THE LEGACY OF
LEWIS FREEMAN A DESCENDANT OF A NOTABLE CHATHAMITE REFLECTS ON RACE IN AMERICA
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BY JON SPOON AND ANNA-RHESA VERSOLA
ABOVE Dr. Harold P. Freeman is a sixth generation descendant of Lewis Freeman, an early Black settler of Pittbsoro. RIGHT Robert Tanner Freeman is another distinguished ancestor for Harold.
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CHATHAM MAGAZINE
orn in the same year the Revolutionary War began, Lewis Freeman was at that time considered “a free man of color” who achieved a version of the American dream – owning a home and property. In downtown Pittsboro, the small pewter green house that once belonged to the Black landowner in 1800s Chatham County still stands on Salisbury Street. The building houses Hobbs Architect. Lewis made sacrifices to accrue the wealth necessary to bring his family out of slavery and secure a future for them. His descendants have gone on to become the first Black dentist in the United States, the first Black American to serve in a presidential cabinet, and a renowned cancer surgeon whose groundbreaking research improved health care today. “This is an American story, the way I look at it,” says Harold P. Freeman, Lewis’
FEBRUARY / MARCH 2022
great-great-great-grandson, during a Zoom interview. “You can tell it in one family through ancestry – a man born in 1775, at the beginning of the country, the beginning of America, who was somehow free by age 25, who became wealthy through property. A man, who had a son by a slave woman, therefore, a son who was a slave, and who ultimately lost his property somehow.” Though few public records exist from the period before the county’s first major growth in 1830, there is enough evidence to piece together a history of one of the earliest successful Black settlers in Pittsboro. In 1811, Lewis built a oneroom house measuring 16 feet by 16 feet, and by the time of his death in 1847, he owned 16 town lots and 20 acres of land, a cow and a horse, according to state archives. “He was a wealthy man for his day,” Harold says. “And his wealth was lost, related to race … so it tells two sides of a story.”