than the slaves themselves