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Content Warning: Materials in the Library of Virginia’s collections contain historical terms, phrases, and images that are offensive to modern readers. These include demeaning and dehumanizing references to race, ethnicity, and nationality; enslaved or free status; physical or mental ability; religion; sex; and sexual orientation and gender identity.

African American Genealogist Selma Stewart can remember the time she came to the Library of Virginia to view the “Free Negro Registers” in person in the Archives and Manuscripts room. This was thirty-three years ago. Her memory of the experience is not positive. The intimate physical descriptions recorded about each human being shocked her: “dark mole on left breast,” “scar on right breast from burn.”1 She silently asked herself: Did these people have to disrobe? As she continued to examine the register, another detail stood out to her: the specificity of the height measurements. She couldn’t help but wonder: this man must have gotten a NEW RULER, because he was much more specific about [these heights]…1/4, 1/8, etc…

“Free Negro Registers” or “Registers of Free Negroes and Mulattoes,” as they were historically called, are the result of several Virginia laws that required local court clerks in Virginia localities to register and record details of free Black and Multiracial men and women. The 1793 Act of Assembly specified the clerks record, “age, name, color, stature and by whom, and in what court emancipated.”2 Many of these register books survive. LVA staff are working to digitize as many as possible through Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative.

But how did the clerk learn all those details? When researchers, volunteer transcribers, and other patrons ask me about the court processes behind each registration entry, I have only been able to provide vague descriptions of what could have taken place thanks in large part to the cumulative work of historians before me.3 That was the case, however, until a recent “re-discovery” of a particular historic object: a measuring stick.

Northampton County is known for keeping the oldest continuous English county records in America. Knowing how much pride it takes in its Eastern Shore history, I was hardly surprised to find several original court buildings preserved and interpreted in its historic Court Green. Next to a greatly modified 1731 courthouse is an early 19th-century clerk’s office dated circa 1800. Upon entering the building, it is easy to miss a wooden measuring stick attached to a circa-1850s book press built along the interior wall. This measuring stick is a replica of the original that stood in its place until 2010, when it was taken down by the Northampton Historic Preservation Society (NHPS) and conserved at Colonial Williamsburg.

A wooden measuring stick attached to a circa-1852 book press in the circa-1800 clerk’s office. A number of architectural features of this building, such as the stone flooring, are original.

Colonial Williamsburg staff dated the stick to the early 19th century based on rectangular nail heads of consistent size. Conservator Christopher Swan reported that the stick was made from soft white pine, with a red ocher oil wash color (similar to the 19th-century cabinets it was attached to), and that there was a possibility that the walnut and clear-finished horizontal bar was added later.4

Over the past century, historians and various publications have associated the object with enslaved people. For example, an early 1911 article describes the interior of the courthouse: “at the door is the measuring post where negroes were stood up and measured before being auctioned off at the steps of the building.”5 The Northampton County Courthouse District made it into the Virginia Landmarks Register in 1971. In the nomination form, the stick is referred to as a “slave measuring rod.”6 As late as 2010, The Philadelphia Sunday Sun published an article demonstrating a number of Northampton’s “jewels,” one of which is “the only slave measuring stick in the hemisphere.”7

Historians have since disproved this use for the stick. While it’s certainly possible that the object had more than one purpose, there’s little doubt that it was primarily used for registering free Black Virginians in Northampton County. I am not a conservator, curator, or preservationist, so I wanted to learn more from someone with this professional expertise. I reached out to retired Master Carpenter Garland Wood, who spent nearly 40 years in the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg. In 2010, the NHPS asked Colonial Williamsburg to restore the measuring stick. Garland Wood, Christopher Swan, and Dave Salisbury all contributed to the restoration of the original object and creation of the replica. Wood was kind enough to share a detailed memory of examining and conserving the measuring stick with me by email:

When Dave was laying out the measurement marks on the stick, he was surprised that the inches were divided up into tenths. As a woodworker, I was used to rules being laid out in quarter inches, or eighth inches, or sixteenths. Never saw a woodworking rule laid out in tenths of an inch, just like a standard modern carpenter’s square or tape. Even in the eighteenth century engineers used tenths, and so did medical people, but not people in the hand trades. The stick is laid out in tenths of an inch. Most measurement systems use eighths or sixteenths. Even in the eighteenth or nineteenth century it is odd to see woodworking measures in tenths. 8

John Stevens was recorded as 5 feet 6 and 3/10 inches. Mary Ann Brickhouse was recorded as 5 feet 1 and 7/10 inches. Why did the clerk use tenths instead of fourths or eighths?

What’s truly incredible is that, upon examining the Northampton County “Register of Free Negroes” 1853-1861 (the only Free Register that survives for this locality), one discovers that the clerk has recorded the height (“stature”) of each individual to the tenth of an inch.

Click to enlarge this close-up of the measuring stick.

The register from Northampton is the only book I have seen thus far to use tenths of an inch to measure the height of the free Black population.

The subject of another blog post altogether is Northampton’s very large free Black population and local citizens’ and authorities’ growing hostility to their presence on the Eastern Shore.

In 1794, Northampton County began registering and certifying free Black inhabitants. Over a five-day period in June, 111 free people were registered. These individuals appear only as names listed in the county court order books in groupings of thirty to fifty individuals. There is no detailed entry with a height measurement; nor is there an apparent extant volume outside of the register that begins in 1853.9

My colleague Vince Brooks and I did our best to mine the Northampton County court order books for some indication of when this object was installed and its original purpose. Court order books can often shed light on the more mundane details of day-to-day court operations, including the care and keeping of historic (then modern!) records in the clerk’s office. We were able to find a few details about the clerk’s office, but unfortunately no entries that specifically mentioned a measuring stick or something like it. It appears that a set of book presses (for the keeping of records) was installed in either late 1846 or early 1847. By 1852, these original presses had become “much crowded” and additional book presses were recommended to be installed in October 1852. Could this be when the measuring stick is installed? More research is needed to determine this.

The Northampton Historic Preservation Society (once a branch of the Virginia Association for Virginia Antiquities, now Preservation Virginia) has used photocopies of original source material to build valuable historic context around the measuring stick in their exhibit room in the 1899 courthouse. The exhibit panel provides further detail about the laws targeted against Black Virginians and how this affected free people on the Eastern Shore. Note that the display panel above also includes claims that school children used the rod to measure themselves.

Although I have not been able to find another example of an object like this, a new exhibition at Harvard University “Measuring Difference” demonstrates how biased people have used innocuous measuring tools to inflict harm and control for centuries.

For those who study the past and anyone who wishes to learn more about our shared history, we must consider the historic context in which the object existed. Outside of a 19th-century clerk’s office, the measuring stick is a banal tool for collecting data. But upon examining the 1793 Act of Assembly and the corresponding Northampton County “Register of Free Negroes,” the weaponization of this tool becomes clear. A measuring stick has become a weapon in the crusade against Black bodies: to record, track, and police the movement of free people of color in Virginia.

Professional genealogist Renate Yarborough Sanders has certainly grappled with this reality. Learning about the existence of such an object brought up many emotions for her. Sanders descends from free people of color in North Carolina, and I reached out to her when I learned about the measuring stick. She had never seen one before.

I was shocked, and sat absolutely frozen in front of my computer, for several minutes. I felt every emotion – from anger, to horror, to indignation – but also to joy and a feeling of justification that such an item had been found – something that might prove the historical record and hush the naysayers, who refuse to believe what the records clearly show.

We can’t ignore this truth. Renate closed her email with this reflection:  Everyone needs to see this and to feel whatever it makes them feel.

Footnotes

[1] See Fauquier County, “Register of Free Negroes,” 1817-1865 or the Bedford County, “Register of Free Negroes,” 1820-1860 for examples of these entries. Free registers are accessible in Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative.

[2] Samuel Shepherd, ed., The Statutes at Large of Virginia, From October Session 1792, to December Session 1806, Inclusive, in Three Volumes, (New Series,) Being a Continuation of Hening (Richmond, Virginia: Samuel Shepherd, 1835), 1: 238.

[3] Among others, see Mick Nicholls, “Creating Identity: Free Black and the Law” as well as Melvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War and Warren Milteer, Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South for those who have tried to break down the court processes that resulted in these descriptive entries. See transcription work and references by Frances Bibbins Latimer for a specific analysis of the free population in Northampton County, Virginia.

[4] Email exchange with Joyce Kappeler, August 20, 2024.

[5] “Northampton Rich in Interesting Antiques,” Norfolk Landmark, vol. 77, no. 107 (January 18, 1911): 9, https://virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=TNL19110118.1.9

[6] United States Department of the Interior National Park Service, “National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form,” July 1969, https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/214-0007_Northampton_County_CH_HD_1971_Final_Nomintation.pdf.

[7] Renee S. Gordon, “Virginia’s Eastern Shore,” Philadelphia Sun, September 20, 2010, https://philasun.com/travel/virginias-eastern-shore/.

[8] Email exchange with Garland Wood, September 6, 2024.

[9] Kirk Mariner, Slave and Free on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, (Onancock, Virginia: Miona Publications, 2014), 34; Northampton County, Order Book 32, 1789-1795. In her transcription, The Register of Free Negroes, Northampton County 1853-1861, Frances Bibbins Latimer discusses the laws aimed at policing and removing free Black people from Northampton.

Lydia Neuroth

Project Manager - Virginia Untold

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