Sep 26, 2019 - Sale 2517

Sale 2517 - Lot 233

Price Realized: $ 2,375
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750
(VIRGINIA.) Photograph album documenting the history of a Virginia plantation and its servants. 26 photographs mounted on 16 loose 11 1/2 x 7-inch scrapbook leaves; condition strong. Virginia, compiled circa 1930
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Additional Details

This carefully captioned family album documents the owners and servants of The Meadows, a plantation in Abingdon, VA. It consists mostly of photographs of old family portraits dating from the 18th century through 1930; the earliest original photograph in the album is apparently a hand-colored print from 1856. The compiler was apparently John Minor Blackford (1887-1945), whose other similar albums are at the University of North Carolina. His grandmother Mary Berkeley Minor Blackford (1802-1896) was active in the American Colonization Society, and apparently manumitted some of the family slaves to send them to Liberia. Perhaps the most interesting pages in this volume document three of the family's longtime African-American servants, who are described with a nostalgic affection that glossed over the horrors of slavery. For example: "Peggy, Grandma Blackford's maid . . . she remembered when the servants of Mrs. John Minor sailed from Fredericksburg Va. to freedom in Liberia. She would not accept freedom and always mentioned the fact that the ones who went, all died very soon. She lived in comfort for 87 years." Another portrait is captioned "John Longley, aged 92, a faithful negro whose stories of the grandeur of The Meadows 'fore the war' showed a lively imagination and amazed the generation who were raised there afterwards. He taught the boys of this family how to swim and went with them to hunt deer in the mountains." Also shown is "Esther Ewing, cook at The Meadows for twenty years," who is described in quite insulting terms. with-- a 9 3/4 x 7 3/4-inch oval Civil War-era photograph of six young men, one a military officer, captioned only "Robert Turner," sharing a common provenance with the scrapbook leaves.