Chatham County, NC, Historical Association

CHATHAM COUNTY SLAVE NARRATIVES
FROM THE FEDERAL WRITERS PROJECT

Beverly and Jim Wiggins
January 2011

Always on the lookout for resources for Chatham County researchers, we were happy to learn about the first-person narratives and photographs of former slaves from the Federal Writer’s Project. These narratives and photographs are part of a joint online collection developed by the Manuscript and the Prints and Photographs Divisions of the Library of Congress. In this brief paper we identify and link to the records of twelve former slaves who lived at some time in Chatham County.
In the years 1936-38, former slaves then living in seventeen states were interviewed regarding their recollections about their lives as slaves. The collection preserved at the Library of Congress includes more than 2300 narratives and 500 photographs. These can be sorted by state of residence when interviewed, resulting in 176 narratives and 42 photos from former slaves interviewed in North Carolina. We were interested in identifying the interviews of former slaves who had spent some or all of their lives in Chatham County. The Library of Congress database allows only limited full-text searches, so we identified the Chatham County ex-slaves by reading all 176 North Carolina narratives.
A few of the narratives do not identify the place in which the interviewee lived while enslaved. Some mention counties or towns, and it was that information we used to locate the narratives of individuals who had been slaves in Chatham County. Twelve of the interviews we read specifically mentioned Chatham County or described the plantations they lived on or the masters to whom they belonged as being near a particular community: Pittsboro, Merry Oaks, Moncure, Lockville, and Goldston. Two photographs of ex-slaves from Chatham were identified.
We have prepared brief descriptions of the twelve Chatham former slaves, their former owners, and other names mentioned in their accounts. In each case a link back to the complete text of the interview, on the Library of Congress website, is provided. We hope that this will make the Chatham County interviews more accessible and perhaps will facilitate research about the African-American families they represent. Although the interviews are brief, the few clues they contain are precious in the context of the scarcity of information on African-Americans of that time.

Click here for the full report and a list of the contents and links for finding the narratives

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