Hittin’ the Road, Virginia Untold Style

In early December, I traveled to Southwest Virginia to continue our work digitizing “Free Negro Registers” for Virginia Untold. We’ve previously written about our digitization initiative to scan all extant volumes of “Free Negro Registers,” many of which remain in the courthouse archives of localities across the state. After digitizing the initial 39 volumes in our collection, we developed a system in which the Library would borrow the volume(s) from each courthouse in order to scan them, and then return the books to the locality, following a system much like the Local Records chancery project. We made great strides in 2024 digitizing volumes from the counties of Essex, Orange, Middlesex, Mecklenburg, and Northampton.

But some localities are tougher to get to than others, and for this reason, we wanted to explore the option of photographing the register pages on-site rather than bringing the entire volume back to Richmond. So, a few weeks ago, I traveled to the far reaches of the Commonwealth to check off a few localities we know contain register volumes: Montgomery, Pulaski, and Washington Counties.

Thanks to a great working relationship with Circuit Court Clerk Tiffany Couch and her staff, my colleague Eddie Woodward was able to pick up two volumes of Montgomery County’s “Register of Free Negroes” on his summer travels to courthouses this past July. Our digitization staff scanned them here at the Library, and the images are in the queue to be uploaded to Virginia Untold in the coming months. My first stop was to return the volumes to the Montgomery County courthouse. Tiffany also allowed me to photograph two loose records related to free Black and enslaved people that she keeps in her office: a commonwealth cause for enslaved man Gilbert and a free registration document. We’ll also add these records to Virginia Untold.

Just a week before my trip, I attended the Digital Archives in the Commonwealth Summit hosted here at the Library and had the privilege to learn about a small but impressive museum in Montgomery County: the Christiansburg Institute (CI). CI is only 1.3 miles from the Montgomery County courthouse, and I knew I had to take advantage of seeing their museum. Staff members Jenny Nehrt, Ashley Palazzo, and Demiah Smith greeted me at the door and proceeded to give me a great behind-the-scenes tour of the museum, archives, and digitization lab.

The Christiansburg Institute Museum and Archives interprets the history of the Christiansburg Institute, which was the first secondary school in Southwest Virginia to educate Black Virginians, many of whom were formerly enslaved. In addition to interpretive efforts, staff at CI have built meaningful relationships with former students, descendants, and community members and thus centered the Institute as a rich resource to preserve Black cultural memory in Southwest Virginia.

During the tour, Demiah Smith, research analyst at Christiansburg Institute, Inc., described a woman named Nancy who supplied housing for the first class of students at CI. Nancy was a free Black woman from Montgomery County. A free person of color, you say? My interest was immediately piqued, and I learned that Demiah had been patiently waiting for the Montgomery County registers to a) return to the courthouse or b) go online so she could continue researching Nancy and her story. I was pleased to tell her that both would soon be an option. I also learned that Demiah found the deed for Nancy’s land and cabin using the Library’s Chancery Records Index. I asked Demiah to share what she has discovered about Nancy (edited for length and clarity):

Nancy Campbell, born a free woman of color around 1821 in Montgomery County, played a pivotal role in local history. Research through county records with Clerk Tiffany Couch and resources like Virginia Untold has shed light on her life as a free woman before emancipation and her family’s complex dynamic of freedom and enslavement. Our interest in Nancy arose from her 1866 decision to rent her one-room cabin to Freedmen’s Bureau agent Charles Schaeffer, facilitating the founding of what became the historic Christiansburg Industrial Institute (CII).

The next day I headed down to Pulaski County, which is about 45 minutes from Salem, Virginia, where I had stayed the night before. The Wilderness Road Regional Museum (WRRM) is managed by one director of education, April Martin, along with many dedicated volunteers. In addition to several other records, WRRM also stewards Pulaski County’s “Register of Free Negroes, 1851-1864.” You can read more about why this is the case in Eddie’s CCRP blog posted a few months ago. I arrived around 10 a.m. on a frigid morning to photograph the fifteen pages of the Pulaski County register. The record indicates that it is the second of two volumes, but no one I spoke with had encountered an earlier volume. I worked in an upstairs room of an early nineteenth-century house now converted into the museum’s archives room.

Although not ideal for digital photography, the buildings associated with the museum are an authentic testament to the region at the time and tell a story of a once-bustling town center in Newbern, Virginia. April encouraged me to explore the grounds and, in between her many duties, described a few interesting things about the property and its history. For example: the buildings’ foundations were made from local stone that was original and quarried locally, just a few miles away. It was a day of learning about yet another impressive effort to preserve the local history of Southwest Virginia.

I left Pulaski County that afternoon to make the hour-and-fifteen-minute drive to Abingdon, Virginia, the county seat of Washington. As far as we know, there are just five pages of a register documenting free people of color from Washington County. The entries begin as early as 1796 and run through 1831. The entries must have been so inconsequential that the clerk decided to record them in the marriage register. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d never know from the exterior of the volume that these entries are captured in between the pages of a marriage record. Thanks to microfilm and the helpful knowledge of Circuit Court Clerk Tricia Moore, I put hands on the five pages and photographed each one, right there in the records room.

For my trip, LVA Digital Collections Specialist Ben Steck set me up with a Nikon D800 DSLR camera and the coolest lightweight step ladder I’ve ever seen. Because each register volume had so few pages, I didn’t bring a tripod with me (although I wish I had). I was a one-woman show, and this sort of endeavor certainly works better with two people to assist with lighting, setup, and hauling equipment, among other things. I learned a lot in the process, including just how grateful I am for professional digitization staff like Ben (and former LVA employee Victoria Garnett) who do such a great job to scan and digitize our material so that it is well-preserved and accessible.

Be on the lookout for social media posts about when these register images are available in Virginia Untold!