Coming Next Week: A New Series “Bound, Free, and In Between: Free People of Color in Scott County, Virginia”
In 1823, a man named Isaac Richmond seized a free woman named Barbara Day in Scott County, Virginia, and tried to take her out of the state. The next day, three men took her back — and two of them were free men of color.
I found that story buried in a court minute book. And then I found the chancery case that connected those men to Barbara's husband, to a woman named Lisha Grant who shows up in Montgomery County in 1793, to a craftsman who made grain sieves and traveled to Burke's Garden for work, to a formerly enslaved man who bought his freedom for $500 and spent the rest of his life fighting for a piece of land, and to a girl who cried over a few yards of linen after months of hard labor.
None of these people left diaries. None of them could write their names. But they left traces — in tax lists, census columns, deeds, depositions, and the arguments they had with each other over handkerchiefs and sheep and unpaid wages.
Starting next Tuesday, I'll be sharing a five-part series about the free Black families of Scott County, Virginia — who they were, how they survived, and how their stories turned up in the places I wasn't expecting to look: chancery cases filed under someone else's name, court minutes from adjacent counties, tax lists where free persons weren't labeled, and a lawsuit in Wythe County that started in Washington County and involved a family from Sullivan County, Tennessee. The records are out there. Sometimes you just have to look sideways to find them.
New posts every Tuesday morning.
Bound, Free, and In Between: Free People of Color in Scott County, Virginia
This five part series is based on original research conducted in February–March 2026 using digitized records from FamilySearch, the Library of Virginia’s Chancery Records Index, and the Virginia Untold collection. Profiles for many of the individuals discussed are available or forthcoming on WikiTree. The research is ongoing.