BY SHELLIE TAYLOR
A while back, I had the pleasure of working on a research project with an archeological field director for a surveying company based in Asheville. His company is hired by developers when concerns are raised about a potential cemetery or historical structure on a property being developed. I’ve worked with him before on the White’s Mill site that we believed contained a slave cemetery. His crew was able to confirm the existence of a cemetery and recommended the site for placement on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), a federal initiative through the National Park Service that helps to preserve historic buildings and cemeteries.
Long story short, anytime I hear that this company has been hired to work anywhere in Iredell County, I get excited because I know their team exhausts every effort to locate these special sites. While doing research for their official report, they usually end up at the library with me doing research. The Iredell County Public Library has a large collection of genealogical and historical information, which can be very useful in determining the history of a property.
The property being researched this time was a 204.57-acre tract of land off Salisbury Highway in the Elmwood community. Across the street from Cameron Presbyterian Church, one of the first three African American congregations in Statesville, is the church’s cemetery. It is split by Hezekiah Road, a private driveway that crosses the railroad tracks. The railroad came through in 1858, prior to the formation of the church. Concerns have been raised by the local residents that there is another cemetery beyond the tracks, in the woods. It could be a slave cemetery. The developer hired the same company in 2022 to come out and search for the cemetery. The official report from that first visit states that there were a few random rocks found in the woods, but nothing that looked like a fieldstone. There were also depressions found, but none of the depressions corresponded with a rock, and they determined that the ground sinking was attributed to tree root cavities. The conclusion was that this was not a cemetery.
For round two of the research, we took a deeper dive into the property records and the records of the families who owned the property. The largest landowner in this area prior to the Civil War was the Chambers family. Robert Henry Chambers (1708-1782) settled in this area in the early part of the 18th century, when this land was still part of Rowan County. Robert’s two sons owned land in this eastern portion of the county; Arthur Chambers (1753-1819) owned land very close to the White’s Mill site I mentioned earlier, and his brother Henry (1750-1817) owned what would become known as the Farmville plantation. Now called Darshana Hall, the house on the property was originally built in 1793. Henry Chambers and then his son Joseph Chambers owned property that their descendants would one day hand over to the trustees of Cameron Presbyterian Church in 1867. It’s reasonable to ask where did the Chambers family bury their slaves prior to 1865.
The Chambers family was one of the largest slaveholding families in Iredell County. According to the 1850 slave schedule, Pinkney Brown Chambers, Joseph’s son, owned 88 slaves; and he owned 76 in the 1860 schedule. That was an unusually large number for this area. Pinkney and his wife Justina lost their wealth as a result of the Civil War. After the Confederate dollar was devalued, their monetary assets were worthless, and Pinkney filed for bankruptcy in 1873. The family property was to be divided up over the next few generations, but at its height, the Chambers family claimed well over 1,000 acres.
In the online catalog of the Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill, I found listings for Chambers family papers dating back to 1754. The Special Collections Department at most universities can be an incredible source of information for researchers. I remember working at the special collections archive when I was a student at Penn State, and the treasures I came across could literally take my breath away! Unfortunately, many of the collections in universities have not been digitized. UNC has a helpful feature in its catalog that allows researchers to request certain items be digitized at no cost. Sometimes, it takes a while before an item I’ve requested gets scanned, but I’m always looking for Iredell-related material. After I came across some Chambers family papers in the special collections, I requested digitized copies.
I was hoping that, worst case scenario, even if I did not find nothing useful for my current project, I would still have access to some interesting Chambers family information. Best case scenario, I’m hoping to find some mention of the process of burying the enslaved people on the plantation. I was not expecting the gold mine of information that awaited me.
One of the files that was digitized was an account of the Chambers family. Four to five pages of information resembled what I usually see in family Bibles. There are Chambers family members listed starting with Henry Chambers (1750-1817) including names, birth, marriage, and death dates. After that, there are about 40 additional pages of the most extensive and meticulous records of enslaved people that I have ever seen. Names of women and their dates of birth and death dates, if known. Most children are listed with the name of their mother. I even saw marriages recorded in these pages. It was illegal for slaves to be married. A result of the Confederacy’s loss in the Civil War was that previously enslaved people could register their relationships and have them legalized. This information, which was recorded in 1866, is called cohabitation bonds. As a freed person, you could report that you and another former slave had been “living together” as man and wife, even if they were from different households. They would list the names of any children they had and how long they had been together. But an actual “marriage” — the way we use the term today — was not viewed as legal prior to 1865. It is unique that the Chambers family used that term anyway.
Early slave records were recorded by Joseph Chambers (1791-1848), but the majority of the information was recorded by his son Pinkney Brown Chambers (1821-1905) — P.B.C. as he initials throughout the documents. The papers held in the UNC collection were continued by Henry A. Chambers (1841-1925), a cousin who lived with Pinkney starting in 1853. To say that the Chambers men took adequately detailed notes is a serious understatement. These records are incredibly meticulous and some of the dates recorded are well past 1865. It’s very likely that many of the Chambers workers remained on the plantation following the Civil War. We must keep in mind, even though slaves had been freed, they still had no resources and very few opportunities beyond the farms where they lived. With the devaluation of Confederate money, most slaveholders experienced financial troubles and could not pay their workers a decent wage. According to the family records, Pinkney was considered a family historian of sorts. Formerly enslaved people and their children would come to him for information that was kept in his books on their family.
I want to make a disclaimer at this point: Slavery was horrible. As a 21st century audience we know that the concept of humans owning other humans and viewing them as property is morally repugnant and wrong. However, as historians and researchers, we must understand that slavery was a way of life for some of our ancestors and, especially in the South, it was a huge part of the economy. I’m not saying slavery was ever justified. According to the Chambers family tradition, it was an unspoken rule to keep families together. There are several examples in these records of Pinkney Brown Chambers purchasing a woman and her children so they could be with his male slave who was the husband and father of the family. He did not break up families, which was among the most heartbreaking aspect of slavery.
I went through and painstakingly recorded all the names in this record and by the time I was done, I had 260 names. I created this index because this information had to be shared. This was a gold mine of African American genealogy. So often, people doing research on their Black ancestors are forced to hit that brick wall of 1865 and accept that their family members were most likely not recorded (at least by name) beyond this point. To have a record that was full of rich detail about these individuals is incredibly valuable.
Based on the birth dates in the records, I then pulled up the 1850 and 1860 slave schedules and attempted to place names with each entry. The slave schedules recorded the gender and age of each enslaved person, but there are no names save for the slaveowner. I wanted to personalize this very vital piece of information and was able to name most of the people listed in the census.
My next stop was to the cohabitation bonds of 1866. These records are the first legal listings of formerly enslaved people and are crucial to building family trees in African American genealogy. I looked through these bonds and all early marriage records (prior to 1885) and highlighted any listings with a Chambers surname. I was able to build a list of former Chambers slaves and their partners. I then looked at the 1870 and 1880 census records which corresponded to the marriage records, and I was able to add the names of children to these families.
By looking at the 1900 census and death certificates (which started being recorded in North Carolina in 1913), I have put together a comprehensive family map that encompasses three to four generations of Chambers family members.
As a local history librarian and as the Mistress of Cemeteries in my free time, I felt it was also my duty to discover where some of these people are buried. I was not surprised to see a lot of Chambers listed on Find A Grave at the Cameron Presbyterian Church in Elmwood (close to Farmville) and at the Green Street Cemetery in Statesville. A few descendants ended up in Mooresville or Rowan County. I kept returning to my initial question which was: where were the Chambers’ slaves buried prior to 1865? As meticulous as the Chambers were about recording the births, marriages, and deaths of their slaves, surely they would have a designated place to bury their servants. Given the large number of enslaved people recorded in the family ledgers, I was convinced that there should be a large slave cemetery somewhere near the Farmville plantation.
I spoke with the owners of Darshana Hall, Meredith and Susan Hall, and they are lovely people. They put me in touch with someone who has knowledge of the old slave cemetery used by the Chambers family. According to the contact, the cemetery is very overgrown and with the extreme heat this summer, I didn’t want to run into any unfriendly snakes, but I will be visiting the site when the weather cools down. I am so excited at the opportunity to visit the final resting place of those Chambers who labored without freedom but not without respect.
I’m continuing to research the Chambers families. My goal is to branch out and potentially find living relatives of these families. If you are related to anyone in the Chambers surname (especially the African American side), please feel free to contact me at the information below. I eventually want to create an album on the library’s Flickr page of documents and photographs that I collect along the way.
To view the Chambers family papers, you can request them from UNC HERE and HERE. You will have to create an account, but this service is free. The full index of the Chambers family record is available on the library’s website.
This cemetery, among others, will be the topic of an upcoming library program, “Never Forgotten: The Cemeteries of Enslaved People in Iredell County.” The program will take place on Thursday, October 17, at 6 p.m. Registration is available online at the library’s website.
Shellie Taylor is the Local History Program Specialist at the Iredell County Public Library. She can be contacted at michelle.taylor@iredellcountync.gov or 704-878-3090, Ext. 8801.