This is the first of two stories about state attempts to make atonement by mapping land that was denied to the Randolph Freedpeople. The story’s second installment will air tomorrow.
Nearly 400 Freedpeople left the Virginia farm where they had been enslaved in the 1840s to migrate to Ohio. Although they were liberated under the bequest of John Randolph, a lesser-known but influential statesman in the early United States, Virginia law at the time required newly freed slaves to leave the state. Randolph’s will includes provisions allowing his former slaves to acquire land in addition to their freedom.
William Leigh, Randolph’s executor, chose Mercer County, Ohio, and purchased about 3,200 acres close to Carthagena, a nascent Black hamlet. However, a white mob blocked their way and compelled the Freedpeole to leave the region at gunpoint when they arrived.
In Ohio, hundreds of freed slaves were refused land by a white mob; a congressman seeks to make amends.
The Freedpeople scattered to neighboring communities like Rossville, which is located just outside of Piqua, in the months and years that followed. Many took jobs as domestic helpers or day laborers rather than beginning with their own homesteads. Although the land was subsequently sold by the executor who bought it for them, there is little proof that the Freedpeople ever received payment for their losses.
In 1907, a number of descendants filed a lawsuit to get paid for their land. According to the statute of limitations, Ohio courts dismissed the lawsuit.
Details became hazy in the more than 180 years from the Randolph Freedpeople’s arrival in Ohio and the present. Last year, when state politicians and descendants looked more closely at the narrative, they were aware of the amount of land that was bought and its general location. However, they were unaware of the precise parcels, their present owners, or their intended purposes.
For the first time, a thorough map of the land acquired for the Randolph Freedpeople was produced late last year by a Miami University geography class that spotted an opportunity and spent the previous semester looking through deeds.
About 40 students are dragging their laptops slowly out of their backpacks on a cold October morning last year before making their way to the front of the room to retrieve Mercer County printouts. They are most likely not being roused by the mild lights that have been lowered for the projection.
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Professor Robbyn Abbitt spends a large portion of the lecture explaining the ins and outs of GIS mapping. At first glance, that appears to be a Google Spreadsheet.
She emphasizes that determining the qualities we wish to have in this data collection is one of the first steps we will need to do in order to accomplish this.
To help pinpoint a specific lot, the students provide various data elements, such as the date of sale, seller, acreage, and then multiple geographic designations. Land surveys conducted when Ohio was still a part of the Northwest Territory led to the creation of the township and range grids at the highest level, which are six miles by six miles. Deeds further divide those squares into subsequent quarters, which are referred to as parts.
However, comprehending the act isn’t always simple.
The explanation from Charles Coutellier was that you must read them backwards.
A retired surveyor named Coutellier stepped in to assist Abbitt’s students in understanding the actions. He provides the northeast quarter of Section 16’s southeast quarter as a speculative example.
“When you write it in the deed, it’s from the smallest to the largest,” he stated. “You have to start with the largest and work your way down to the smallest when you lay it out on the ground.”
Consider a square, which is your section 16, using his example. Create four smaller squares by drawing a cross in the middle of it, then choose the Southeast quarter’s bottom right square. Subdivide that square as before, but this time, look for the square in the Northeast quarter’s upper right corner.
According to Coutellier, that is simple because it can also contain three additional divisions.
“When sellers start breaking off a few acres here or a few acres there, and that’s not to mention the challenge of simply reading the handwriting,” he continued, “deeds can get even more complex.” Professional scriveners occasionally wrote the deeds, but political hires in the auditor’s office also occasionally wrote them, according to Coutellier.
Abbitt and her students are back in the classroom, debating whether to arrange the sections smallest to largest or largest to smallest. Something sort of magical occurs when Abbitt looks up and asks the students to save their progress. Parcels appear all throughout Mercer County after more than an hour of looking at spreadsheets and a basic grid map.
Abbitt grinned broadly as he addressed the class, “Look at all of this, this is really cool.” What you guys just did is something that has never been done before.
It wasn’t flawless from the beginning. When parcels overlapped in a few instances, Abbitt clarified that the second half of their project would involve determining what went wrong and correcting it while also verifying the accuracy of the remaining parcels.
Nevertheless, they had managed to create a very accurate depiction of the Randolph Freedpeople’s land after a few months of labor. They completed the job by December of last year.
The Miami class identified 3,140 of the 3,200 acres that the executor William Leigh bought on behalf of the Randolph Freedpeople after looking through Mercer County property records. Although they are not in one central area, the 199 properties that are now there are close to Carthagena. Rather, they are dispersed, with a few sitting directly west of Grand Lake St. Marys and the majority south or southwest of the lake.
They can show that a parcel was bought and then sold in the majority of cases, but in twelve of them, they found ownership gaps. Some of those lots had a sale deed linked to Leigh without the prior purchase, while others had a purchase deed linked to Leigh without a subsequent sale.
In the years that have passed, the parcels have also changed. Sometimes the land is identified by the titles as overlapping with larger parcels; when these overlaps are taken into consideration, the total acreage increases to 3,825.
In other instances, shipments have subsequently been split up. Two parcels belonging to the Randolph Freedpeople are the source of the northeastern portion of what is today Chickasaw. Likewise, a series of parcels on St. Henry’s western boundary originate from a Randolph parcel.
Nearly 95% of the land is allocated for agricultural use, making up the great bulk. However, over 100 properties have been designated for residential development. The Miami report states that, after accounting for renovations, the parcels’ current assessed values are $13.9 million and $52.9 million, respectively.
The discrepancy between the plotted and purportedly bought 3200 acres can be explained in a few different ways. Leigh might have only ever bought 3,140 acres. The deeds might have been misplaced or acquired by another agent. The fact that one of the townships where Leigh allegedly purchased land is now a part of Auglaize County further complicates issues because county lines have changed over the years.
Abbitt described the mapping as a sometimes hunt and peck process, and recalled wrestling with deeds written by one recorder whose south looked virtually indistinguishable from north. Nevertheless, she clarified that after it was decoded, the procedure was really simple.
Most of them have been fairly easy to map out, she said, because most of them are down to these little 40-acre sub quarters, and I think a big reason for that is because these lands were purchased not too long after this was surveyed.
She clarified that Leigh’s acquisition was typically the second in a particular parcel’s history.
Descendants of the Randolph Freedpeople and those advocating on their behalf are pleased to see a map, but they re skeptical of the land valuation figures.
Funny. Ridiculous, Butch and Sherri Hamilton said of the $14 million mark. Both are board members for the group Land of the Freed, set up by Paisha Thomas, a seventh-generation descendant of the Randolph Freedpeople.
It s too low, Thomas argued, because look how much has been produced from that land.
To Thomas and the Hamiltons, questions of value must necessarily account for the value that land has generated in nearly 180 years since it was denied the Randolph Freedpeople. But even if you set aside the idea of lost generational wealth, the assessed value is significantly lower than market value.
Part of that is down to Current Agricultural Use Value a tax designation that values farmland for its agricultural use rather than what that land would fetch for development purposes.
An Ohio State Universitystudy of cropland valuebased on a survey of farmers put the average market value per acre in Western Ohio at $11,548. But the value of transition land, being sold for residential, commercial or industrial use, tallied much higher. The study s author warned they re working with limited data to calculate the figure, but they came up with $26,205.
Taking those numbers into account, the Miami analysis 3,140 acres would land somewhere between $36 million and $82 million.
But the map itself? Abbitt is confident that what her class has put together is representing the deeds. The surveyor Coutellier, who reviewed their final product, said they ve got it nailed.
In terms of what was gathered and what they plotted, he said, You can take that to the bank.
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