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2006 Mail

Slavery in Mount Joy, Lancaster County

From Albert Geiser, March 19, 2006

I've been looking at censuses. The census for Mt. Joy, Pennsylvania, in 1840 appears to indicate slaves were owned there. The slave columns on the page are blanked out, however the number line clearly indicates that these people owned slaves.  I came across a town in Ohio of the same time period in which more clearly there was slavery, because the slave columns were checked.  I came across these doing genealogy for a friend whose ancestor lived in Maryland and then Ohio and owned slaves in both places, and had a connection to Mt. Joy without residing there.

Do you know if there was tobacco farming in Mt. Joy PA, or generally in other parts of Lancaster?  In Troy Ohio, Richmond County, tobacco farmers evidently protected slavery for as long as they could, and my friend's ancestor's connection to Mt. Joy suggests tobacco was being grown there.

Thanks so much,

Albert Geiser

Editor's reply:  Thanks for your interesting letter. Although I cannot cite documentation that tobacco was grown in the Mt. Joy area, I am pretty sure that it was a cash crop there in 1840 and of course still is today in other parts of Lancaster. I distinctly remember seeing tobacco barns along Route 283 as I drove from Harrisburg to my job in Lancaster in the 1980's. The barns were distinctive because of their unusual louvered side vents, which were often opened just after harvest to allow the large tobacco leaves to dry properly before storage.

However I do not know if those who grew the tobacco in the 1840's had been slaveholders. As you may know, slaveholding in Pennsylvania was dying out by that time, but some people did still have slaves. The 1840 census does not record any slaves for Lancaster County in 1840, however the census takers were recording only "slaves for life" as slaves. They did not count as slaves those persons held to slavery until age 28, or "term slaves."  That may explain the blanked out number lines you refer to. The census taker may have counted some term slaves (which did exist in Lancaster County at that time) as slaves, but the count was corrected by the county census board to show zero slaves, and the term slaves categorized as "Free Colored Persons."

If I get a chance, I will also examine the records for Mt. Joy in 1840, to see if I can determine anything. Those who were enslaved in that area, prior to this, generally were slaves to the local ironmasters, another large industry in that region.

Mr. Geiser's response:  Thanks for your kind and informative reply. I'm going to look up more on the subject of term slaves.

There isn't sign of markings at all in the columns in the Lancaster censuses. However, in the 1830 and 1840 censuses in Troy, Richland Co, Ohio they are very clear. If you have not looked at these pages, the slaveholding pages are one page over from every property holding page, and I think most people doing genealogy would miss them.  Also, in the 1820 census, the slaveholding pages from the Troy census are missing and the census has been clearly cut with scissors. This is Troy Township, Richland County, Ohio; not the better known Troy of Miami County.

My friend's ancestor, who was 63 yrs old, married a woman in 1849 who was mulatto and they evidently lived out the rest of their lives together. How would I go about finding out names of slaves in that era in Ohio, or earlier in Maryland?  Have their names been recorded sporadically, or is there a database?  Ohio was a stormy place even for that era, with Southerners streaming in thinking it should be their territory, and Northerners streaming in
thinking it should have been theirs. This little settlement was definitely Southern starting about 1820. Slave owners in Maryland circa 1820/1830 could have concluded at that time that the frontier of Ohio would be a lot easier for them than Maryland. All they had to do was take their family and slaves out on the new National Road to Ohio.

Thanks so much for your help.

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