Presentation offers insight to slave life on Collier’s Woodville plantation
Historian Temujin Ekunfeo speaks about what slave life may have been like at Woodville Plantation.
Examples of what slaves may have eaten at Woodville: salt pork, Hoppen’ John (a rice and bean dish) and fried cornmeal.
Slavery is something most people from the northern states associate with the South, however, slavery was a big part of life in the Pittsburgh area and in the South Hills during the late 18th and early 19th century.
Slave life at John Neville’s plantation, Woodville, is something Rob Windhorst, president of the Neville House Associates, has been looking to delve into for more than five years. Woodville, located along Washington Pike in Collier Township, was home to 28 slaves and 25 slave children, according to Windhorst and local historian Temujin Ekunfeo of Beltzhoover.
Slave life at Woodville was the topic of a recent program held at the plantation entitled “Where Lived a Family of Negroes: Slave Life on the Neville Plantation.”
“This is a piece of Western Pennsylvania history that hasn’t really been touched on,” Windhorst said. He said four out of five people on the site of Woodville would have been black, and that looking into slave life helps to start to present “a better picture of not only this farm, but a more accurate period of this time period in history.”
“We born and raised in the north think that slavery only existed in the south,” Ekunfeo said. “All 13 original colonies had slaves.”
He added that most prominent men in the Revolution were slave owners, and that Benjamin Franklin and William Penn also owned slaves.
Ekunfeo himself is the grandson and great grandson of slaves.
Windhorst started off the program talking about the “overseers” that kept the farm and slaves in order, since the Nevilles were rarely home.
“By the 1790s, there were at least 28 slaves in residence on this farm,” which with the Bower Hill site, totaled about 1,200 acres, Windhorst said. “These are the folks that really brought this farm into existence.”
The overseer system was in place not simply to watch the slaves work, but to be the leaders in the business aspect of the farm. Slave owners rarely had direct interaction with their slaves, so they used overseers. Windhorst said there were four different types of overseers, starting with the principal overseer, who was like the farm manager.
The second type was an “inferior overseer” or a “second rate overseer” who was responsible for handling day to day duties and made sure work got done. A property manager was the third type of overseer, and he would have been responsible for the agricultural business on the property.
The lowest type of overseer was a driver who was typically pulled from the slave community. Windhorst said the driver was given better or even private living quarters and extra privileges, like food or material goods. However, the driver was often alienated from both the white overseers and the slave population. “They moved themselves out of both communities and were caught in the middle,” he said.
Ekunfeo said he thinks, although they were slaves, that Neville’s slaves were not beaten, but treated decently. He said slaves at Neville’s farm were rather well dressed, because Neville was wealthy.
“Slaves are a vanity item,” Ekunfeo said of the time period. “You want your slave to look good.”
The slaves on Neville’s farm were not just field workers, but they were skilled in things like iron working and carpentry, and also working at distilling whiskey on the plantation.
“These slaves were whiskey experts,” Ekunfeo said, adding that Monongahela whiskey was made by slaves. “The Neville House was built with slave labor.” The same was true for the Bower Hill house that burned during the Whiskey Rebellion.
Ekunfeo added he thinks that the slaves at the farm were loyal and didn’t run away because it was in their best interest and they were being treated well. “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t,” he said.
After John Neville died in 1803, his son Presley Neville and son-in-law Isaac Craig freed Neville’s slaves.
“No one knows where they went,” Ekunfeo said. He added he’s done research on the slaves and can find no evidence of where the slaves went when they were freed. He added that since they were slaves, they may not have had last names, so it is hard to find out where they went or where they are buried.
“They are as unknown in death as they were in life,” Ekunfeo said. “They were like the wind and they were gone.”
For more information, visit www.woodvilleplantation.org. Woodville is open for tours from 1 p.m.-4 p.m. every Sunday.